Explaining Culture (Dan Sperber, 2005)
“Humans can mentally represent not just environmental and somatic facts, but also some of their own mental states, representations and processes.
The human internal representation system - the language of thought, to use Jerry Fodor's expression - can serve as its own metalanguage. (…)
Doubting and disbelieving involve representing a representation as being improbable or false.
Presumably, other animals do not have the ability to disbelieve what they perceive or what they decode.
Secondly, meta-representational abilities allow humans to process information which they do not fully understand, information for which they are not able at the time to provide a well-formed representation. (…)
A device with rnetarepresentational abilities, on the other hand, can embed a defective representation in a well-formed meta-representation.
Children use this ability all the time to process half-understood information.
They are told things that they do not quite understand by speakers whom they trust.
So they have grounds to believe that what they are told is true, even though they do not know exactly what it is that they are told. (…)
The obvious function served by the ability to entertain half-understood concepts and ideas is to provide intermediate steps towards their full understanding.
But it also creates the possibility of conceptual mysteries, which no amount of processing could ever clarify, invading human minds.”
