How the Mind Works
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"As far as biological cause and effect are concerned, music is useless. It shows no signs of design for attaining a goal such as long life, grandchildren, or the accurate perception and prediction of the world." --How the Mind Works (1997) by Steven Pinker "I suspect that music is auditory cheesecake, an exquisite confection crafted to tickle the sensitive spots of at least six of our mental faculties. A standard piece tickles them all at once, but we can see the ingredients in various kinds of not-quite-music that leave one or more of them out." --How the Mind Works (1997) by Steven Pinker |
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How the Mind Works is a 1997 book by Canadian-American cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, in which the author attempts to explain some of the human mind's poorly understood functions and quirks in evolutionary terms. Drawing heavily on the paradigm of evolutionary psychology articulated by John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, Pinker covers subjects such as vision, emotion, feminism, and "the meaning of life". He argues for both a computational theory of mind and a neo-Darwinist / adaptationist approach to evolution, all of which he sees as the central components of evolutionary psychology. He criticizes difference feminism because he believes scientific research has shown that women and men differ little or not at all in their moral reasoning. The book was a Pulitzer Prize Finalist.
Reception
Jerry Fodor, considered one of the fathers of the computational theory of mind, criticized the book. Fodor wrote a book called The Mind Doesn't Work That Way, saying "There is, in short, every reason to suppose that the Computational Theory is part of the truth about cognition. But it hadn't occurred to me that anyone could suppose that it's a very large part of the truth; still less that it's within miles of being the whole story about how the mind works". He continued, "I was, and remain, perplexed by an attitude of ebullient optimism that's particularly characteristic of Pinker's book. As just remarked, I would have thought that the last forty or fifty years have demonstrated pretty clearly that there are aspects of higher mental processes into which the current armamentarium of computational models, theories and experimental techniques offers vanishingly little insight."
Pinker responded to Fodor's criticisms in Mind & Language. Pinker argued that Fodor had attacked straw man positions, wryly suggesting a possible title for his riposte as No One Ever Said it Did.
Daniel Levitin has criticized Pinker for referring to music as an "auditory cheesecake" in the book. In his book This Is Your Brain on Music (2006), Levitin takes some time in the last chapter to refute Pinker’s arguments. When asked about Levitin's book by New York Times journalist Clive Thompson, Pinker said he hadn't read it.
