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

The Mind's Eye | 297what appears to be plastic material. I was educated on classical lines; andit is conceivable that this picture is an echo of the oft-repeated admonitionto "dig out the meaning" of some passage of Greek or Latin.Exaggerated pout indeed! Titchener's Cheshire Cow, his triangle withred angles that don't even join, and his meaning shovel could not possiblybe the concepts underlying his thoughts. Surely he did not believethat cows are rectangular or that triangles can do just fine without one oftheir angles. Something else in his head, not an image, must haveembodied that knowledge.And that is the problem with other claims that all thoughts areimages. Suppose I try to represent the concept "man" by an image of aprototypical man—say, Fred MacMurray. The problem is, what makesthe image serve as the concept "man" as opposed to, say, the concept"Fred MacMurray"? Or the concept "tall man," "adult," "human," "American,"or "actor who plays an insurance salesman seduced into murder byBarbara Stanwyck"? You have no trouble distinguishing among a particularman, men in general, Americans in general, vamp-victims in general,and so on, so you must have more than a picture of a prototypical man inyour head.And how could a concrete image represent an abstract concept, like"freedom"? The Statue of Liberty is already taken; presumably it is representingthe concept "the Statue of Liberty." What would you use for negativeconcepts, like "not a giraffe"? An image of a giraffe with a red diagonalline through it? Then what would represent the concept "a giraffe with ared diagonal line through it"? How about disjunctive concepts, like "eithera cat or a bird," or propositions, like "All men are mortal"?Pictures are ambiguous, but thoughts, virtually by definition, cannotbe ambiguous. Your common sense makes distinctions that pictures bythemselves do not; therefore your common sense is not just a collectionof pictures. If a mental picture is used to represent a thought, it needs tobe accompanied by a caption, a set of instructions for how to interpretthe picture—what to pay attention to and what to ignore. The captionscannot themselves be pictures, or we would be back where we started.When vision leaves off and thought begins, there's no getting around theneed for abstract symbols and propositions that pick out aspects of anobject for the mind to manipulate.Incidentally, the ambiguity of pictures has been lost on the designersof graphical computer interfaces and other icon-encrusted consumer