For Minsky, reductionists build on old ideas, and novelists create new ones. "Reductionists are usually right -- at least at science's cautious core, where novelties rarely survive for long."
From looking at chemistry or physics, "it really is amazing how certain sciences depend upon so few kinds of explanations." Should psychology be like chemistry or physics? Minsky argues no!! "The `laws of thought' depend not only upon the properties of those brain cells, but also on how they are connected. And these connections are established not by the basic, `general' laws of physics, but by the particular arrangements of the millions of bits of information in our inherited genes. To be sure, `general' laws apply to everything. But, for that very reason, they can rarely explain anything in particular.
But this isn't a call to reject the laws of physics. It is a challenge to find additional laws. This is exactly the view that Pylyshyn proposes in his book, when ZWP argued that cognitive laws capture generalizations that cannot be captured by physical descriptions.
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