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

314 HOW THE MIND WORKSCORE CURRICULUMYou have channel-surfed to a rerun of L.A. Law, and you want to knowwhy the harpy lawyer Rosalind Shays is weeping on the witness stand. Ifsomeone began to explain that the fluid in her tear ducts had increasedin volume until the pressure exceeded the surface tension by such andsuch an amount, you would squelch the lecture. What you want to findout is that she hopes to win a lawsuit against her former employers and isshedding crocodile tears to convince the jury that when the firm firedher she was devastated. But if you saw the next episode and wanted toknow why she plummeted to the bottom of an elevator shaft after sheaccidentally stepped through the open door, her motives would be irrelevantto anyone but a Freudian gone mad. The explanation is that matterin free fall, Rosalind Shays included, accelerates at a rate of 9.8 metersper second per second.There are many ways to explain an event, and some are better than others.Even if neuroscientists someday decode the entire wiring diagram ofthe brain, human behavior makes the most sense when it is explained interms of beliefs and desires, not in terms of volts and grams. Physics providesno insight into the machinations of a crafty lawyer, and even fails toenlighten us about many simpler acts of living things. As Richard Dawkinsobserved, "If you throw a dead bird into the air it will describe a gracefulparabola, exactly as physics books say it should, then come to rest on theground and stay there. It behaves as a solid body of a particular mass andwind resistance ought to behave. But if you throw a live bird in the air itwill not describe a parabola and come to rest on the ground. It will flyaway, and may not touch land this side of the county boundary." We understandbirds and plants in terms of their innards. To know why they moveand grow, we cut them open and put bits under a microscope. We need yetanother kind of explanation for artifacts like a chair and a crowbar: a statementof the function the object is intended to perform. It would be silly totry to understand why chairs have a stable horizontal surface by cuttingthem open and putting bits of them under a microscope. The explanationis that someone designed the chair to hold up a human behind.Many cognitive scientists believe that the mind is equipped withinnate intuitive theories or modules for the major ways of making sense