Sir

Patricia Churchland's review of my book The Stuff of Thought ('Poetry in motion' Nature 450, 29–30; 2007) says virtually nothing about the book's contents, and gets two of its main claims backwards. A lengthy section of the book argues against the idea that “thought is like external language in all important respects.” And the theory of Jerry Fodor's that Churchland calls “font-change semantics” (whereby a person's knowledge of the meaning of a word, such as cut, consists of a single mental symbol, such as 'cut') is one that I argue against, together with Fodor's innateness ad libitum claim, also mistakenly attributed to me.

The book apparently stimulated the reviewer to free-associate to her own beliefs that psychological phenomena can be explained at the level of neurons and that human thinking is in the service of motor control. The fact that I (like most cognitive psychologists) have not signed up to these views is the only point of contact between my book and her review.