This is philosophy bites with me David Edmonds and me Nigel Warburton.

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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. So if I say to you, yesterday the world's tallest woman

was serenated 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 serenating, 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

...