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474LANGUAGE, VOLUME 58, NUMBER 2 (1982) Piattelli-Palmarini, Massimo. 1980 (ed.) Language and learning: The debate between Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Smith, N. V. 1973. The acquisition of phonology. Cambridge: University Press. ------. 1981. Consistency, markedness and language change: On the notion 'consistent language'. JL 17.39—54. [Received 10 August 1981.] Culture and inference: A Trobriand case study. By Edwin Hutchins. (Cognitive science series, 2.) Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980. Pp. viii, 143. $14.00. Reviewed by Charles O. Frake, Stanford University For anthropologists, the relevance of this book on reasoning among Trobriand Islanders will be immediately apparent. Anthropologists grow up with Trobriand gifts of urigubu and Trobriand kinswomen called tabu, just as linguists grow up with raised predicates and cleft sentences. Those not so intimately familiar as anthropologists with the ins and outs of Trobriand life as originally described by Malinowski, or with the various theoretical schemes that have subsequently been spun out of his descriptions, may find parts of this book tedious going. But the book has something to say to all students of human thinking, whatever their disciplinary identities. Perhaps as a reflection of our society's preoccupation (and the occupation of many) with sorting out people into our cultural categories of 'smart' or 'dumb', the study of human thinking—known among academics as 'cognition'—has become a major activity in a number of disciplines outside its proper, but not always hospitable, home of psychology. This shared interest of some computer scientists, psychologists , linguists, and anthropologists now has a label, 'cognitive science', as well as ajournai of the same name—and, through Harvard University Press, a 'Cognitive science' book series, in which Hutchins' work is the second volume. H's disciplinary identity is that of 'cognitive' anthropologist. His book is of interest to linguists because it is within the use of language in discourse that H searches for cognition. The basic problem for those intent on studying cognition is where to find it. In the myriad of things that a human animal does, what provides evidence of its 'thinking'? Probably a better way to phrase this question is: What does an investigator have to know about some human activity in order to make inferences about the actor's knowledge and thinking as a component ofthat activity? Psychologists have looked for thinking in their laboratories, where they induce humans called 'subjects' to perform acts designed by psychologists as 'cognitive tasks'. 'Smart' subjects are those who share the psychologists' understanding of a 'task'; they are usually undergraduate psychology majors. Those far removed from psychology classrooms—small children, ghetto youths, truck drivers, third-world peasants, and primitive islanders—generally turn out to be 'dumb' at these tasks. This result clearly says more about their lack of shared understanding of, and interest in, psychologists' tasks than about the intelligence with which such people conduct their lives. Such distressing results have led many, including not a few psychologists, to seek cognition outside the laboratory. Some have sought it by trying to create it artificially on the computer. Work in artificial intelligence has been a focus of cognitive science; and H's approach owes much to this tradition. Creating intelligence artificially is only a detour (though often a thought-provoking one) on the road to finding real intelligence out there in the world' where all kinds of people—kids, truck REVIEWS475 drivers, primitive islanders, even psychology undergraduates—are learning, using, and manipulating knowledge in their ordinary lives. H recommends: "If what we want to know about is how people reason in the real world, let's look at them doing that' (125). But where to look? One obvious, but curiously unexploited, answer is at technical activity closely geared to real-world tasks; the real real-world that causes ships to run aground, crops to tail, and roofs to leak, even over the heads of ethnomethodologists. Recently some psychologists have looked to primitive navigation at sea as a worthy example of cognitive activity (Neisser 1965:119-22, Oatley 1977). So it is. But why is navigation more 'cognitive' than farming, or truck driving, or hustling a fix, or playing marbles? Are we learning more about our culture...

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