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

Good Ideas 355The very same word, force, is being used literally and metaphorically,with a common thread of meaning that we easily appreciate. Sentencesabout motion and sentences about desire both allude to a billiard-balldynamics in which an agonist has an intrinsic tendency to motion or rest,and is opposed by a weaker or stronger antagonist, causing one or both tostop or proceed. It is the impetus theory I discussed earlier in the chapter,the core of people's intuitive theory of physics.Space and force pervade language. Many cognitive scientists (includingme) have concluded from their research on language that a handfulof concepts about places, paths, motions, agency, and causation underliethe literal or figurative meanings of tens of thousands of words and constructions,not only in English but in every other language that has beenstudied. The thought underlying the sentence Minnie gave the house toMary would be something like "Minnie cause [house go-possessionallyfrom Minnie to Mary]." These concepts and relations appear to be thevocabulary and syntax of mentalese, the language of thought. Becausethe language of thought is combinatorial, these elementary concepts maybe combined into more and more complex ideas. The discovery of portionsof the vocabulary and syntax of mentalese is a vindication of Leibniz'"remarkable thought": "that a kind of alphabet of human thoughtscan be worked out and that everything can be discovered and judged bycomparison of the letters of this alphabet and an analysis of the wordsmade from them." And the discovery that the elements of mentalese arebased on places and projectiles has implications for both where the languageof thought came from and how we put it to use in modern times.Other primates may not think about stories, inheritances, meetings, andtraffic lights, but they do think about rocks, sticks, and burrows. Evolutionarychange often works by copying body parts and tinkering with thecopy. For example, insects' mouth parts are modified legs. A similarprocess may have given us our language of thought. Suppose ancestralcircuits for reasoning about space and force were copied, the copy's connectionsto the eyes and muscles were severed, and references to thephysical world were bleached out. The circuits could serve as a scaffoldingwhose slots are filled with symbols for more abstract concerns likestates, possessions, ideas, and desires. The circuits would retain their