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

Good Ideas | 303Experimenter: Flumo and Yakpalo always drink cane juice [rum]together. Flumo is drinking cane juice. Is Yakpalo drinking canejuice?Subject: Flumo and Yakpalo drink cane juice together, but the timeFlumo was drinking the first one Yakpalo was not there on that day.Experimenter: But I told you that Flumo and Yakpalo always drink canejuice together. One day Flumo was drinking cane juice. Was Yakpalodrinking cane juice?Subject: The day Flumo was drinking the cane juice Yakpalo was notthere on that day.Experimenter: What is the reason?Subject: The reason is that Yakpalo went to his farm on that day andFlumo remained in town on that day.The example is not atypical; Cole's subjects often say things like "Yakpaloisn't here at the moment; why don't you go and ask him about the matter?"The psychologist Ulric Neisser, who excerpted this dialogue, notesthat these answers are by no means stupid. They are just not answers tothe experimenter's question.A ground rule when you solve a problem at school is to base your reasoningon the premises mentioned in a question, ignoring everything else youknow. The attitude is important in modem schooling. In the few thousandyears since the emergence of civilizations, a division of labor has allowed aclass of knowledge professionals to develop methods of inference that arewidely applicable and can be disseminated by writing and formal instruction.These methods literally have no content. Long division can calculate milesper gallon, or it can calculate income per capita. Logic can tell you thatSocrates is mortal, or, in the examples in Lewis Carroll's logic textbook, thatno lamb is accustomed to smoking cigars, all pale people are phlegmatic, anda lame puppy would not say "thank you" if you offered to lend it a skippingrope. The statistical tools of experimental psychology were borrowed fromagronomy, where they were invented to gauge the effects of different fertilizerson crop yields. The tools work just fine in psychology, even though, asone psychological statistician wrote, "we do not deal in manure, at least notknowingly." The power of these tools is that they can be applied to any problem—howcolor vision works, how to put a man on the moon, whether mitochondrialEve was an African—no matter how ignorant one is at the outset.To master the techniques, students must feign the ignorance they will laterbe saddled with when solving problems in their professional lives. A high