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

Good Ideas 315of the world. There are modules for objects and forces, for animatebeings, for artifacts, for minds, and for natural kinds like animals, plants,and minerals. Don't take the "theory" idiom literally; as we have seen,people don't really work like scientists. Don't take the "module"metaphor too seriously, either; people can mix and match their ways ofknowing. A concept like "throwing," for example, welds an intention(intuitive psychology) to a motion (intuitive physics). And we often applymodes of thinking to subject matters they were not designed for, such asin slapstick humor (person as object), animistic religion (tree or mountainas having a mind), and anthropomorphic animal stories (animalswith human minds). As I have mentioned, I prefer to think of the ways ofknowing in anatomical terms, as mental systems, organs, and tissues,like the immune system, blood, or skin. They accomplish specializedfunctions, thanks to their specialized structures, but don't necessarilycome in encapsulated packages. I would also add that the list of intuitivetheories or modules or ways of knowing is surely too short. Cognitive scientiststhink of people as Mr. Spock without the funny ears. A more realisticinventory would include modes of thought and feeling for danger,contamination, status, dominance, fairness, love, friendship, sexuality,children, relatives, and the self. They are explored in later chapters.Saying that the different ways of knowing are innate is different fromsaying that knowledge is innate. Obviously we have to learn about Frisbees,butterflies, and lawyers. Talking about innate modules is not meantto minimize learning but to explain it. Learning involves more than recordingexperience; learning requires couching the records of experience sothat they generalize in useful ways. A VCR is excellent at recording, but noone would look to this modern version of the blank slate as a paradigm ofintelligence. When we watch lawyers in action, we draw conclusions abouttheir goals and values, not their tongue and limb trajectories. Goals andvalues are one of the vocabularies in which we mentally couch our experiences.They cannot be built out of simpler concepts from our physicalknowledge the way "momentum" can be built out of mass and velocity or"power" can be built out of energy and time. They are primitive or irreducible,and higher-level concepts are defined in terms of them. To understandlearning in other domains, we have to find their vocabularies, too.Because a combinatorial system like a vocabulary can generate a vastnumber of combinations, one might wonder whether human thoughtscan be generated by a single system, a general-purpose Esperanto of themind. But even a very powerful combinatorial system has its limits. A