Tom Griffiths

And then he works out how to extend that math to arguments, right?

So things that look a little more like what we think of as logical statements in terms of, you know, P is true and Q is true and so on.

Yeah.

Even Boole thought about that.

I think one thing that's really interesting about Boole was that he kind of thought of himself as a psychologist.

There's at least one place where he describes himself as a psychologist.

I think in his nomination to the Royal Society, that's how he self-describes.

But he was definitely not an empirical psychologist.

He was a very theoretical kind of psychologist, if he was a psychologist at all.

And so his...

His approach, which he's unapologetic about, he writes saying, there's no need for us to go off and do experiments and figure out what are the laws of thought.

Because when we write them down, it's self-evident to us that this is a good way of thinking.

We can recognize what good thinking looks like, and then we can capture that with mathematics.

And so he had distanced himself from whatever it

actually it is that humans do.

That was something that would come back and bite cognitive scientists in the 20th century.

The first growth of cognitive science came out of recognizing that it was possible to use

something like logic and something like what computers were doing as a way of generating theories about what could be going on inside people's heads.

And they ran with that for a little while, but then started to realize, oh, there were lots of things that it didn't describe very well.

And that sort of opened the door to then thinking about other theoretical approaches.