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

70 HOW THE MIND WORKSstanding the popular misconception that we think in our mother tongue.As I showed in The Language Instinct, sentences in a spoken languagelike English or Japanese are designed for vocal communication betweenimpatient, intelligent social beings. They achieve brevity by leaving outany information that the listener can mentally fill in from the context. Incontrast, the "language of thought" in which knowledge is couched canleave nothing to the imagination, because it is the imagination. Anotherproblem with using English as the medium of knowledge is that Englishsentences can be ambiguous. When the serial killer Ted Bundy wins astay of execution and the headline reads "Bundy Beats Date with Chair,"we do a double-take because our mind assigns two meanings to thestring of words. If one string of words in English can correspond to twomeanings in the mind, meanings in the mind cannot be strings of wordsin English. Finally, sentences in a spoken language are cluttered witharticles, prepositions, gender suffixes, and other grammatical boilerplate.They are needed to help get information from one head to another byway of the mouth and the ear, a slow channel, but they are not neededinside a single head where information can be transmitted directly bythick bundles of neurons. So the statements in a knowledge system arenot sentences in English but rather inscriptions in a richer language ofthought, "mentalese."In our example, the portion of mentalese that captures family relationscomes in two kinds of statements. An example of the first is Alexfather-of Andrew: a name, followed by an immediate family relationship,followed by a name. An example of the second is Alex is-male: aname followed by its sex. Do not be misled by my use of English wordsand syntax in the mentalese inscriptions. This is a courtesy to you, thereader, to help you keep track of what the symbols stand for. As far as themachine is concerned, they are simply different arrangements of marks.As long as we use each one consistently to stand for someone (so thesymbol used for Alex is always used for Alex and never for anyone else),and arrange them according to a consistent plan (so they preserve informationabout who is the father of whom), they could be any marks in anyarrangement at all. You can think of the marks as bar codes recognized bya scanner, or keyholes that admit only one key, or shapes that fit only onetemplate. Of course, in a commercial computer they would be patternsof charges in silicon, and in a brain they would be firings in sets of neurons.The key point is that nothing in the machine understands them theway you or I do; parts of the machine respond to their shapes; and are