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

552 HOW THE MIND WORKSThird, the mind reflexively interprets other people's words and gesturesby doing whatever it takes to make them sensible and true. If thewords are sketchy or incongruous, the mind charitably fills in missingpremises or shifts to a new frame of reference in which they make sense.Without this "principle of relevance," language itself would be impossible.The thoughts behind even the simplest sentence are so labyrinthinethat if we ever expressed them in full our speech would sound like theconvoluted verbiage of a legal document. Say I were to tell you, "Janeheard the jingling ice cream truck. She ran to get her piggy bank fromher dresser and started to shake it. Finally some money came out."Though I didn't say it in so many words, you know that Jane is a child(not an eighty-seven-year-old woman), that she shook the piggy bank(not the dresser), that coins (not bills) came out, and that she wanted themoney to buy ice cream (not to eat the money, invest it, or bribe the driverto turn off the jingling).The jester manipulates this mental machinery to get the audience toentertain a proposition—the one that resolves the incongruity—againsttheir will. People appreciate the truth of the disparaging propositionbecause it was not baldly asserted as a piece of propaganda they mightreject but was a conclusion they deduced for themselves. The propositionmust possess at least a modicum of warrant or the audience couldnot have deduced it from other facts and could not have gotten the joke.This explains the feeling that a witty remark may capture a truth that istoo complex to articulate, and that it is an effective weapon that forcespeople, at least for a moment, to agree to things they would otherwisedeny. Reagan's wisecrack that abortion-rights advocates had already beenborn is so trivially true—everyone has been born—that on first hearing itmakes no sense. But it does make sense on the assumption that there aretwo kinds of individuals, the born and the unborn. Those are the termsin which abortion opponents want the issue to be framed, and anyonewho understands the quip has implicitly acknowledged that the framingis possible. And within that frame, the abortion-rights advocate possessesa privilege but wants to deny it to others and hence is a hypocrite. Theargument is not necessarily sound, but a rebuttal would need many morewords than the dozen that sufficed for Reagan. The "higher" forms of witare cases where an audience's cognitive processes have been commandeeredagainst them to deduce a disparaging proposition from premisesthey cannot deny.