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Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

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Thinking Machines 129o<strong>the</strong>r saying it is outside. Rites of passage, <strong>the</strong> age of majority, diplomas,licenses, and o<strong>the</strong>r pieces of legal paper draw sharp lines that all partiescan mentally represent, lines that let everyone know where everyone elsestands. Similarly, all-or-none rules are a defense against salami tactics, inwhich a person tries to take advantage of a fuzzy category by claimingone borderline case after ano<strong>the</strong>r to his advantage.Rules and abstract categories also help in dealing with <strong>the</strong> naturalworld. By sidestepping similarity, <strong>the</strong>y allow us to get beneath <strong>the</strong> surfaceand ferret out hidden laws that make things tick. And because <strong>the</strong>y are, ina sense, digital, <strong>the</strong>y give representations stability and precision. If youmake a chain of analog copies from an analog tape, <strong>the</strong> quality declineswith each generation of copying. But if you make a chain of digital copies,<strong>the</strong> last can be as good as <strong>the</strong> first. Similarly, crisp symbolic representationsallow for chains of reasoning in which <strong>the</strong> symbols are copied verbatimin successive thoughts, forming what logicians call a sorites:All ravens are crows.All crows are birds.All birds are animals.All animals need oxygen.A sorites allows a thinker to draw conclusions with confidence despitemeager experience. For example, a thinker can conclude that ravensneed oxygen even if no one has ever actually deprived a raven of oxygento see what happens. The thinker can reach that conclusion even if he orshe has never witnessed an experiment depriving any animal of oxygenbut only heard <strong>the</strong> statement from a credible expert. But if each step in<strong>the</strong> deduction were fuzzy or probabilistic or cluttered with <strong>the</strong> particularsof <strong>the</strong> category members one step before, <strong>the</strong> slop would accumulate.The last statement would be as noisy as an rath-generation bootleg tapeor as unrecognizable as <strong>the</strong> last whisper in a game of broken telephone.People in all cultures carry out long chains of reasoning built from linkswhose truth <strong>the</strong>y could not have observed directly. Philosophers haveoften pointed out that science is made possible by that ability.Like many issues surrounding <strong>the</strong> mind, <strong>the</strong> debate over connectionismis often cast as a debate between innateness and learning. And as always,

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