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

358 J HOW THE MIND WORKSHer criticisms were right on target.I've never won an argument with him.VIRTUE IS UP:He is high-minded.She is an upstanding citizen.That was a low trick.Don't be underhanded.I wouldn't stoop to that; it is beneath me.LOVE IS A PATIENT:This is a sick relationship.They have a healthy marriage.This marriage is dead—it can't be revived.It's a tired affair.IDEAS ARE FOOD:What he said left a had taste in my mouth.All this paper has are half-baked ideas and warmed-over theories.I can't swallow that claim.That's food for thought.Once you begin to notice this pedestrian poetry, you find it everywhere.Ideas are not only food but buildings, people, plants, products,commodities, money, tools, and fashions. Love is a force, madness,magic, and war. The visual field is a container, self-esteem is a brittleobject, time is money, life is a game of chance.The ubiquity of metaphor brings us closer to a resolution to Wallace'sparadox. The answer to the question "Why is the human mind adaptedto think about arbitrary abstract entities?" is that it really isn't. Unlikecomputers and the rules of mathematical logic, we don't think in Fs andx's and y's. We have inherited a pad of forms that capture the key featuresof encounters among objects and forces, and the features of other consequentialthemes of the human condition such as fighting, food, andhealth. By erasing the contents and filling in the blanks with new symbols,we can adapt our inherited forms to more abstruse domains. Someof these revisions may have taken place in our evolution, giving us basic