And here [Pinker] is on why we like to read fiction: ‘Fictional narratives supply us with a mental catalogue of the fatal conundrums we might face someday and the outcomes of strategies we could deploy in them. What are the options if I were to suspect that my uncle killed my father, took his position, and married my mother?’ Good question. Or what if it turns out that, having just used the ring that I got by kidnapping a dwarf to pay off the giants who built me my new castle, I should discover that it is the very ring that I need in order to continue to be immortal and rule the world? It’s important to think out the options betimes, because a thing like that could happen to anyone and you can never have too much insurance.
Says Jerry Fodor, in his review of Pinker’s How the Mind Works. I am fascinated whenever clever people say stupid things, and this certainly looks like a prime specimen. Can Fodor really think that the above constitutes a valid argument of any kind? That stories, if they are useful as mental sandboxes, must be literal mental sandboxes? That rings must be rings, dwarves must be dwarves and immortals must never die? That, in other words, there is a naively naturalistic mapping for everything mentioned in a story to the identical thing in the world, and allegory and metaphor do not even exist, nor usually carry intentional and ofter moral arguments? Surely that would be ludicrous, but just as surely, the above “argument” seems founded on such ludicrosity.
There certainly are interesting things one could learn from this, about how one’s pet theories bias the mind, or how being too immersed in the dreamy Language of Thought will make one ignore reality. It’s called cognitive dissonance and quite a fascinating phenomenon itself. But I think what I’ll take away is not to read book reviews by people I heartily disagree with and listen to Das Rheingold instead. Wagala weia.
Deprecated: Function link_pages is deprecated since version 2.1.0! Use wp_link_pages() instead. in /mnt/web224/a3/17/5110917/htdocs/engine/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6170