The Mind’s New Science: An Ambitious Contemporary Effort

© Howard Gardner 2025 

If you want a list of all the things that I am not good at, I can launch it…and my family and friends can add to it generously. But I may have a few talents. One of these is spotting promising trends and—with luck and a smattering of skill—nudging the trends in the right direction.

Indeed, my first “popular” book, The Quest for Mind explicated the French intellectual enterprise of structuralism. Drawing on the works of developmental psychologist Jean Piaget and of structural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, I sought to explain this scholarly endeavor and to intertwine the hitherto separate contributions of these two seminal thinkers (Gardner 1973). A decade later, I became intrigued by a new interdisciplinary field—cognitive science—an attempt to synthesize anthropology, computer science, linguistics, psychology, philosophy, and neuroscience. The result: The Mind’s New Science, a history and account of that emerging field (Gardner 1985).  

Stepping back, I had the insight that my own way of approaching scholarship—and perhaps other pursuits—was via the practice of synthesis: identifying and tying together disparate strands of work in ways that made sense to me and might prove useful to others. (As a young scholar, I had authored two textbooks). Twenty years ago, I identified “synthesizing” as one of the five minds for the future (2005). Some years later, in a scholarly autobiography (Gardner 2020), I characterized my own mind as A Synthesizing Mind. And while at the time I believed I was ready to move on to other kinds of minds, I have in fact become virtually fixated on synthesis—and have written literally dozens of blogs on this topic. (Read more of my thoughts on synthesizing here.)

Helping to discover a field—or, if you prefer, a kind of mind—has been satisfying to me, and perhaps helpful to others. But that’s no substitute for actually conceiving and executing worthwhile exemplars of that genre. Accordingly, when I learned about a recent effort in that direction, I decided to investigate it further.

The effort: The neural mind: how brains think, by George Lakoff, an emeritus professor of cognitive science and linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, and Srini Narayanan, a senior research director at Google DeepMind, Zurich (and, earlier, a faculty member of the Institute of Cognitive and Brain Sciences at UC Berkeley).

The result: A book of well over 300 pages of text and over 30 pages of references, drawing on findings and insights from numerous fields. Moreover, the book—and one reason that it caught my attention—constitutes an existence proof of The Mind’s New Science. Specifically: the authors interweave knowledge about the brain (neuroscience), the mind (psychology), language (linguistics—Lakoff’s area of expertise), cultural differences in language and conceptualization (anthropology), and computing (computer science/artificial intelligence—Narayanan’s expertise). Moreover, the authors do so in a way that attempts to address fundamental issues about the nature and realization of knowledge—a concern of philosophy, dating back to the time of the Greeks, and forward to fundamental contributors to epistemology like Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) and Immanuel Kant (1724-1804).

Now, if I were decades younger, and well-tooled in these several fields, I would attempt to summarize the book, lay out its chief claims, identify its flaws, and wrap it up in an overall critique—and, perhaps, offer a few paragraphs on “what’s next”. I don’t feel equipped to do this. And, in any case, such a review would call for a few thousand word (at a minimum) in The New York Review of Books…probably followed by a heated exchange in the succeeding “Letters” section…and, as well, continuing give-and-take online, on Substack, and other sites in the second quarter of the 21st century.

That said, since you’ve stayed with me until this point, I owe you at least a sense of the flavor, the aroma of the Lakoff-Narayanan ambitious expertise.

The building blocks

The authors pay tribute to two scholars known to me. The first is the neurologist Antonio Damasio. In his pioneering book Descartes’ Error, Damasio wrote, “the immune system, the hypothalamus, the ventromedial frontal cortex, and the Bill of Rights have the same root cause.”  

Of course, citation of the Bill of Rights in the midst of a set of medical terms deliberately captures one’s attention. The point that Damasio is trying to make, and that Lakoff & Narayanan seek to illustrate: It is possible to provide an account of cognition that goes from the hardware (the brain) to the most intricate human inventions (the vital postscripts to the US Constitution).

