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

352 HOW THE MIND WORKSTHE METAPHORICAL MINDWe are almost ready to dissolve Wallace's paradox that a forager's mind iscapable of calculus. The human mind, we see, is not equipped with anevolutionarily frivolous faculty for doing Western science, mathematics,chess, or other diversions. It is equipped with faculties to master thelocal environment and outwit its denizens. People form concepts thatfind the clumps in the correlational texture of the world. They have severalways of knowing, or intuitive theories, adapted to the major kinds ofentities in human experience: objects, animate things, natural kinds,artifacts, minds, and the social bonds and forces we will explore in thenext two chapters. They wield inferential tools like the elements of logic,arithmetic, and probability. What we now want to know is where thesefaculties came from and how they can be applied to modern intellectualchallenges.Here is an idea, inspired by a discovery in linguistics. Ray Jackendoffpoints to sentences like the following:The messenger went from Paris to Istanbul.The inheritance finally went to Fred.The light went from green to red.The meeting went from 3:00 to 4:00.The first sentence is straightforward: someone moves from place toplace. But in the others, things stay put. Fred could have become a millionairewhen the will was read even if no cash changed hands but abank account was signed over. Traffic signals are set in pavement anddon't travel, and meetings aren't even things that could travel. We areusing space and motion as a metaphor for more abstract ideas. In theFred sentence, possessions are objects, owners are places, and giving ismoving. For the traffic light, a changeable thing is the object, its states(red and green) are places, and changing is moving. For the meeting,time is a line, the present is a moving point, events are journeys, beginningsand ends are origins and destinations.The spatial metaphor is found not only in talk about changes but intalk about unchanging states. Belonging, being, and scheduling are construedas if they were landmarks situated at a place: