This is philosophy bytes with me, David.
Edmonds, and me, Nigel Warburton.
Philosophy bytes is unfunded.
Please help us to keep it going by subscribing or donating at www.philosophybytes.com.
or you can become a patron at Patreon.
Imagine somebody told you a whale pole vaulted over the Empire State Building.
You've probably never heard that sentence before, so how did you understand it?
Joshua Green, a Harvard psychologist and philosopher, is fascinated by this sort of question.
Joshua Green, welcome to philosophy Bites.
Thanks.
Great to be here.
The topic we're talking about today is the construction of thought.
That sounds a complicated subject.
What do we mean by that?
Well, we have this ability that we take for granted, but that really is quite remarkable, which is that we can take concepts and put them together on the fly to create and understand new thoughts.
Say to you, yesterday the world's tallest woman was serenaded by 30 pink elephants.
You immediately understand what I just said, even though you've never heard anybody say that before.
You can take all of those concepts, the concept of woman, the concept of tall, of pink, of serenading of 30, and put them all together.
And not just put them together as a bag of mixed up concepts, but as a very specific idea where it's the elephants that are doing the singing instead of the woman.
Despite what you might have guessed, if you had to guess based on what you know about the world, I can.