The mind problem

The study of language became a science when its ideas started to be submitted to experimental tests, and one of the first achievements of the new science has been described with great clarity by Massimo Piattelli Palmarini: “Just as there is a naive physics whose intuitions are subverted by true physics, so there is a naive theory of language which is easily dismissed by experimental data. This theory states that a child learns new words by listening to the sounds which accompany the actions performed by adults or the objects which are presented to them. In reality, as Paul Bloom has noticed, no mother, on coming home, tells her child: ‘Now I am opening the door. Now I am hanging the coat. And now I am coming toward you and give you a kiss’. Rather, in doing all these things, she is likely to say something like ‘How was your afternoon? Did you play with Maria? Did you brush your teeh? ‘. And normally a statement is going to be uttered just when the corrisponding action is not taking place. ‘Sleep’ will be said when the child is not sleeping”.
Children must clearly be born with mental rules which allow them to interpret what adults are saying, and luckily today we know of many examples which prove their existence. Susan Carey and Nancy Soja, for example, were able to illustrate some of them by describing how two and a half year old children were handling imaginary names.
A T-shaped metal object (a hydraulic joint) was given the name “blinket”, while a piece of dough was called “dax”, and then the children were invited to find other “blinket” and other “dax” objects in the room. It turned out that they identified as “blinket” any T-shaped object, even if made of wood, cardboard or plastic. The name “dax”, instead, was given only to dough-made objects, irrespective of their shape, and was never used for pieces of wax or jelly, even when these had the same shape and size of the original piece.
Clearly the children deduced that “blinket” meant a particular shape and not a material substance, while “dax” was referring to material substance and not to shape. These are abstract hypotheses, and children must have inborn mental rules in order to perform such complex and precise operations.