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

Thinking Machines 63mediated by all the rest of her beliefs about where she is and how the worldworks. And Sallys behavior depends just as much on whether she wants toescape the danger—if she were a volunteer firefighter, or suicidal, or a zealotwho wanted to immolate herself to draw attention to a cause, or had childrenin the day-care center upstairs, you can bet she would not have fled.Skinner himself did not pigheadedly insist that measurable stimuli likewavelengths and shapes predicted behavior. Instead, he defined stimuliby his own intuitions. He was perfectly happy calling "danger"—like"praise," "English," and "beauty"—a kind of stimulus. That had the advantageof keeping his theory in line with reality, but it was the advantage oftheft over honest toil. We understand what it means for a device torespond to a red light or a loud noise—we can even build one that does—but humans are the only devices in the universe that respond to danger,praise, English, and beauty. The ability of a human to respond to somethingas physically nebulous as praise is part of the puzzle we are trying tosolve, not part of the solution to the puzzle. Praise, danger, English, andall the other things we respond to, no less than beauty, are in the eye ofthe beholder, and the eye of the beholder is what we want to explain. Thechasm between what can be measured by a physicist and what can causebehavior is the reason we must credit people with beliefs and desires.In our daily lives we all predict and explain other people's behaviorfrom what we think they know and what we think they want. Beliefs anddesires are the explanatory tools of our own intuitive psychology, andintuitive psychology is still the most useful and complete science ofbehavior there is. To predict the vast majority of human acts—going tothe refrigerator, getting on the bus, reaching into one's wallet—you don'tneed to crank through a mathematical model, run a computer simulationof a neural network, or hire a professional psychologist; you can just askyour grandmother.It's not that common sense should have any more authority in psychologythan it does in physics or astronomy. But this part of common sensehas so much power and precision in predicting, controlling, and explainingeveryday behavior, compared to any alternative ever entertained, thatthe odds are high that it will be incorporated in some form into our bestscientific theories. I call an old friend on the other coast and we agree tomeet in Chicago at the entrance of a bar in a certain hotel on a particularday two months hence at 7:45 P.M. I predict, he predicts, and everyonewho knows us predicts that on that day at that time we will meet up. Andwe do meet up. That is amazing! In what other domain could laypeople—