Book Notice: The Laws of Thought (2026)

Griffiths, Tom. 2026. The Laws of Thought. Henry Holt and Company.

Griffiths 2026 traces three distinct traditions in cognitive science, and tries to show how they can be woven together in a single theory. It characterizes the contributions in terms of Marr's famous theory of levels of analysis: computational, algorithmic, and implementation. Logic (symbolic rule systems) and Bayes rule constitute the computational level. Neural networks constitute the implementation level. As an overview, I enjoyed the book. I think it did a fair job at presenting early generative syntax (before Aspects). I also appreciated the historical overview of artificial neural networks, starting from the work of Mclelland and Rumelhart all the way through modern LLMs. It did a good job of presenting Bayes' rule for beginners, and why it might be useful for cognitive scientists, with some pointers to recent work in this area.