It would seem that Perceptrons has much the same role as The Necronomicon -- that is, often cited but never read. - Marvin Minsky

Get the mind into the (partial) state that solved the old problem; then it might handle the new problem in the "same way."

[We] became involved with a somewhat therapeutic compulsion: to dispel what we feared to be the first shadows of a “holistic” or “Gestalt” misconception that would threaten to haunt the fields of engineering and artificial intelligence as it had earlier haunted biology and psychology. For this, and for a variety of more practical and theoretical goals, we set out to find something about the range and limitations of perceptrons.

Only the surface of reason is rational. I don't mean that understanding emotion is easy, only that understanding reason is probably harder.