Margaret A. Boden's Mind as Machine is the most comprehensive account of the history of the cognitive sciences yet to appear. The book has been ten years in the making, and one is tempted to view it as the culmination of Boden's prolific career as a cognitive scientist herself, her magnum opus. Boden, who is at the Centre for Research in Cognitive Science at the University of Sussex (a unit she founded in 1987), has authored or edited no fewer than ten books on topics in and related to cognitive science (mainly artificial intelligence), and has published well over sixty articles and reviews on the subject. Although the book is presented as a history of cognitive science, her aim is twofold: she wishes to provide not only a historical account of the field, but also a better sense of what cognitive science actually is. These two aims are for her inextricably linked: one cannot properly understand cognitive science without a historical perspective. In her past work, Boden has often posed questions in cognitive science from both philosophical and historical perspectives. Given the cross-disciplinary nature of her work, Boden's new book has potential appeal for cognitive scientists as well as historians. Anyone interested in the history of twentieth-century brain and behaviour sciences will find it valuable, given that we have very few historical treatments of cognitive science available to us, and the book also has promise as a reference for university courses – though a potential obstacle here is its hefty price tag.

The seventeen chapters of the book are arranged into two main parts. The first six chapters provide a ‘historical timeline’ for the emergence of cognitive science, as well as an intellectual history of the concept of ‘man as machine’ from antiquity to the mid-twentieth century. This first part culminates in a narrative that sets up the emergence of cognitive science as an interdisciplinary field, a process described by Boden, with some qualification, as a ‘revolution’. It is well known to scholars interested in the history of cognitive science that many historical assessments of the field are tied to arguments for some sort of cognitive ‘revolution’ having taken place during the 1950s, amounting to a radical departure from behaviourist psychology and its general rejection of mental states as explanatory of behaviour. To her credit, Boden does not depict psychology prior to the 1950s as a behaviourist monolith. However, she does see ‘revolution’ as the most apt term to characterize the shifts that took place, and argues that key changes that occurred during the 1950s were not simply embracings of a new ‘cognitive’ approach but rather critiques of behaviourism. Boden also gives a prominent role to cybernetics and information theory in the emergence of the cognitive sciences.

The last eleven chapters focus on the disciplines commonly viewed as comprising cognitive science as a field: computational psychology, anthropology, linguistics, artificial intelligence (AI), neurophysiology and philosophy; each is given a historical dimension as well. Boden also includes a chapter on artificial life. Connecting these varied fields and Boden's account of them are two major themes: interdisciplinarity and a respect for alternative theoretical approaches. For Boden – and it seems for cognitive scientists in general – the best way to approach the mind and brain is from multiple points of view. As a result, a respect for approaches that fall outside traditional disciplinary boundaries has characterized each branch of the field.

Over four hundred pages of the book are devoted to computational psychology and AI. This is not surprising, since Boden sees AI as the ‘theoretical heart’ and computational psychology and neuroscience the ‘thematic heart’ of cognitive science (p. 368). Her account of crucial work in the 1950s and 1960s focuses mostly on psychology but interweaves elements from early AI research. Concentrating on the work of important figures such as Allen Newell, Herbert Simon, George A. Miller, Jerome Bruner and Noam Chomsky in their institutional contexts, Boden does not simply present streams in cognitive science as developing independently of each other, but includes interactions and influences, highlighting the theoretical similarities, differences, commonalities and conflicts between these figures and their approaches to the mind.

Despite the fact that she is not a trained historian, Boden develops an explicit historiographical position on her subject. At the outset she states that she does not focus on ‘sociopolitical influences’ or the wider cultural dimensions of cognitive science. Given Boden's position as a scientist writing about the history of her field, one might suspect, perhaps unfairly, that her tale to come would be one of a steady march of scientific progress culminating in the present day. Happily, her position turns out to be more nuanced than this. She spends a fair amount of time placing herself within the spectrum of positions between constructivism and realism, or what she calls, following the late John Ziman, ‘the Legend’ – the myth of a ‘wholly disinterested science’ (p. 823). Boden rejects an idealized vision of the development of science and the view of science as completely objective and rational but also rejects what she calls the ‘polar opposite’ (p. 24) of this view: constructivism, which she deems ‘fundamentally irrational’ (p. 21). While she does acknowledge the influence of political contexts in the history of science – an entire chapter is devoted to the political context of Cold War-era military funding, its effects on the development of cognitive sciences and public and scientific attitudes towards this funding – she seems to equate constructivism with attacks on the scientific enterprise itself. Boden is perfectly comfortable in characterizing science as progressive (for her, gaining proximity to truth) and makes no apologies for it.

Mind as Machine is an exhaustive account of cognitive science and its history – at times overwhelmingly so. But each chapter is meticulously organized into sections, and Boden includes very useful cross references throughout the book. It has two comprehensive indexes, by subject and name, as well as a list of abbreviations used in the text and a 133-page list of references. While the book at times suffers somewhat from presentism – perhaps inevitable, given that it is impossible to classify either as a history of cognitive science or as an account of the contemporary landscape of the field – Boden is historiographically self-aware, and thus the book is extremely valuable, as few existing histories of the field have such a perspective. Certainly, Boden is trying to boost cognitive science as a field, and her being a participant puts her in an excellent position to do so. However, remarkably, she is also able to give the impression of stepping out of her field and seeing it from a different, broader point of view.