"Humans . . . entered the 'cognitive niche.' Remember the definition of intelligence from Chapter 2: using knowledge of how things work to attain goals in the face of obstacles. By learning which manipulations achieve which goals, humans have mastered the art of the surprise attack. They use novel, goal-oriented courses of action to overcome the Maginot Line defenses of other organisms, which can respond only over evolutionary time. The manipulations can be novel because human knowledge is not just couched in concrete instructions like 'how to catch a rabbit.' Humans analyze the world using intuitive theories of objects, forces, paths, places, manners, states, substances, hidden biochemical essences, and, for other animals and people, beliefs and desires. . . . People compose new knowledge and plans by mentally playing out combinatorial interactions among these laws in their mind's eye."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Academics from CanadaCognitive scientistsPhilosophers from CanadaLinguists from CanadaPsychologists from Canada
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
p. 188
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Steven_Pinker
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Steven Pinker
49 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Steven Pinker →
Related Quotes
"What about the rationalization that charitable extracurricular activities teach kids important lessons of moral engag…"
"Effective altruism – efforts that actually help people rather than making you feel good or helping you show off – is …"
"The moralistic fallacy is that what is good is found in nature. It lies behind the bad science in nature-documentary …"
"It's no mystery why organisms sometimes harm one another. Evolution has no conscience, and if one creature hurts anot…"
"On top of all the miseries inflicted by predators and parasites, the members of a species show no pity to their own k…"
"But Elias did propose an exogenous trigger to get the whole thing started, indeed, two triggers. The first was the co…"
"Intelligence, then, is the ability to attain goals in the face of obstacles by means of decisions based on rational (…"
"The idea that thought is the same thing as language is an example of what can be called a conventional absurdity: a s…"
"I predict it will come to be seen as a turning point in the history of psychology."
"Suppose the reasoning centers of the brain can get their hands on the mechanisms that plop shapes into the array and …"