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

296 I HOW THE MIND WORKSsyllogism is invalid whenever regions don't form a checkerboard. Ourgeographic knowledge is not a big mental map but a set of smaller maps,organized by assertions about how they are related.Finally, images cannot serve as our concepts, nor can they serve asthe meanings of words in the mental dictionary. A long tradition inempiricist philosophy and psychology tried to argue that they could,since it fit the dogma that there is nothing in the intellect that was notpreviously in the senses. Images were supposed to be degraded or superimposedcopies of visual sensations, the sharp edges sanded off and thecolors blended together so that they could stand for entire categoriesrather than individual objects. As long as you don't think too hard aboutwhat these composite images look like, the idea has a ring of plausibility.But then, how would one represent abstract ideas, even something assimple as the concept of a triangle? A triangle is any three-sided polygon.But any image of a triangle must be isosceles, scalene, or equilateral.John Locke made the enigmatic claim that our image of a triangle is "alland none of these at once." Berkeley called him on it, challenging hisreaders to form a mental image of a triangle that was isosceles, scalene,equilateral, and none of the above, all at the same time. But rather thanabandoning the theory that abstract ideas are images, Berkeley concludedthat we don't have abstract ideas!Early in the twentieth century, Edward Titchener, one of America'sfirst experimental psychologists, rose to the challenge. By carefully introspectingon his own images, he argued that they could represent anyidea, no matter how abstract:I can quite well get Locke's picture, the triangle that is no triangle and alltriangles at one and the same time. It is a flashy thing, come and gonefrom moment to moment; it hints two or three red angles, with the redlines deepening into black, seen on a dark green ground. It is not therelong enough for me to say whether the angles join to form the completefigure, or even whether all three of the necessary angles are given.Horse is, to me, a double curve and a rampant posture with a touchof mane about it; cow is a longish rectangle with a certain facial expression,a sort of exaggerated pout.I have been ideating meanings all my life. And not only meanings,but meaning also. Meaning in general is represented in my consciousnessby another of these impressionistic pictures. I see meaning as theblue-grey tip of a kind of scoop, which has a bit of yellow above it (probablya part of the handle), and which is just digging into a dark mass of