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

Good Ideas | 309Now we can explain what these two ways of thinking are for. Fuzzycategories come from examining objects and uninsightfully recording thecorrelations among their features. Their predictive power comes fromsimilarity: if A shares some features with B, it probably shares others.They work by recording the clusters in reality. Well-defined categories, incontrast, work by ferreting out the laws that put the clusters there. Theyfall out of the intuitive theories that capture people's best guess aboutwhat makes the world tick. Their predictive power comes from deduction:if A implies B, and A is true, then B is true.Real science is famous for transcending fuzzy feelings of similarityand getting at underlying laws. Whales are not fish; people are apes;solid matter is mostly empty space. Though ordinary people don't thinkexactly like scientists, they too let their theories override similarity whenthey reason about how the world works. Which two out of three belongtogether: white hair, gray hair, black hair? How about white cloud, graycloud, black cloud? Most people say that black is the odd hair out,because aging hair turns gray and then white, but that white is the oddcloud out, because gray and black clouds give rain. Say I tell you I have athree-inch disk. Which is it more similar to, a quarter or a pizza? Whichis it more likely to be, a quarter or a pizza? Most people say it is moresimilar to a quarter but more likely to be a pizza. They reason that quartershave to be standardized but pizzas can vary. On a trip to an unexploredforest, you discover a centipede, a caterpillar that looks like it, anda butterfly that the caterpillar turns into. How many kinds of animalshave you found, and which belong together? Most people feel, alongwith biologists, that the caterpillar and the butterfly are the same animal,but the caterpillar and the centipede are not, despite appearances to thecontrary. During your first basketball game, you see blond players withgreen jerseys run toward the east basket with the ball, and black playerswith yellow jerseys run toward the west basket with the ball. The whistleblows and a black player with a green jersey enters. Which basket will herun to? Everyone knows it is the east basket.These similarity-defying guesses come from intuitive theories aboutaging, weather, economic exchange, biology, and social coalitions. Theybelong to larger systems of tacit assumptions about kinds of things andthe laws governing them. The laws can be played out combinatorially inthe mind to get predictions and inferences about events unseen. Peopleeverywhere have homespun ideas about physics, to predict how objectsroll and bounce; psychology, to predict what other people think and do;