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

356 | HOW THE MIND WORKScomputational abilities, continuing to reckon about entities being in onestate at a time, shifting from state to state, and overcoming entities withopposite valence. When the new, abstract domain has a logical structurethat mirrors objects in motion—a traffic light has one color at a time butflips between them; contested social interactions are determined by thestronger of two wills—the old circuits can do useful inferential work.They divulge their ancestry as space- and force-simulators by themetaphors they invite, a kind of vestigial cognitive organ.Are there any reasons to believe that this is how our language ofthought evolved? A few. Chimpanzees, and presumably their commonancestor with our species, are curious manipulators of objects. When theyare trained to use symbols or gestures, they can make them stand for theevent of going to a place or putting an object in a location. The psychologistDavid Premack has shown that chimpanzees can isolate causes.Given a pair of before-and-after pictures, like an apple and a pair of applehalves or a scribbled sheet of paper next to a clean one, they pick out theobject that wreaked the change, a knife in the first case and an eraser inthe second. So not only do chimpanzees maneuver in the physical world,•but they have freestanding thoughts about it. Perhaps the circuitry behindthose thoughts was co-opted in our lineage for more abstract kinds of causation.How do we know that the minds of living human beings really appreciatethe parallels between, say, social and physical pressure, or betweenspace and time? How do we know that people aren't just using deadmetaphors uncomprehendingly as when we talk of breakfast withoutthinking of it as breaking a fast? For one thing, space and forcemetaphors have been reinvented time and again, in dozens of languagefamilies across the globe. Even more suggestive evidence comes from myown main field of research, child language acquisition. The psychologistMelissa Bowerman discovered that preschool children spontaneouslycoin their own metaphors in which space and motion symbolize possession,circumstance, time, and causation:You put me just bread and butter.Mother takes ball away from boy and puts it to girl.I'm taking these cracks bigger [while shelling a peanut].I putted part of the sleeve blue so I crossed it out with red [while color­ing]-