The Perception of Color by Ralph M. Evans (review)

334 Books tentative answers to these questions the author, who is a journalist, interviewed 13 more or less distinguished or newsworthy men, 8 of them psychologists and 5 from areas adjacent to psychology - a linguist, an ethologist, a neurophysiologist and two psychiatrists. The book begins and ends with chapters in which the issues that arise in the interviews are given a preliminary airing and then subjected to a more general discussion with tentative conclusions. In each of the 13 intervening chapters an interview with one of the experts is reproduced, apparently verbatim, following an introduction. There is a lot of interesting material at various levels of generality, from the experts’ physical appearance to their views on the nature of man. The questions the book is mainly concerned with are important ones -or at least the second of them is - and in the age of television journalism the book’s format is a natural one, especiallyif the target audience is a fairly general one. To set against these merits, however, the book has a number of weaknesses that are likely to leave psychologists irritated and may leave a more general audience bemused. To take the second of these points first, as one would expect with specialists talking about their own fields, many of the interviews are larded with technical terms that the general reader cannot be expected to know. On one or two occasions the author does go out of his way, in his introduction to an interview, to explain some of the terms or issues that are to come up, but, for the most part, readers are left to their own devices. The introductions, being mainly summaries of the following interviews, are so close to the verbatim as to be clear when the expert is clear (for example Broadbent and Laing) and obscure when he is obscure (for’example McClelland and Festinger). Even general readers may find themselves asking how interviews with a sample of 8 can justify even the most tentative conclusions about psychologists in general. To psychologists, who realize that the sample is not only small but unrepresentative-in the sense that the psychologists interviewed are all more or less distinguished male academics, while a substantial proportion of psychologists are undistinguished female and operating in one or other of the applied fields-the fallacy will seem to be greatly compounded. Nor is it likely to escape a psychologist that, sample size apart and judged simply as a study of the characteristics of eminent male academic psychologists, the present investigation has the fundamental weakness that it lacks a comparisongroup, sothat, even ifCohen were justified in concluding (as he tentatively does) that his psychologists are (in some sense of the words) interested in exercising power and attached to writing as a means of expressing themselves, there is no way of knowing if they are different, in these respects, fromeminent male academicsin other fields. It would be pleasant to be able to report that Cohen’s treatment of the other, more important question, which is not an empirical one and not, therefore, open to criticisms of the kind just mentioned, is free of other important weaknesses. Unfortunately, this is not so. Cohen has chosen his experts carefully, so that they represent both sides of such questions as the scientific status of psychoanalysis, the role in psychology of experiment, as opposed to naturalistic observation and introspection and the adequacy of a behaviourist analysis of complex phenomena such as language, but he is unable to present these opposing views with the impartiality that is surely appropriate to his role in this book. The extent to which he is against psychology in general and certain forms of it in particular is apparent in the heavily emotive introductory chapter and in the postscript to the interview with Skinner, where Cohen undertakes to show readers the errors and dangers of Skinner’s ways. Such a partisan approach may or may not commend itself to general readers as ‘livening’ the presentation, but it inevitably detracts from the book’s claim to be taken as a serious contribution to the discussion of its questions. Mechanics of the Mind. Colin Blakemore. Cambridge Univ. Press, London, New York and Melbourne...