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

Good Ideas 329Graham Bell's biography for clues about what he had in mind." Othersare notoriously open to rival interpretations, like paintings and sculpture,which are sometimes designed to have an inscrutable design. Still others,like Stonehenge or an assembly of gears found in a shipwreck, probablyhave a function, though we don't know what it is. Artifacts, because theydepend on human intentions, are subject to interpretation and criticismjust as if they were works of art, an activity Dennett calls "artifacthermeneutics."And now we come to the mind's way of knowing other minds. We are allpsychologists. We analyze minds not just to follow soap-opera connivingsbut to understand the simplest human actions.The psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen makes the point with a story.Mary walked into the bedroom, walked around, and walked out. How doyou explain it? Maybe you'd say that Mary was looking for something shewanted to find and thought it was in the bedroom. Maybe you'd sayMary heard something in the bedroom and wanted to know what madethe noise. Or maybe you'd say that Mary forgot where she was going;maybe she really intended to go downstairs. But you certainly would notsay that Mary just does this every day at this time: she just walks into thebedroom, walks around, and walks out again. It would be unnatural toexplain human behavior in the physicist's language of time, distance, andmass, and it would also be wrong; if you came back tomorrow to test thehypothesis, it would surely fail. Our minds explain other people's behaviorby their beliefs and desires because other people's behavior is in factcaused by their beliefs and desires. The behaviorists were wrong, andeveryone intuitively knows it.Mental states are invisible and weightless. Philosophers define themas "a relation between a person and a proposition." The relation is an attitudelike believes-that, desires-that, hopes-that, pretends-that. Theproposition is the content of the belief, something very roughly like themeaning of a sentence—for example, Mary finds the keys, or The keys arein the bedroom. The content of a belief lives in a different realm from thefacts of the world. There are unicorns grazing in Cambridge Common isfalse, but John thinks there are unicorns grazing in Cambridge Commoncould very well be true. To ascribe a belief to someone, we can't just