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

Good Ideas 323ways of knowing. Most agents are animals, and animals, like plants andminerals, are categories that we sense are given by nature. Some selfpropelledthings, like cars and windup dolls, are artifacts. And manyagents do not merely approach and avoid goals but act out of beliefs anddesires; that is, they have minds. Let's look at each of them.People everywhere are fine amateur biologists. They enjoy looking atanimals and plants, classify them into groups that biologists recognize,predict their movements and life cycles, and use their juices as medicines,poisons, food additives, and recreational drugs. These talents,which have adapted us to the cognitive niche, come from a mode ofunderstanding the world called folk biology, though "folk natural history"may be a more apt term. People have certain intuitions about naturalkinds—roughly, the sorts of things found in a museum of natural history,such as animals, plants, and minerals—that they don't apply to artifacts,such as coffeepots, or to kinds stipulated directly by rules, such as trianglesand prime ministers.What is the definition of lion} You might say "a large, ferocious catthat lives in Africa." But suppose you learned that a decade ago lionswere hunted to extinction in Africa and survive only in American zoos.Suppose scientists discovered that lions weren't innately ferocious; theyget that way in a dysfunctional family but otherwise grow up like BertLahr in the Wizard of Oz. Suppose it turned out that they were not evencats. I had a teacher who insisted that lions really belonged in the dogfamily, and though she was wrong, she could have been right, just aswhales turned out to be mammals, not fish. But if this thought experimentturned out to be true, you would probably feel that these gentleAmerican dogs were still really lions, even if not a word of the definitionsurvived. Lions just don't have definitions. They are not even picked outby the picture of a lion in the dictionary next to the definition of theword. A lifelike mechanical lion wouldn't count as the real thing, and onecan imagine breeding a striped lion that looked more like a tiger butwould still count as a lion.Philosophers say that the meaning of a natural-kind term comes froman intuition of a hidden trait or essence that the members share with oneanother and with the first examples dubbed with the term. People don't