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

Good Ideas 333In another sense, of course, the world does have surfaces and chairsand rabbits and minds. They are knots and patterns and vortices of matterand energy that obey their own laws and ripple through the sector ofspace-time in which we spend our days. They are not social constructions,nor the bits of undigested beef that Scrooge blamed for his visionof Marley's ghost. But to a mind unequipped to find them, they might aswell not exist at all. As the psychologist George Miller has put it, "Thecrowning intellectual accomplishment of the brain is the real world. . . .[A] 11 [the] fundamental aspects of the real world of our experience areadaptive interpretations of the really real world of physics."A TRIVIUMThe medieval curriculum comprised seven liberal arts, divided into thelower-level trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric) and the upper-levelquadrivium (geometry, astronomy, arithmetic, and music). Trivium originallymeant three roads, then it meant crossroads, then commonplace(since common people hang around crossroads), and finally trifling orimmaterial. The etymology is, in a sense, apt: with the exception ofastronomy, none of the liberal arts is about anything. They don't explainplants or animals or rocks or people; rather, they are intellectual toolsthat can be applied in any realm. Like the students who complain thatalgebra will never help them in the real world, one can wonder whetherthese abstract tools are useful enough in nature for natural selection tohave inculcated them in the brain. Let's look at a modified trivium: logic,arithmetic, and probability."Contrariwise," continued Tweedledee, "if it was so, it might be, and if it wereso, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic!"Logic, in the technical sense, refers not to rationality in general but toinferring the truth of one statement from the truth of other statementsbased only on their form, not their content. I am using logic when I reasonas follows. P is true, P implies Q, therefore Q is true. P and Q are