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

328 | HOW THE MIND WORKSend that a person intends to be used for attaining that end. The mixtureof mechanics and psychology makes artifacts a strange category. Artifactscan't be defined by their shape or their constitution, only by what theycan do and by what someone, somewhere, wants them to do. A store inmy neighborhood sells nothing but chairs, but its inventory is as varied asa department store's. It has stools, high-backed dining chairs, recliners,beanbags, elastics and wires stretched over frames, hammocks, woodencubes, plastic S's, and foam-rubber cylinders. We call them all chairsbecause they are designed to hold people up. A stump or an elephant'sfoot can become a chair if someone decides to use it as one. Probablysomewhere in the forests of the world there is a knot of branches thatuncannily resembles a chair. But like the proverbial falling tree thatmakes no sound, it is not a chair until someone decides to treat it as one.Keil's young subjects who happily let coffeepots turn into birdfeeders getthe idea.An extraterrestrial physicist or geometer, unless it had our psychology,would be baffled by some of the things we think exist in the world whenthese things are artifacts. Chomsky points out that we can say that thebook John is writing will weigh five pounds when it is published: "thebook" is both a stream of ideas in John's head and an object with mass.We talk about a house burning down to nothing and being rebuilt; somehow,it's the same house. Consider what kind of object "a city" must be,given that we can say London is so unhappy, ugly, and polluted that itshould be destroyed and rebuilt a hundred miles away.When Atran claimed that folk biology mirrors professional biology, hewas criticized because folk categories like "vegetable" and "pet" match noLinnaean taxon. He replies that they are artifacts. Not only are theydefined by the needs they serve (savory, succulent food; tractable companions),but they are, quite literally, human products. Millennia ofselective breeding have created corn out of a grass and carrots out of aroot. One has only to imagine packs of French poodles roaming theprimeval forests to realize that most pets are human creations, too.Daniel Dennett proposes that the mind adopts a "design stance"when dealing with artifacts, complementing its "physical stance" forobjects like rocks and its "intentional stance" for minds. In the designstance, one imputes an intention to a real or hypothetical designer. Someobjects are so suited to accomplishing an improbable outcome that theattribution is easy. As Dennett writes, "There can be little doubt what anaxe is, or what a telephone is for; we hardly need to consult Alexander