108 BOOK REVIEWS

omnipotence fantasies, denial of death, and authoritarianism are definitely out. In their stead, he proposes the ideal of a partnership with patients who, whenever possible, are encouraged to take an enlightened interest in their malfunctions and treatment. With regret, he presents this ideal as never fully attainable.

Although Bennet writes primarily for doctors, there is much in the book that applies willy nilly to members of other helping professions: doctors have no monopoly on professional business. But the ideal of a user-friendly partnership between client and therapist may seem to be less radical to many non-medical therapist readers than it may to the sorts of doctor readers Bennet seems to have in mind (they are not UN like that), because many of us (and of them) have been using such a model for years already and have found that the ideal is probably a lot less unattainable than he suggests. As for the wounded healer model, it, too, has already gained wider acceptance than he acknowledges.

But these minor quibbles should not detract from appreciation of this thought-provoking blueprint for a form of medical practice that does not by its very nature constitute a hazard to the health of patients and doctors alike.

VJCKY RIPPERE

J. A. FODOR: Psychosemantics-The Problem of Meaning in fhe Philosophy of .Mind. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. (1987). pp. xiii + 171. f17.95.

Psychologists might once have been forgiven for assuming that philosophers had little to share with them in their attempts to understand how the mind works. But, or so it seems, we are all cognitive scientists now. And Jerry Fodor, in this lucid and intelligent text, maps out the territory of endeavour in which he, as a philosopher, has a unique contribution to make.

In Psychosemantics, Fodor develops a powerful and imaginative defence of our intuitive commitment to the notion that we have, and act out of, beliefs and desires. This notion has come to seem problematic within cognitive science because of its reliance on the concept of representation. This notoriously deep and difficult idea raises the fundamental question of how mental states can bear a relation to the world (how they can be ‘about’ anything). and how they can have causal powers. For Fodor, computer science, with its central observation that not only mental states but symbols too can represent, has provided the framework for a solution to the problem of mediating between the causal properties of symbols (or mental states) and their semantic properties.

Fodor sees cognitive psychology as affording his Representational Theory of IMind empirical validation. This is in the form of good accounts-independently confirmed-of mental processes as causal sequences of mental representations. He sets himself, as a philosopher of language, the task of uncovering the semantic assumptions of the theory. He examines, for example, the possibility of individuating mental states in terms of their causal powers. Tackling the central question of what it is for a physical system to have mental states that are ‘about’ something, he proposes a ‘naturalised’ theory of meaning that has at its core the semantics of observation terms like ‘red’.

In the Epilogue, Fodor speculates about the likelihood that our grasp of belief desire psychology is innate, arguing that the spectacularly successful embodiment of intelligence in homo sapiens has depended on there being no need for us to learn about the rudiments of our neighbours’ psychology.

Fodor writes with characteristic wit and vigour. His theorising is bold and sophisticated, demanding for the non-specialist but rewarding for any cognitive psychologists who wish to pursue the theoretical implications of their work.

BERNADETTE HILL