[CogSci] New book and podcast

[Tom Griffiths]

Dear colleagues,

I’m excited to announce that my new book The Laws of Thought is out tomorrow! The book tells the story of computational cognitive science and AI for a general audience. It explains three major approaches to formalizing thought—rules and symbols, neural networks, and probability and statistics—introducing each idea through the stories of the people behind it, from a teenage George Boole having a vision of an algebra of thought while walking through a field to Eleanor Rosch rethinking the nature of categories in a hut in Papua New Guinea. 

For more than a decade I’ve been conducting oral history interviews with cognitive scientists, and they provide part of the source material for the book. Those interviews are now being released as a podcast called The Cognition Project, which focuses on the cognitive revolution and the development of the field of cognitive science.

I hope that the book and the podcast can be useful to anybody teaching cognitive science or computational modeling, or who wants to know more about the stories and people behind our field.

Book links:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250358363/thelawsofthought/
https://www.amazon.com/Laws-Thought-Quest-Mathematical-Theory/dp/1250358353/
https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-laws-of-thought-the-quest-for-a-mathematical-theory-of-the-mind-tom-griffiths/c6daebf87fa78c32

You can find the first two episodes of the podcast, featuring Jerome Bruner and Molly Potter talking about the early days of the cognitive revolution, here:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-cognition-project/id1872765981
https://open.spotify.com/show/7rhwBGhEQCtO9cBguazFsq

Best wishes,

Tom.

--
Tom Griffiths
Director, Princeton Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence
Henry R. Luce Professor of Information Technology, Consciousness and Culture
Departments of Psychology and Computer Science
Princeton University

http://cocosci.princeton.edu/tom/