The Stuff of Thought Quotes

“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?”
― Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature

“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.
”
― Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature

“If adults commit adultery, do infants commit infantry? If olive oil is made from olives, what do they make baby oil from? I a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian consume? A writer is someone who writes, and a stinger is something that stings. But fingers don't fing, grocers don't groce, hammers don't ham, humdingers don't humding, ushers don't ush, and haberdashers do not haberdash...If the plural of tooth is teeth, shouldn't the plural of booth be beeth? One goose, two geese-so one moose, two meese? If people ring a bell today and rang a bell yesterday, why don't we say that they flang a ball? If they wrote a letter, perhaps they also bote their tongue.”
― Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature

“Much can be gained be contrasting a theory with its alternatives, even ones that look too extreme to be true. You can really understand something when you know what it is not.”
― Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature

“Semantics is about the relation of words to thoughts, but it also about the relation of words to other human concerns. Semantics is about the relation of words to reality—the way that speakers commit themselves to a shared understanding of the truth, and the way their thoughts are anchored to things and situations in the world.”
― Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature

“There is a joke about a little girl who is filling in a hole in her garden when a neighbor looks over the fence. He politely asks, "Hi! What are you up to?" "My goldfish died," replies the girl tearfully, "and I've just buried him." The neighbor asks, "Isn't that an awfully big hole for a goldfish?" The little girl tamps down the soil and replies, "That's because he's inside your stupid cat.”
― Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature

“People take even greater umbrage when they hear themselves labeled with a common noun. The reason is that a noun predicate appears to pigeonhole the with a stereotype of a category rather than referring to them as an individual who happens to possess a trait.”
― Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature

“Knowledge, then, can be dangerous because a rational mind may be compelled to use it in rational ways, allowing malevolent or careless speakers to commandeer our faculties against us. This makes the expressive power of language a mixed blessing: it lets us learn what we want to know, but it also lets us learn what we don't want to know. 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. It's not surprising that we expect people to sheathe their words in politeness and innuendo and other forms of doublespeak.”
― Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature

“Peppier n. The waiter at a fancy restaurant whose sole purpose seems to be walking around asking diners if they want ground pepper.”
― Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature

“Now, it has been independently shown that people hate to lose something more than they enjoy gaining it. For example, they don't mind paying for something with a credit card even when told there is a discount for cash, but they hate paying the same amount if they are told there is a surcharge for using credit. As a result, people will often refuse to gamble for an expected profit (they turn down bets such as "Heads, you win $120; tails, you pay $100), but they will gamble to avoid an expected loss (such as "Heads, you no longer owe $120; tails, you now owe an additional $100"). (This kind of behavior drives economists crazy, but is avidly studied by investment firms hoping to turn it to their advantage.) The combination of people's loss aversion with the effects of framing explains the paradoxical result: the "gain" metaphor made the doctors risk-averse; the "loss" metaphor made them gamblers.”
― Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature

“There's a pattern here. In summing up the language of matter, space, and time, I concluded that they are measured by human goals, not just by a scale, a clock, and a tape measure. Now we see that the fourth major category in conceptual semantics, causality, also cares about our intentions and interests.”
― Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature

“Another reason we know that language could not determine thought is that when a language isn't up to the conceptual demands of its speakers, they don't scratch their heads dumbfounded (at least not for long); they simply change the language. They stretch it with metaphors and metonyms, borrow words and phrases from other languages, or coin new slang and jargon. (When you think about it, how else could it be? If people had trouble thinking without language, where would their language have come from-a committee of Martians?) Unstoppable change is the great given in linguistics, which is not why linguists roll their eyes at common claims such as that German is the optimal language of science, that only French allows for truly logical expression, and that indigenous languages are not appropriate for the modern world. As Ray Harlow put it, it's like saying, "Computers were not discussed in Old English; therefore computers cannot be discussed in Modern English.”
― Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature

“We are verbivores, a species that lives on words, and the meaning and use of language are bound to be among the major things we ponder, share, and dispute.”
― Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature

“There is a theory of space and time embedded in the way we use words. There is a theory of matter and a theory of causality, too. Our language has a model of sex in it (actually, two models), and conceptions of intimacy and power and fairness. Divinity, degradation, and danger are also ingrained in our mother tongue, together with a conception of well-being and a philosophy of free will. These conceptions vary in their details from language to language, but their overall logic is the same. They add up to a distinctively human model of reality, which differs in major ways from the objective understanding of reality eked out by our best science and logic. Though these ideas are woven into language, their roots are deeper than language itself. They lay out the ground rules for how we understand our surroundings, how we assign credit and blame to our fellows, and how we negotiate our relationships with them. A close look at our speech-our conversations, our jokes, our curses, our legal disputes, the names we give our babies-can therefore give us insight into who we are.”
― Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature

“Take space. It has to be either finite or infinite, yet neither possibility sits well with our intuitions. When I try to imagine a finite universe, I get Marcel Marceau miming on an invisible wall with his hands. Or, after reading about manifolds in books on physics, I see ants creeping over a sphere, or people trapped in a huge inner tube unaware of all the exposure around them. But in all these cases the volume is stubbornly suspended in a larger space, which shouldn't be there at all, but which my minds eye can't help but peek at.”
― Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature

