Rey drops us into the middle of some contemporary debates in the philosophy of mind. He often focuses on the attempts of other philosophers of mind to be 'eliminativists´ or ´instrumentalists´ with respect to the mental states (states like beliefs and desires) that we are subjectively aware of by way of introspection. Rey suggests that people like Dennett are wrong to view "beliefs" as only being useful instruments by which Folk Psychology allows us to predict future human behaviors. Rey thinks people like Paul Churchland are wrong to try to eliminate "beliefs" from the Science of Mind by replacing them with neural network processes.

                           What Rey offers is a spirited defense of ´mental realism´, taking mental states like "beliefs" as the basis for an algorithmic description of how human minds work. Rey builds on Fodor´s representational theory of mind to produce his own version of a Computational/Representational Theory of Thought that tries to incorporate and extend our ordinary day-to-day world of mental experience: our beliefs, hopes, and desires.

                           Rey provides both an initial outline of his plan of attack and a useful glossary of terms. He quickly dances past "The Temptations to Dualism"; anyone sympathetic to Chalmers or other modern dualists will be disappointed with the brush-off dualism recieves. Rey's chief concern is fighting the forces of Eliminativism and issuing endless complaints about the weaknesses of trainable neural networks. Halfway through the book Rey finally makes clear that he is proposing a theory of thought that will have to be built upon some foundation (such as neural networks), but he is uninterested in developing such a foundation.

                           Rey wants to describe an algorithm by which sensory experiences (inputs) can be translated into abstract mental representations (elements of a Language of Thought) which can then be subjected to computational processes and so produce new representations and human behaviors (outputs). His formal system for doing this is the type of toy algorithm that one commonly finds being offered in Freshman term papers by students who are getting their first exposure to artificical intelligence or cognitive science. This is where most "realists" admit that something must be done about the problem of getting semantics into syntactical algorithms. Rey does not take up this challenge. Finally, Rey suggests how "Further Capacities" such as subjective qualia might be incorporated into his theory.

                           Rey provides a clear statement of modern functionalism. Maybe Rey's level-headed methods will allow materialists to grant Rey's algorithmic approach to mind a place in the Science of Mind. In this age of mindless connectionistic models, we could sure use a viable counter-balance at the high end of the brain/mind hierarchy. Only time will tell us if Rey's theory is viable or only a philosophical pipe dream. 

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