Book Reviews: The Fifth Generation Fallacy: Why Japan is Betting Its Future on Artificial Intelligence

But the way Hirst has souped up his thesis with general expository matter has had not altogether satisfactory results. The textbook-like sections against which the accounts of his own work are set treat some topics, like structural ambiguity, at length, but do not form a very well-balanced or comprehensive whole. They nevertheless dilute Hirst's own work enough to prevent the reader from experiencing that feeling of excitement that good theses provoke, and to leave her disappointed in not getting the fuller and more concentrated account of Hirst's system as such, and its performance, she would have liked. The idea that language interpretation involves quite disparate processes is one deserving investigation, but it is not clear whether Hirst's particular way of combining such different lines as Montague and markers, via frames, is on the right track, and his book does not compel his reader, in a Pied Piper imperative, to follow him.