The second acknowledged scholar is computer scientist Jerome Feldman, a long-time colleague of the authors. In the book’s acknowledgement Lakoff & Narayanan contend, “Jerome Feldman is the major intellectual influence behind this book. He has contributed fundamental ideas and support throughout. This work would not have been possible without his contribution,” (p. 345). And, they add, “Feldman showed that mental structures with the gestalt property (a whole) can be modeled computationally…this computational model applies to both neural circuits with the gestalt property and to analytic tools used to study ideas such as schemas and frames that have the gestalt property,” (p. 25). Put succinctly, like Damasio, Feldman allows the authors to proceed from wetware (the brain) to dry-ware (the mind) and to explain ideas, themes, and concepts that capture the attention of members of our species.

Chomsky teaching in the 1960s

An effective drama foregrounds villains as well as heroes. And in this book the villain is the pioneering linguist Noam Chomsky—once Lakoff’s teacher and, indeed, the primary intellectual influence on the young scholar in his early studies at MIT, 65 years ago. In his youth, Lakoff was one of the chief analysts of the syntactic aspects of natural language and an unabashed admirer of Chomsky. But Lakoff (and other once-Chomskyan acolytes) eventually concluded that syntax could not and should not be studied and analyzed apart from semantics (roughly, meaning and form need to be intertwined). As I put it in 1985, “these critics abandoned simple deep structure in favor of grammars whose underlying structures were much deeper and closer to semantic representations themselves.” This rejection resulted in a gulf that has remained until this day—when, alas, Chomsky is no longer able to engage in debate.

One can see why—if one seeks to go from neurons to metaphors, from nodes to the Constitution—Chomskyan syntactic puritanism no longer works.

At the risk of losing both myself and my readers, let me attempt to go one step deeper into the Lakoff-Narayanan claims (p. 142-143).

• The human brain contains thousands of circuits that build on metaphors that underlie the human conceptual system;

• These function unconsciously;

• These circuits involve multi-model association area—connecting (for example) sensorimotor circuits and more abstract and subjective circuits for quantity, affection, and purpose;

• The mapping circuits link distinct brain regions; though metaphoric in content, they reflect a reality—real world physical and social experiences that originate in infancy;

• Simple metaphoric thoughts are learned prior to and independent of language, just through lived experience;

• Where basic experiences are the same, the primary metaphoric mappings tend to be the same and are learned by experience

• Complex metaphorical thought is formed via integration of neurally-linked regions;

• Complex metaphorical thought shows up not just in language but also in gesture, imagery (e.g. paintings, other art forms, math, science).

I hope that this synopsis gives you a sense of the authors’ ambitious enterprise—from neuronal connections to amendments to the Constitution—sufficient to determine whether you want to probe more deeply into their ambitious analysis and synthesis.

Stepping back

At the risk of repeating myself, I should acknowledge that I blog here more as an enterprising journalist than as an informed critic. I lack the capacity to go into the weeds and to point out which of the authors’ claims are on solid ground; which ones clearly fail to withstand scrutiny; and where it’s appropriate to invoke the Scottish verdict: “Not Proven.” But I hope to have given incentive to at least some readers to dig deeper and to emerge with a more probing synthesis as well as some directions for moving ahead.

As for me, this morning’s mail brought in The Emergent Mind: How Intelligence Arises in People and Machines, by Gaurav Suri and Jay McClelland. I intend to leaf through this hefty volume, look for similarities and differences with Lakoff and Narayanan, and ponder on whether a synthesis might be in the offing.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For very helpful comments on earlier drafts, I thank Kirsten McHugh, Annie Stachura, and Ellen Winner.

REFERENCES

Chomsky, N. (1957). Syntactic structures. Mouton & Co.

Damasio, A. (1994). Descartes’ Error. G.P. Putnam's Sons.

Gardner, H. (1973). The quest for mind: Piaget, Lévi-Strauss, and the structuralist movement.  Knopf.

Gardner, H. (1985). The mind’s new science: a history of the cognitive revolution. Basic Books.

Gardner, H. (2005). Five minds for the future. Harvard Business School Press.

Gardner, H. (2020). A synthesizing mind. MIT Press.

Lakoff, G. & Narayanan, S. (2025). The neural mind: how brains think. University of Chicago Press.