“Language has often been called a weapon, and people should be mindful about where to aim it and when to fire.”
― Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature

“…the power of analogy doesn’t come from noticing a mere similarity of parts […] It comes from noticing relations among the parts, even if the parts themselves are very different. […] For an analogy to be scientifically useful, though, the correspondences can’t apply to a part of one thing that merely resembles a part of the other. They have to apply to the relationship between the parts, and even better, the relationship between the relationships, and to the relationships between the relationships between the relationships.”
― Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature

“The concept of a connotation is often explained by the conjugational formula devised by Bertrand Russell in a 1950s radio interview: I am firm; you are obstinate; he is pigheaded. The formula was turned into a word game in a radio show and newspaper feature and elicited hundreds of triplets. I am slim; you are thin; he is scrawny. I am a perfectionist; you are anal; he is a control freak. I am exploring my sexuality; you are promiscuous; she is a slut. In each triplet the literal meaning of the words is held constant, but the emotional meaning ranges from attractive to neutral to offensive.”
― Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature

“hextable n. The record you find in someone else's collection which instantly tells you you could never go out with them.”
― Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature

“shoeburyness n. The vague uncomfortable feeling you get when sitting on a seat which is still warm from someone else's bottom.”
― Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature

“If all abstract thought is metaphorical, and all metaphors are assembled out of biologically basic concepts, then we would have an explanation for the evolution of human intelligence. Human intelligence would be a product of metaphor and combinatorics. Metaphor allows the mind to use a few basic ideas-substance, location, force, goal-to understand more abstract domains. Combinatorics allows a finite set of simple ideas to give rise to an infinite set of complex ones.”
― Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature

“For instance, to be fluent with the various LOVE IS A JOURNEY expressions, one has to fathom the conceptual metaphor in considerable depth. Lakoff explains:

The lovers are travelers on a journey together, with their common life goals seen as destinations to be reached. The relationship is their vehicle, and it allows them to pursue those common goals together. The relationship is seen as fulfilling its purpose as long as it allows them to make progress toward their common goals. The journey isn't easy. There are impediments, and there are places (crossroads) where a decision has to be made about which direction to go in and whether to keep traveling together.”
― Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature

“Kant was surely right that our minds "cleave the air" with concepts of substance, space, time, and causality. They are the substrate of our conscious experience. They are the semantic contents of the major elements of syntax: noun, preposition, tense, verb. They give us the vocabulary, verbal and mental, with which we reason about the physical and social world. Because they are gadgets in the brain rather than readouts of reality, they present us with paradoxes when we push them to the frontiers of science, philosophy, and law. And as we shall see in the next chapter, they are a source of the metaphors by which we comprehend many other spheres of life.”
― Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature

“The theory of conceptual semantics, which proposes that word senses are mentally represented as expressions in a richer and more abstract language of thought, stands at the center of this circle, compatible with all of the complications. Word meanings can vary across languages because children assemble and fine-tune them from more elementary concepts. They can be precise because the concepts zero in on some aspects of reality and slough off the rest. And they can support our reasoning because they represent lawful aspects of reality-space, time, causality, objects, intentions, and logic-rather than the system of noises that developed in a community to allow them to communicate. Conceptual semantics fits, too, with our commonsense notion that words are not the same as thoughts, and indeed, that much of human wisdom consists of not mistaking one for the other.”
― Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature

“The meaning of a word, then, seems to consist of information stored in the heads of the people who know the word: the elementary concepts that define it and, for a concrete word, an image of what it refers to.”
― Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature

“Spam is not, as some people believe, an acronym for Short, Pointless, and Annoying Messages.”
― Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature

“The idea that the language people speak controls how they think—linguistic determinism—is a recurring theme in intellectual life.”
― Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature

“A language may be like other cultural products, which may be used at different times by innovators, early adopters, early majorities, late majorities, and laggards. […] This new usage may fall dead born from the innovators lips or be welcomed into a segment of the community with open arms. The reception is partly capricious, but when a new combination does catch on, it could involve the later adopters grasping the rationale with the stroke of insight recapitulating that of the original coiner, their dumbly memorising the verb in that construction, or something in between. […] Can we catch innovators in the act of stretching the language? It happens all the time. Though linguists often theorise about a language as if it were the fixed protocol of a homogeneous community of idealised speakers, like the physicists’ frictionless plane an ideal gas, they also know that a real language is constantly being pushed and pulled at the margins by different speakers in different ways.”
― Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature

“The flexibility of the human mind - its ability to flip frames, shift gestalts, or reconstruct events – is a wondrous talent. But it makes it difficult to predict how person will think and talk about a given situation. When I hit a wall with the stick, am I affecting the stick by moving it to the wall, or affecting the wall using the stick as an instrument?”
― Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature

“Left to our own devices, we are apt to backslide to our instinctive conceptual ways. This underscores the place of education in a scientifically literate democracy, and even suggests a statement of purpose for it (a surprisingly elusive principle in higher education today). The goal of education is to make up for the shortcomings in our instinctive ways of thinking about the physical and social world. And education is likely to succeed not by trying to implant abstract statements in empty minds but by taking the mental models that are our standard equipment, applying them to new subjects in selective analogies, and assembling them into new and more sophisticated combinations.”
― Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature