The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature

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The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature

3.84 of 5 stars 3.84 · rating details · 3,584 ratings · 389 reviews

New York Times bestselling author Steven Pinker possesses that rare combination of scientific aptitude and verbal eloquence that enables him to provide lucid explanations of deep and powerful ideas. His previous books, including the Pulitzer Prize finalist The Blank Slate, have catapulted him into the limelight as one of today's most important and popular science writers....more

Hardcover, 512 pages

Published September 11th 2007 by Viking Adult

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Mar 10, 2009 Trevor rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: evolution, language, psychology, philosophy, science

It is remarkable how much of modern thought can track its genetic heritage back to Kant. When I studied Kant at uni I was told that there was an entire school of philosophy that was formed on the basis of a poor (mis)translation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason into English. I always liked the idea of that.

It is also nice to hear someone talking about Kant and not talking about ‘the unknowability of the thing in itself’ – often the only bit of Kant anyone knows. One of the things Kant sought t...more It is remarkable how much of modern thought can track its genetic heritage back to Kant. When I studied Kant at uni I was told that there was an entire school of philosophy that was formed on the basis of a poor (mis)translation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason into English. I always liked the idea of that.

It is also nice to hear someone talking about Kant and not talking about ‘the unknowability of the thing in itself’ – often the only bit of Kant anyone knows. One of the things Kant sought to do in his philosophy was to find a way out of the endless debate (war?) between Empiricism (knowledge comes from experience) and Rationalism (knowledge is innate and logic eternal). Kant rejected both of these views and sought a compromise. He put forward that we had to have already existing structures in our minds that allowed us to frame the world and thereby understand it – these already existing structures – a priori categories he calls them – are the lenses we use to bring the world into focus.

This is much the same as Chomsky’s view that we learn language because we have evolved mental pathways that make learning language easy – if not virtually inevitable. Pinker is perhaps the greatest populariser of Chomsky living today. His earlier books – particularly The Blank Slate (ironically titled this, despite him arguing against notions of blank slates) and How The Mind Works - are virtually treatises on the victory of nature over nurture. As such these two have been my least favourite of his books. As a recovering meliorist I still struggle with ideas that fix human nature quite as firmly as I feel Pinker – and oddly enough, even Chomsky – would seem to require it to be fixed.

All the same, his other books, and large parts of this one, make me wish I’d become a Linguist. There is a long and amusing – well, I found it amusing, anyway – discussion about sexual intercourse and the various ways one can refer to it. Basically there are two ways – a series of ‘polite’ forms: they were intimate, made love, (or my current favourite which my daughter told me tonight) they had a marital embrace. (Sorry, I’ll need to pause for a moment while I stop laughing).

The other way one can refer to sex is somewhat less polite. Without using any words that will require asterisks, these might involve verbs such as 'to rut' or 'to nail'. Okay, they are clearly less pleasant than 'to make love' or 'to engage in marital embracing' – but what I liked most about this was his explanation of why one lot are polite and the others less so. Pinker points out that all of the polite forms are intransitive verbs (verbs that don’t take an object and so the act 'just happens', rather than being done) whereas the impolite forms are all transitive – one person does something to someone else. So, I shagged her – is going to be impolite. Now, isn’t that interesting?

There was also a long discussion in the middle about a book I read a couple of years ago called Don’t Think of an Elephant - I really didn’t think too much of that book at the time. It all seemed a bit simple-minded to me - a bit like an advertising man getting into politics. So I was very surprised to see so much space devoted to it here. I think Pinker is right – it is not enough to ‘reframe the debate’ and I also think there is a reality below the fluff of political debate that eventually asserts itself - frame or no frame.

One thing you can say about Pinker is that he has many more thoughts per page than your average book. The fact that I don’t agree with everything he says is hardly a criticism compared to the pleasure I get out of reading him. Sometimes he makes me smile, sometimes I can't help laughing out loud.
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Apr 23, 2008 Alex rated it 4 of 5 stars

The Stuff of Thought succeeds where his last book, The Blank Slate, failed. Here, Pinker largely abandons the heredity vs. environment debate for a discussion of the mind itself, and what role language plays in human thinking.

Drawing from Immanuel Kant, who first proposed the concept of a priori cognitive frameworks of time and space (so-called "pure intuitions") in his Critique of Pure Reason, Pinker argues that the human brain comes equipped with an innate understanding of certain fundamental...more The Stuff of Thought succeeds where his last book, The Blank Slate, failed. Here, Pinker largely abandons the heredity vs. environment debate for a discussion of the mind itself, and what role language plays in human thinking.

Drawing from Immanuel Kant, who first proposed the concept of a priori cognitive frameworks of time and space (so-called "pure intuitions") in his Critique of Pure Reason, Pinker argues that the human brain comes equipped with an innate understanding of certain fundamental attributes of the world like matter, causality and duration. Over the course of evolution, we developed basic preset cognitive models that allow us to navigate reality, tell past from present, evaluate volume, and square the perceived world with the self that perceives it. This runs counter to Wittgenstein's belief that thought is the slave of language. Rather, Pinker suggests, our core knowledge of space, time and identity precedes our knowledge of the words that represent them. How those words and their usage come to reflect our inborn predilections of the world is the subject of the book.

This is a tremendously ambitious undertaking, and Pinker for the most part rises to the challenge with clarity and gusto. As a non-linguist, I am severely handicapped in my ability to verify or contest his many assertions, but as a language enthusiast I found his evidence compelling and his investigation enthralling.

Consider his opening example. On the morning of September, 11th, 2001, a hijacked plane crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center, causing a deadly explosion killing thousands. Seventeen minutes later, a second plane crashed into the South Tower, incinerating more still, and within an hour an a half, both buildings were reduced to heaps of toxic rubble. By any standard, what happened in that small window of time changed the world. But of all the heavy themes and loaded issues debated by scholars and pundits in the years since, Pinker hones in a single, deceptively complex question: how many events took place on the morning of 9/11—one or two?

Initially, the question seems so trivial as to be offensive—the reduction of a calamitous tragedy to a piddling cardinal distinction—but follow Pinker's thread a bit further and one finds oneself in a turbulent theoretical sea, light years away from "mere" semantics. What constitutes an event? What do we mean by cause? These concepts, to say nothing of ordinality, intention, continuity, being, and force are constants in the human mind—atomic units of comprehension—and Pinker exhaustively yet effortlessly analyzes how these irreducible meanings manifest themselves in the ever-shifting matrix of grammar and lexicon. As it turns out, many of these analyses turn out to have dramatic real-world consequences, such as whether or not a president should be tried for perjury due to a particular use of tense, or how much insurance companies must dole out to their clients on the basis of what determines a single event versus two separate events. (In the case of the World Trade Center attacks, this meant the difference between 3.5 and 7 billion dollars.)

Not that the book is without its flaws. All along, one can't help sense the author's half-assed attempt to atone for the hostility he's exhibited towards the arts in the past (for instance, his famous dismissal of music as "auditory cheesecake"), and his awkward inclusion of familiar quotations and stock literary allusions comes off as amateurish and not entirely genuine. Does he really hold Shakespeare, whose vocabulary he once deemed inferior to that of modern third-graders, to be singularly capable of distilling profound psychological insights into mellifluous verse? Or is he just throwing a bone to his critics?

The second half is also markedly less inspired than the first, and indeed actively disappointing. Linguistic factoids and etymological myth-bustings abound. Pinker chooses to spend a great deal of time on baby names, among other things, analyzing why certain trends arrive and depart when they do. My God, who cares? In the hands of Bill Bryson, such digressions might be worthy of a reader's attention, but here they feel like empty Gladwellisms, trivial observations dressed up in zippy anecdotes and cute funfacts.

Uneven though it is, The Stuff of Thought generates enough escape velocity to merit a place among the strongest and most original works of popular science in recent memory. Not since The Astonishing Hypothesis, in which Francis Crick dismantled the longstanding myth of Cartesian Dualism, has a single work managed to elucidate such a mysterious and controversial realm, wedged as it is between cognitive science, philosophy of mind, neurology and evolutionary psychology.

"I've never met anyone who isn't interested in language," wrote Pinker in the introduction to his 1994 bestseller, The Language Instinct. Too often, though, that fascination is squashed by pedantic grammarians bemoaning the degradation of standards on one side and pious sociologists extolling the virtues of primitivism on the other. The Stuff of Thought should provide an antidote.

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Aug 03, 2008 Jafar rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

It’s hard to review this book. The book starts off to look too heavy with a long chapter on verbs. If you think verbs are simple things that are classified into transitive and intransitive, you’re in for a big surprise. The chapter is named Down the Rabbit Hole after how Alice ended up in Wonderland. And the world of verbs is quite a Wonderland. This chapter can seem a bit too technical and tedious unless you really love language. There’s a chapter about the relationship between language and int...more

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Feb 25, 2008 liz rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: non-fiction

I love Steven Pinker. LOVE Steven Pinker. But I also think Linguistics is the Best Thing Ever. So I loved SP's book "The Language Instinct" (even though a lot of it was old news to me, since I was fresh off of my linguistics course), and I was super-stoked for this one. Well, the first couple of chapters were not that great. But things totally picked up after that! Once his focus widened from strictly the brain to the influence of language on culture, the type of things that were detailed became...more

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Nov 02, 2009 Joshua Nomen-Mutatio rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: cognitive-science-and-or-psychology, cultural-and-or-political, evolutionary-theory, linguistics

Listened to this on audiobook last night/this morning after having just returned from seeing Pinker speak at UW-Madison last evening, which was excellent and a real treat for this cognitive science and evolutionary psychology nerd and huge fan of Steven Pinker. Books like this are too rich and complex to give a half-assed review of, or one where I just write clever anecdotes about my life and vaguely tie them to some idea in the book, like a blog entry beneath a book, awaiting your votes. Not th...more

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Feb 14, 2009 Kevan rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: cognitive-science

I've read a number of Pinker's books.

I very much enjoyed The Language Instinct and quite enjoyed How the Mind Works.

I read Words and Rules when living in Thailand and learning Thai. I had real problems mapping what he had to say from English to Thai. What he had to say about English and its implication for how the Mind/Language engine work simply did not seem to be true.

The Stuff of Thought seems much more solid though and I am finding it quite fascinating.

Pinker keeps saying "for English speake...more

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Oct 01, 2011 Jennifer rated it 5 of 5 stars

If you like cognitive psychology and linguistics, you will really enjoy this book. I particularly enjoyed Pinker's discussion of metaphors and analogies and how our thoughts and our science are both limited and expanded by the metaphors we have in our language. When I finished this book, I felt a rush as though I stepped outside of my thought processes and limited ways of knowing the world momentarily and could see much broader implications for diplomacy, cross-cultural understanding, science, a...more

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Jun 09, 2008 Justin rated it 4 of 5 stars

Great expose of how the mind can be exposed through the semantics and structure of language.

I was bogged down my the technical aspects of verbs and grammar towards the beginning of the book but the second half really hit its stride as Pinker explains metaphors, the need for taboos, expletives and indirect language.

A worthwile read for those wishing to learn more about humanity and the illogical quirks that make us interesting.

Most importantly, the purpose of education is revealed. Not to conv...more

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Feb 25, 2008 Megan rated it 2 of 5 stars

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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Jan 21, 2008 Gwen rated it 1 of 5 stars

A friend gave me this book. I didn't like Pinker's other one and I don't like this one. This isn't a knee-jerk reaction from a sociologist; socio-biological explanations are generally examples of people reading their own interpretations of the social world, and how it "ought" to be, back into "history" and saying that it's natural. The arguments themselves are contradictory--men evolved to be promiscuous and sleep with any woman, except they also evolved to not sleep with ugly women. So they'll...more

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Jun 17, 2008 Aaron rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: science, non-fiction

Fascinating, funny and dazzlingly cunning contemporary science. Reveals how we mysteriously know how to organise verbs, the overwhelming prevalence of metaphor in our thinking, why neologisms fail, why names vary over time, why swearing is necessary, and crucially where our evolved view of the world falls short, leaving us vulnerable.

There's a lot here, and a couple of the end chapters feel more speculative than the confident earlier ones, but this is a mine of insight for anyone interested in t...more

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Feb 05, 2009 Bookmarks Magazine added it

By examining our words, we can learn a lot about who we are. So argues Harvard academic and popular science writer Steven Pinker in The Stuff of Thought, a logical extension of his previous books. Pinker once again caters to a popular (though scientifically literate) audience, using accessible examples from jokes, Shakespeare, pop songs, and films to understand the science. One fascinating chapter explores the value of metaphors; another covers swearing (did you know that "gee whiz" is derived f

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Feb 14, 2013 Ioannis Savvas rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Ο Steven Pinker είναι γνωστός εξελικτικός γλωσσολόγος (evolutionary linguist). To The Stuff of Thought είναι το δεύτερο βιβλίο του που διαβάζω, ύστερα από το Γλωσσικό ένστικτο. Το βιβλίο είναι αυτό που λέει ο υπότιτλος: Language as a Window into Human Nature. O Pinker εξηγεί σε ένα περιεκτικό και πυκνογραμμένο κείμενο, με όρους κοινωνιολογικούς, ανθρωπολογικούς, ψυχολογικούς και κυρίως νευροφυσιολογικούς, πώς η γλώσσα αντικατοπτρίζει τον τρόπο σκέψης του ανθρώπου. Ή αντίθετα, πώς η σκέψη του ανθ...more Ο Steven Pinker είναι γνωστός εξελικτικός γλωσσολόγος (evolutionary linguist). To The Stuff of Thought είναι το δεύτερο βιβλίο του που διαβάζω, ύστερα από το Γλωσσικό ένστικτο. Το βιβλίο είναι αυτό που λέει ο υπότιτλος: Language as a Window into Human Nature. O Pinker εξηγεί σε ένα περιεκτικό και πυκνογραμμένο κείμενο, με όρους κοινωνιολογικούς, ανθρωπολογικούς, ψυχολογικούς και κυρίως νευροφυσιολογικούς, πώς η γλώσσα αντικατοπτρίζει τον τρόπο σκέψης του ανθρώπου. Ή αντίθετα, πώς η σκέψη του ανθρώπου σε όλες της τις εκφάνσεις (λογική, συναίσθημα, διαπροσωπικές σχέσεις, θρησκευτική πίστη, σεξουαλικότητα, κ.λπ.) εκφράζονται μέσω της γλώσσας και την διαμορφώνουν.

Εκφράσεις όπως «to think is to grasp a metaphor» ή «a basic principle in linguistics is that the relation of a sound to a meaning is arbitrary» αποτελούν ανατρεπτικές ιδέες, τουλάχιστον για την ελληνική πραγματικότητα. Ίσως οι Έλληνες γλωσσολόγοι θα πρέπει να δουν την ελληνική γλώσσα μέσα από άλλη προοπτική. Να χρησιμοποιήσουν και λίγη νευροφυσιολογία και όχι μόνο «φιλολογία». Και ο συγγραφέας καταλήγει: «Language is not just a window into human nature but a fistula: an open wound through which our innards are exposed to an infectious world».

Το βιβλίο είναι δομημένο σε κεφάλαια που χτίζουν το οικοδόμημα με τρόπο συνθετικό. Το υποκεφάλαιο «Oomph: thoughts about causality» του κεφαλαίου «Cleaving the air» είναι μια επιτομή της αιτιότητας και των πλανών που ο ανθρώπινος εγκέφαλος εξυφαίνει γύρω της. Κάθε υποψήφιος διδάκτορας -ως υποψήφιος επιστήμονας- θα πρέπει να διαβάσει αυτό το υποκαιφάλαιο. Επίσης, εξαιρετικό είναι το κεφάλαιο «The seven words you can’t say on television», στο οποίο ο συγγραφέας εξηγεί γιατί βρίζουμε, βλαστημούμε και καταριόμαστε. Και γιατί αυτή η πλευρά της συμπεριφοράς μας σχετίζεται κυρίως με το σεξ, τη θεότητα και τις ασθένειες.

Ένα υπέροχο βιβλίο, τεκμηριωμένο και συνεκτικό. Το προτείνω για προσεκτική ανάγνωση ανεπιφύλακτα.(less)

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Oct 06, 2012 Alex marked it as to-read

New York Times bestselling author Steven Pinker possesses that rare combination of scientific aptitude and verbal eloquence that enables him to provide lucid explanations of deep and powerful ideas. His previous books—including the Pulitzer Prize finalist The Blank Slate—have catapulted him into the limelight as one of today's most important and popular science writers.

Now, in The Stuff of Thought, Pinker marries two of the subjects he knows best: language and human nature. The result is a fas

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Sep 02, 2011 Patrick rated it 5 of 5 stars

Amazon review:
Is there a difference between the meanings of these two sentences?

(1) Hal loaded hay into the wagon, and,

(2) Hal loaded the wagon with hay.

Well, Steven Pinker claims there is a difference and it's a difference that reveals something about the way the mind conceptualizes experience. That is "the stuff of thought" with which Pinker's latest book is concerned, and this "stuff," as he convincingly demonstrates, can be made accessible through a careful analysis of "the stuff of langu...more

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Nov 24, 2010 Aurochz rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: psychology, neuorscience-evolution, science, linguistics

Remember in 8 Mile, how Eminem had those three or four rap battles that were varying levels of shit up to the end and then he owned everyone with that final one? That is a lot like Steven Pinker's career and that final battle is a lot like this book. I didn't agree with everything in this book, but overall it was better written, had more interesting information and had stronger arguments and evidence in favor of his positions. I have now read every major publication he has written and I can say...more Remember in 8 Mile, how Eminem had those three or four rap battles that were varying levels of shit up to the end and then he owned everyone with that final one? That is a lot like Steven Pinker's career and that final battle is a lot like this book. I didn't agree with everything in this book, but overall it was better written, had more interesting information and had stronger arguments and evidence in favor of his positions. I have now read every major publication he has written and I can say easily that this is his best work. Before I get into the good, lets get into the small amount of bad.

His main thesis in this one was very ambiguous and I don't think it really coalesced into a real point. That being said it was breath of fresh air considering the main points in THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT and HOW THE MIND WORKS, were impossible to really prove and ultimately didn't come close to living up to the promises in either. This one as in his others he failed to distinguish and define terms in such away as to seal the deal on certain subjects, though in this one he was slightly better in this regard. He also tried to make an excuse for this albeit indirectly by saying that scientists in general don't define there terms well. That is still a negative in my eye regardless of the consensus behind it. These criticisms being said they weren't that bad or detrimental to this book. The first criticism can be shoveled under the couch, since it felt more like a reporting on the new advances in linguistics and other fields rather than an argumentative book trying to make a central point.

I like how in this book he relied more on arguments in the negative and less on weaker positive arguments and speculation. His refutations made more sense and it seemed like he more fairly represented the opposition in this book, then he did in his previous books. The Material was more interesting to me, though I think WORDS & RULES was about on the same level in this regard. He relied on less sensationalism and the underlying victim hood complex that pervaded his other books. It was just better in every way in regards to content.

The book was well written. I actually laughed at a few of the jokes this time. Overall it stayed on topic and I didn't feel like any of it strayed from the core material. Though the books thesis was ambiguous so again that wasn't as hard to do this time. All the information seemed to be sourced or substantiated in some way. I cant fault it, majorly in anyway as far as formatting and writing go.

I would highly recommend this book, even if like me you didn't like Pinker's previous books. It is a nice addition to any modicum of linguistics knowledge you may already have and a lot of the information is still fresh, rather than redundant or beginners stuff like his other books. Good stuff. (less)

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Nov 10, 2010 Alan rated it 3 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Linguistic autodidacts

Recommended to Alan by: Author reputation and a library return cart

I'm not sure whether I should review this one at all—for one thing, this is my first Pinker, though he's been on my list for awhile, and in retrospect this is probably not the best place to start reading his work. As Steven Pinker himself describes it in the Introduction, The Stuff of Thought is the culmination and convergence of a couple of series of books on how we humans think. Its antecedents are probably much more accessible.

For another thing, there's a lot of material here. Despite being l...more

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Oct 08, 2010 Lars Guthrie rated it 2 of 5 stars

Science, like art, opens our eyes to what is in front of us. But unlike art, which honors transcendence and promises infinity, science measures what is observable and defines what is finite. Neuroscientists tell us that the possibilities are not limitless. The equipment we are given performs specific functions. We can adapt our brains to tasks unrelated to these functions, like reading, but this kind of ‘neuronal recycling,’ as Stanislas Dehaene calls it, still makes use of the same old brains.

I...more Science, like art, opens our eyes to what is in front of us. But unlike art, which honors transcendence and promises infinity, science measures what is observable and defines what is finite. Neuroscientists tell us that the possibilities are not limitless. The equipment we are given performs specific functions. We can adapt our brains to tasks unrelated to these functions, like reading, but this kind of ‘neuronal recycling,’ as Stanislas Dehaene calls it, still makes use of the same old brains.

I think Steven Pinker is transmitting the same message in ‘The Stuff of Thought.’ That ‘I think,’ will serve as a general qualifier for everything that follows, because Pinker’s message is often buried in his relentlessly verbose prose. If one example would serve to make a point, you can be sure that’s not where he will stop.

Pinker is one brainy dude, so perhaps the problem is with my own intelligence. He avoids jargon, and throughout ‘Stuff’ self-effacingly makes fun of his own tendency to ramble on and on (and on and on). But those self-induced chuckles are pretty much self-indulgent, because they fail to dam an overwhelming onslaught of logorrhea.

So if I missed what he’s really trying to say, that’s the way it goes. I’m relieved to have finished the book.

One limitation on our brains, on the way we think, is how we think—in words. Language, Pinker finds, is based on conceptual constructs that are not mathematical or scientific. We make meaning that is ‘very different from the analogue flow of sensation the world presents.’ We don’t measure space ‘in smooth coordinates like those revealed by rulers, protractors, and surveyors’ levels.’ We use a ‘mental cartoon of pushing and resisting’ that is laden with emotion and concerned with saving face.

Pinker summarizes these linguistic constructs in the final chapter of ‘Stuff,’ ‘Escaping the Cave.’ If you want the gist of the book’s thesis, reading this chapter would be a quick way to do so. Yes, that cave is Plato’s and language is the shadow on the walls. We can perhaps start to break out, though, with Pinker’s version of neuronal recycling—inventing new ways of using language through metaphor and combining our words in new ways. In other words, through art.

But we will still always bound by what we are, which is expressed in the language we speak and in which we think. Pinker refuses to completely throw out the genetically determined ‘universal grammar’ of his progenitor, Noam Chomsky. In the nature vs. nurture, innatism vs. tabula rasa, debate, Pinker leans toward nature, but his position—that of a conceptual semanticist—is rather carefully nuanced. He outlines that position in a chapter called ‘Fifty Thousand Innate Concepts’ by contrasting it with other linguistic theories.

Those theories are placed on a continuum that has Jerry Fodor’s ‘extreme nativism’ at one end and radical ‘linguistic determinism’ on the other. An extreme nativist holds that the language we use for thought is totally predetermined. A radical linguistic determinist argues that our thoughts are completely determined by the language we invent. If I’ve got it right, the conceptual semanticist says, now let’s be reasonable, our thoughts are based in a given structure that we’ve extended to include new ways of thinking.

I found this chapter to be the most valuable in the book because it gave me some grounding in the current prevailing wisdom of linguistics, even though following the reasoning of linguists can be as painful and convoluted as the following the reasoning of philosophers. Dang it, give me some nuts and bolts, I say. Some clear explanations and practical advice. And less laundry lists.

The most entertaining chapter is ‘The Seven Words You Can’t Say on Television.’ Pinker’s nerdy obsessiveness and self-deprecation (as well as his love of dirty jokes) suits his discussion of why one word for an object or an act can be acceptable, while another one is taboo, and how excrement has trumped sacrilege in shock value (at least in English).

For the most part, however, that nerdy obsessiveness weighs down ‘The Stuff of Thought’ to the point where I wanted to tell Pinker to stuff it.
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Aug 07, 2010 Nicholas Whyte rated it 2 of 5 stars

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1487501.html

I was rather unimpressed by the Pinker book I read last year, but this seemed to be a more coherent assembly of facts and theories relating to linguistics, psychology and philosophy. I'm afraid I still wasn't gripped by it, but that is more to do with my own preferences for intellectual exercise than any fault of the book; I can't get very excited by deep philosophical questions, and psychology has never been an attractive field for me.

There were some po...more http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1487501.html

I was rather unimpressed by the Pinker book I read last year, but this seemed to be a more coherent assembly of facts and theories relating to linguistics, psychology and philosophy. I'm afraid I still wasn't gripped by it, but that is more to do with my own preferences for intellectual exercise than any fault of the book; I can't get very excited by deep philosophical questions, and psychology has never been an attractive field for me.

There were some points of interest.

* I was startled to read of an old family friend making her reputation by observing and writing up the process by which her daughters learned to speak, and indeed nervously wondered if I too had been an unwitting subject of her research. But on reflection, by the time we knew the family her daughters were well past the stage of language acquisition (in English anyway, though for all I know she may have also exploited the liguistic consequences of their subsequent emigration to the Netherlands).

* Good quote on linguistic determinism: 'The idea that Eskimos pay more attention to varieties of snow because they have more words for it is so topsy-turvy (can you think of any other reason why Eskimos might pay attention to snow?) that it's hard to believe it would be taken seriously wer it not for the feeling of cleverness it affords at having transcended common sense.'

* A joke about Eastern European aristocrats having a drinking contest where the winner is the one who can think of the biggest number. After long thought the first one says, 'Three.' The second one ponders long and hard, and finally says, 'You win.'

* But the reason that peoples who count 'one, two, many' don't have larger numbers is that thye don't really need them; Pinker quotes a researcher who finds that the Yanomanö warrior knows each of his arrows individually and so does not count them.

* Rude words for sex are transitive (take a direct object); polite words for sex are intransitive (require a preposition) - 'John bonked Mary'; 'John made love to Mary'. I wonder how true this is in languages other than English.

* Politeness strategies in many languages use similar strategies to make direct questions more acceptable - he gives an example from Tzeltal, 'You wouldn't perhaps sell your chicken, it was said' - similar in concept to English 'You wouldn't be selling your chicken by any chance, would you?'

That last point was rather unusual in that Pinker for once drew from languages other than English for his conclusions, and I would have enjoyed the book more if he had done so more often. I'm glad to have read a better book by him than How The Mind Works, but I won't go out of my way to track his stuff down in future.(less)

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Jul 10, 2010 Billie Pritchett rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: favorites

The thesis of Steven Pinker's Stuff of Thought is that one can examine language (any language) and discover human beings' innate concepts, which in turn reveal the way human beings' naturally structure the world. Pinker thinks that across all languages, the relevant similarities suggest that a class of innate concepts exist as part of human cognition and particularities of and across languages arise due to human roles in specific environments. Here would be an example of the relationship between...more

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Jun 18, 2010 Kelly rated it 3 of 5 stars Recommends it for: people who dig Pinker or linguistics

I thought this was mostly an interesting book. Of course, I have a thing for linguistics and enjoy thinking about language in various contexts. This is the first Pinker book I have managed to finish (I was motivated by a book club), and I still felt some of what kept me from finishing the other one (The Language Instinct). One thing is that I feel like Pinker is very impressed with himself. He clearly has some good ideas, but he freely talks on all of his thoughts, including some that appear a l...more

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Mar 12, 2010 Gradskata Samodiva rated it 4 of 5 stars

Защо псуваме, защо има "горе" и "долу" в езика ни и защо в някои езици тези концепции са нещо като "ляво" и "дясно". Според автора Стивън Пинкър езикът е продукт на най-дълбоката ни биологична човешка природа, а не "страничен продукт" на развитието ни. Затова и в книгата ще намерите няколко обяснения от областта на неврологията за това защо някои думи не могат да се споменат по телевизията.

Книга, богата на идеи, едновременно интегрирани, но и способни на самостоятелност. Голям потенциал за наст...more

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Jul 31, 2009 Douglas rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

One of the best books I've read in 2009. I read this book after downloading the first chapter onto my Kindle. It was a very good chapter. It was also the first non-fiction book I read on my Kindle. The next two or three chapters was much harder to get through as it was survey of the different language assimilation theories and why they failed to answer observations Steven Pinker and other see in the real world.
I did find several chapters exceptionally interesting:
The Metaphor Metaphor - how we...more

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Jun 22, 2009 John rated it 4 of 5 stars

This is a fast read book. Though I don't like Pinker's allegiance to Chomsky, I think he's great for summing up the bunches of different theories and even better at describing the problems in linguistics that people are trying to understand--excellent examples! And he has an entertaining narrative voice. My only beef was that after he spent time talking about fallacious arguments and the people who use them, he tended to attack "radical" or "extreme" versions of theories, thereby leading the rea...more

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Oct 02, 2010 Nathan rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: franklin-library, sociology

Steven Pinker is well-equipped, with extensive scholarly knowledge of his subject, fluent familiarity with pop culture and a Seinfeldian sense of good humor about the quirks of human nature. These don't mesh all that well, however, so that this often read as a series of jokes, followed by a long section of sociology, and a random reference peppered in. The whole thing doesn't flow well.

It's also a little difficult to warm up to. Pinker analyzes aspects of human communication that have become se...more

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Aug 13, 2011 Derek Bridge rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This is a highly thought-provoking journey through the semantics and pragmatics of natural language and what they reveal about human nature. Every chapter has things of interest; each is well-written and entertaining.

For me, the early chapters were the best. Pinker picks apart some of the English verb system, along with some related parts-of-speech, especially prepositions and particles, to reveal an underlying conceptual framework. I found myself reflecting on the folk wisdom that the way prepo...more

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Jan 01, 2008 Mary rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: anyone who wants to learn what language says about how we think

I really enjoyed this book. I kept annoying my family and friends with new factoids. I learned useful things about how language illustrates limits in our thought processes, but also how it can overcome those limits. I hope I can put this to use in avoiding bad arguments, arguing against poorly thought out pseudo-science, and explaining difficult concepts to non-scientists. But even if I can't, it was still fascinating.

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Sep 01, 2009 getAbstract rated it 5 of 5 stars

Theoretical discussion of language

Steven Pinker’s enthusiasm about language comes through everywhere in this book – which is a good thing, because the subject matter itself is dense and complex. This combination results in a curious reading experience: Pinker’s lively style, many anecdotes and extreme lucidity pull you forward in the text, but the difficulty of the questions he raises could stump you for some time. He explores many linguistic theories in such depth that readers without a particu...more

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Jul 07, 2009 Joseph rated it 5 of 5 stars

Pinker is a true joy to read, and this book may be his best yet. He examines aspects of human language--including politeness, profanity, metaphor, and the details of word meanings--and shows how they reveal deep structure and knowledge about how our minds conceptualize the world and deal with problem solving and social interactions. As always, Pinker's writing is both smart and witty--the book is packed with scientific findings and often quite technical (though never hard to follow), and I learn...more

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Aug 10, 2012 David Fuller rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: science

THERE'S no money in semantics -- so why does Steven Pinker think you'll be interested in the way we use words?

Maybe because it could be worth billions of dollars, as he shows in one of many examples in The Stuff of Thought.

Pinker, originally from Montreal, is no stranger to language. He is a psychology professor at Harvard University and was director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at MIT.

His research has dealt with how people use language, and especially how children acquire it.

A vigor...more

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About Steven Pinker

Steven Arthur Pinker is a prominent Canadian-American experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, and author of popular science. Pinker is known for his wide-ranging advocacy of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind. He conducts research on language and cognition, writes for publications such as the New York Times, Time, and The New Republic, and is the author of seven b...more Steven Arthur Pinker is a prominent Canadian-American experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, and author of popular science. Pinker is known for his wide-ranging advocacy of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind. He conducts research on language and cognition, writes for publications such as the New York Times, Time, and The New Republic, and is the author of seven books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, Words and Rules, The Blank Slate, and most recently, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature.

He was born in Canada and graduated from Montreal's Dawson College in 1973. He received a bachelor's degree in experimental psychology from McGill University in 1976, and then went on to earn his doctorate in the same discipline at Harvard in 1979. He did research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for a year, then became an assistant professor at Harvard and then Stanford University. From 1982 until 2003, Pinker taught at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, and eventually became the director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. (Except for a one-year sabbatical at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1995-6.) As of 2008, he is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard.

Pinker was named one of Time Magazine's 100 most influential people in the world in 2004 and one of Prospect and Foreign Policy's 100 top public intellectuals in 2005. He has also received honorary doctorates from the universities of Newcastle, Surrey, Tel Aviv, McGill, and the University of Tromsø, Norway. He was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, in 1998 and in 2003. In January 2005, Pinker defended Lawrence Summers, President of Harvard University, whose comments about the gender gap in mathematics and science angered much of the faculty. On May 13th 2006, Pinker received the American Humanist Association's Humanist of the Year award for his contributions to public understanding of human evolution.

In 2007, he was invited on The Colbert Report and asked under pressure to sum up how the brain works in five words – Pinker answered "Brain cells fire in patterns."

Pinker was born into the English-speaking Jewish community of Montreal. He has said, "I was never religious in the theological sense... I never outgrew my conversion to atheism at 13, but at various times was a serious cultural Jew." As a teenager, he says he considered himself an anarchist until he witnessed civil unrest following a police strike in 1969. His father, a trained lawyer, first worked as a traveling salesman, while his mother was first a home-maker then a guidance counselor and high-school vice-principal. He has two younger siblings. His brother is a policy analyst for the Canadian government. His sister, Susan Pinker, is a school psychologist and writer, author of The Sexual Paradox.

Pinker married Nancy Etcoff in 1980 and they divorced 1992; he married Ilavenil Subbiah in 1995 and they too divorced. His current wife is the novelist and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein. He has no children.

He is currently working on an upcoming book about the evolution of human morality, specifically focusing on "the historical decline of violence and its psychological roots" as stated by the author himself on the Harvard website.(less)

More about Steven Pinker...

Books by Steven Pinker

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

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Quotes from The Stuff of Thought: ...

“Dear White Fella When I am born I’m black When I grow up I’m black When I am sick I’m black When I go out ina sun I’m black When I git cold I’m black When I git scared I’m black And when I die I’m still black. But you white fella When you’re born you’re pink When you grow up you’re white When you git sick you’re green When you go out ina sun you go red When you git cold you go blue When you git scared you’re yellow And when you die you’re grey And you got the cheek to call me coloured?” — 8 people liked it

“One can choose to obsess over prescriptive rules, but they have no more to do with human language than the criteria for judging cats at a cat show have to do with mammalian biology.
” — 7 people liked it

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