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.