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

Good Ideas | 327different appearance, and guessed that blackbirds provide their babieswith mashed-up food, too.Children also have a sense that a living thing's properties are there tokeep it alive and help it function. Three-year-olds say that a rose hasthorns because it helps the rose, but not that barbed wire has barbs tohelp the wire. They say that claws are good for the lobster, but not thatjaws are good for the pliers. This sense of fitness or adaptation is not justa confusion between psychological wants and biological functions. Thepsychologists Giyoo Hatano and Kayoko Inagaki have shown that childrenhave a clear sense that bodily processes are involuntary. They knowthat a boy can't digest dinner more quickly to make room for dessert, norcan he make himself fat by wishing alone.Is essentialism learned? Biological processes are too slow and hiddento show to a bored baby, but testing babies is only one way to showknowledge in the absence of experience. Another is to measure thesource of the experience itself. Three-year-olds haven't taken biology,and they have few opportunities to experiment with the innards or theheritability of animals. Whatever they have learned about essences haspresumably come from their parents. Gelman and her students analyzedmore than four thousand sentences from mothers talking to their childrenabout animals and artifacts. The parents virtually never talkedabout innards, origins, or essences, and the few times they did, it wasabout the innards of artifacts. Children are essentialists without theirparents' help.Artifacts come with being human. We make tools, and as we evolvedour tools made us. One-year-old babies are fascinated by what objectscan do for them. They tinker obsessively with sticks for pushing, clothand strings for pulling, and supports for holding things up. As soon asthey can be tested on tool use, around eighteen months, children showan understanding that tools have to contact their material and that atool's rigidity and shape are more important than its color or ornamentation.Some patients with brain damage cannot name natural objects butcan name artifacts, or vice versa, suggesting that artifacts and naturalkinds might even be stored in different ways in the brain.What is an artifact? An artifact is an object suitable for attaining some