New Books in Science Tom Griffiths, "The Laws of Thought: The Quest for a Mathematical Theory of the Mind" (Henry Holt and Co., 2026)
Feb 4, 2026
Tom Griffiths, cognitive scientist and head of Princeton’s AI Lab, blends history and math to track attempts to formalize thought. He covers three frameworks—symbols, neural networks, and probability. Stories range from Boole and Turing to Chomsky, neural learning rules, backpropagation, and the strengths and limits of large language models.
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Author's Personal Motivation
- Tom Griffiths wrote the book to explain stories he loved and to give context for modern AI.
- He aimed it partly at his younger self and at readers bewildered by AI's sudden cultural arrival.
Math Made Thoughts Scientifically Tractable
- The cognitive revolution made math the tool to study internal mental states rigorously.
- Mathematical theories let psychologists treat thoughts like observable phenomena across scales.
Three Mathematical Views Of Mind
- Cognitive science developed three core mathematical frameworks: rules/symbols, neural networks, and probability.
- Each framework captures different aspects: structure, learned transformations, and reasoning under uncertainty.
