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

312 HOW THE MIND WORKSthe world. Crank up the microscope, and the boundaries turn to fuzz. Takea textbook example, "mother," a category with the seemingly straightforwarddefinition "female parent." Oh, yeah? What about surrogate mothers?Adoptive mothers? Foster mothers? Egg donors? Or take species. Aspecies, unlike the controversial larger categories like "fish," is supposed tohave a clear definition: usually, a population of organisms whose memberscan mate to form fertile offspring. But even that vaporizes under scrutiny.There are widely dispersed, gradually varying species in which an animalfrom the western edge of the range can mate with an animal from the center,and an animal from the center can mate with an animal from the east,but an animal from the west cannot mate with an animal from the east.The observations are interesting, but I think they miss an importantpoint. Systems of rules are idealizations that abstract away from complicatingaspects of reality. They are never visible in pure form, but are noless real for all that. No one has ever actually sighted a triangle withoutthickness, a frictionless plane, a point mass, an ideal gas, or an infinite,randomly interbreeding population. That is not because they are uselessfigments but because they are masked by the complexity and finitenessof the world and by many layers of noise. The concept of "mother" is perfectlywell defined within a number of idealized theories. In mammaliangenetics, a mother is the source of the sex cell that always carries an Xchromosome. In evolutionary biology, she is the producer of the largergamete. In mammalian physiology, she is the site of prenatal growth andbirth; in genealogy, the immediate female ancestor; in some legal contexts,the guardian of the child and the spouse of the child's father. Theomnibus concept "mother" depends on an idealization of the idealizationsin which all the systems pick out the same entities: the contributorof the egg nurtures the embryo, bears the offspring, raises it, and marriesthe sperm donor. Just as friction does not refute Newton, exotic disruptionsof the idealized alignment of genetics, physiology, and law do notmake "mother" any fuzzier within each of these systems. Our theories,both folk and scientific, can idealize away from the messiness of theworld and lay bare its underlying causal forces.It's hard to read about the human mind's tendency to put things in boxesorganized around a stereotype without pondering the tragedy of racism.