George Miller

George Miller whose most recent book is Language and Speech, is the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Psychology at Princeton.

A Model Science

George Miller, 3 November 1983

Cognition has become fashionable. Half a dozen academic disciplines are currently scrambling to establish ownership. The philosophers, who got there first, are being jostled by empiricists, but are relaxing none of their traditional claims. To psychologists, cognition is a ‘problem’ that only they can analyse experimentally. Social anthropologists feel that their concern for culture gives them some special claim to cognition. Computer scientists who create artificially intelligent systems now freely define cognition in their own likeness. Special cognitive intuitions about language provide basic data for linguists. Even neuroscientists now speak of cognitive brain processes. All put forward their favourite entitlements.

Copying the coyote

Richard Poirier, 18 October 1984

When, in the summer of 1898, at the age of 56, William James went to Berkeley, California to deliver a series of lectures on pragmatism, he could have used his own life to illustrate the...

Read more reviews

Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.

Sign up to our newsletter

For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.

Newsletter Preferences