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

Thinking Machines 129other saying it is outside. Rites of passage, the age of majority, diplomas,licenses, and other 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 another to his advantage.Rules and abstract categories also help in dealing with the naturalworld. By sidestepping similarity, they allow us to get beneath the surfaceand ferret out hidden laws that make things tick. And because they are, ina sense, digital, they give representations stability and precision. If youmake a chain of analog copies from an analog tape, the quality declineswith each generation of copying. But if you make a chain of digital copies,the last can be as good as the first. Similarly, crisp symbolic representationsallow for chains of reasoning in which the 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 the statement from a credible expert. But if each step inthe deduction were fuzzy or probabilistic or cluttered with the particularsof the category members one step before, the slop would accumulate.The last statement would be as noisy as an rath-generation bootleg tapeor as unrecognizable as the last whisper in a game of broken telephone.People in all cultures carry out long chains of reasoning built from linkswhose truth they could not have observed directly. Philosophers haveoften pointed out that science is made possible by that ability.Like many issues surrounding the mind, the debate over connectionismis often cast as a debate between innateness and learning. And as always,