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

308 I HOW THE MIND WORKSthe first words children learn for objects and generally the first mentallabel we assign when seeing them.What makes a category like "mammal" or "rabbit" better than a categorylike "shirts made by companies beginning with H" or "animals drawnwith a very fine camel's hair brush"? Many anthropologists and philosophersbelieve that categories are arbitrary conventions that we learnalong with the other cultural accidents standardized in our language.Deconstructionism, poststructuralism, and postmodernism in thehumanities take this view to an extreme. But categories would be usefulonly if they meshed with the way the world works. Fortunately for us, theworld's objects are not evenly sprinkled throughout the rows andcolumns of the inventory list defined by the properties we notice. Theworld's inventory is lumpy. Creatures with cotton tails tend have longears and live in woodland clearings; creatures with fins tend to havescales and live in the water. Other than in the children's books with splitpages for assembling do-it-yourself chimeras, there are no finned cottontailsor floppy-eared fish. Mental boxes work because things come inclusters that fit the boxes.What makes the birds of a feather cluster together? The world issculpted and sorted by laws that science and mathematics aim to discover.The laws of physics dictate that objects denser than water arefound on the bottom of a lake, not its surface. Laws of natural selectionand physics dictate that objects that move swiftly through fluids havestreamlined shapes. The laws of genetics make offspring resemble theirparents. Laws of anatomy, physics, and human intentions force chairs tohave shapes and materials that make them stable supports.1 eople form two kinds of categories, as we saw in Chapter 2. We treatgames and vegetables as categories that have stereotypes, fuzzy boundaries,and family-like resemblances. That kind of category falls naturally out ofpattern-associator neural networks. We treat odd numbers and females ascategories that have definitions, in-or-out boundaries, and commonthreads running through the members. That kind of category is naturallycomputed by systems of rules. We put some things into both kinds of mentalcategories—we think of "a grandmother" as a gray-haired muffin dispenser;we also think of "a grandmother" as the female parent of a parent.