Robots: Fact, Fiction + Prediction by Jasia Reichardt (review)

Books 161 interesting of the three is Austin's book. Its first and second sections are particularly worthwhile. In Section I, the author, a medical doctor and research neurologist, describes his own professional career, and he has a particular theme to develop: the role of chance in discovery. Austin reports how again and again accidents helped him with problems or revealed research opportunities . The accidents included articles encountered, information gleaned from chance meetings with colleagues, laboratory techniques learned years earlier that happened to prove relevant, unexpected observations that suggested new phenomena and others. In Section II, Austin attempts to systematize the varieties of chance into four principles. For example, his Chance III, the Pasteur Principle, is the well-known 'chance favors the prepared mind'. He acknowledges that his four categories are not entirely distinct one from another but nevertheless uses them fairly effectively to illuminate various historical cases of chance discoveries. I found the third section somewhat less interesting. Here, Austin considers a series of issues about creativity. The writing is always thoughtful and judicious, but it lacks the freshness of the author's earlier emphasis on chance, an area often acknowledged as important but, to this reviewer's knowledge , not discussed before so thoroughly and insightfully. In no way does the book explicitly concern creativity in the arts, but in two ways Austin's account might particularly interest those in the arts. Himself an amateur painter, Austin relates how sensitivity to and fascination with color played a critical role in his research throughout his career. Second, the altogether human and in many ways aesthetic character of Austin's investigations do much to break down stereotyped contrasts between artistic and scientificthinking. The second book is the product of a 1975 symposium on the gifted held at Johns Hopkins University. It includes eight articles plus an introduction and a transcribed end-of-conference discussion . The first of three sections concerns the gifted-child movement and begins with a particularly interesting review of the field,emphasizing the well-known Terman longitidunal study of high IQ children that began in California in the 1920's. The next section includes two articles on educational help for the gifted.The first concerns a program at Johns Hopkins University for locating mathematically talented children and accelerating their development through fairly competitive special classeswith peers. The other article concerns sex differences among the mathematically gifted, problems of sex stereotyping and implications for the education of mathematically gifted women. The third section of the book includes three articles concerned with measuring creativity and designing education to help those with creative potential to develop it. This book will be most satisfying to those interested specifically in the gifted, formal measurement of intellectual and creative capacities and the special problems of education for the gifted. It is both narrower and more technical than the first book reviewedand offers far lessinsight into the details of the creative process. Also, there islittle concern with artistic creativity. Given its emphasis, however, this book offers a good sample of contemporary thought and research concerning the scientifically gifted. Andrew Harrison's book is quite different again. Harrison servesas a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Bristol and undertakes in this book a very philosophical analysis of the concept of making, its relation to thinking and the nature of making as a specificallyrational activity. From the first, Harrison has a particular interest in artistic making, because artistic making so often is considered an arational, if not irrational, endeavor. It is the author's mission to demonstrate how artistic making and other kinds of making not obviously rational in character in fact are so when properly understood. Harrison argues that artistic making typically isnot rational in the senseof being a goal-directed process where the maker has a perfectly clear vision of the outcome. Rather, artists discover what they want to make in the process of making it. But good making does depend on insightful attention to the developing work in order to draw out its opportunities. Most readers without strong philosophical interests and background may find Harrison's book difficult to get through. The author writes in the elaborate syntax of British philosophy, and, although...