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Language and Human Nature Tetralogy #4

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

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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 fascinating look at how our words explain our nature. What does swearing reveal about our emotions? Why does innuendo disclose something about relationships? Pinker reveals how our use of prepositions and tenses taps into peculiarly human concepts of space and time, and how our nouns and verbs speak to our notions of matter. Even the names we give our babies have important things to say about our relations to our children and to society.

With his signature wit and style, Pinker takes on scientific questions like whether language affects thought, as well as forays into everyday life: why is bulk e-mail called spam and how do romantic comedies get such mileage out of the ambiguities of dating? The Stuff of Thought is a brilliantly crafted and highly readable work that will appeal to fans of readers of everything from The Selfish Gene and Blink to Eats, Shoots & Leaves.

499 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2007

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About the author

Steven Pinker

62 books9,919 followers
Steven Arthur Pinker is a prominent Canadian-American experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, and author of popular science. Pinker is known for his wide-ranging explorations of human nature and its relevance to language, history, morality, politics, and everyday life. 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 numerous books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, Words and Rules, The Blank Slate, The Stuff of Thought, The Better Angels of Our Nature, The Sense of Style, and most recently, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.

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 columnist for the Wall Street Journal and the author of The Sexual Paradox and The Village Effect.

Pinker married Nancy Etcoff in 1980 and they divorced 1992; he married Ilavenil Subbiah in 1995 and they too divorced. He is married to the novelist and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein, the author of 10 books and winner of the National Medal of the Humanities. He has no children.

His next book will take off from his research on "common knowledge" (knowing that everyone knows something). Its tentative title is: Don't Go There: Common Knowledge and the Science of Civility, Hypocrisy, Outrage, and Taboo.

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Displaying 1 - 30 of 695 reviews
Profile Image for BlackOxford.
1,095 reviews68.9k followers
May 1, 2023
How To Tell If You’re a Horse

I remember seeing, perhaps 30 years ago, a chart of a design for an artificial intelligence computer programme by academic engineers at a university somewhere in Texas. The chart showed an enormous logically ramifying hierarchy of various sorts of events, experiences, and actions which their computer was intended to understand. Everything that the engineers could imagine happening was included somewhere in a sort of organisational chart of existence. At the very top of the chart was a single box that stood for exactly that, existence itself. From that box, the designers had drawn an upward facing arrow pointing to a word without a box:. ‘REALITY.’

The Stuff of Thought brought back memories of that AI chart. ‘Reality’ is something that Pinker refers to frequently as that which keeps language on the straight and narrow: “ The tethering of words to reality helps allay the worry that language ensnares us in a self-contained web of symbols.” Like the AI designers, Pinker has a little arrow that points out of language, to something other than language to which language is tied. But also, just like the AI designers, the only thing Pinker’s arrow actually points to is... well another word.

Pinker doesn’t like the idea that words, language, have a life that is only loosely and unreliably connected to that which is not-language. He does recognise that ‘reality’ is an awkward thing for a linguist to talk about: “[T]he nature of reality does not dictate the way that reality is represented in people’s minds,” he says. So, according to this logic, despite our conviction that the world consists of more than human minds, it would be impossible to determine what reality is except by consultation with other minds. How does Pinker arrive at such a confused place?

Pinker likes to be very precise in his semiotic descriptions and examples. But not when it comes to this business of reality. For that he plays fast and loose, conflating semantics (the connection of words to things that are not-words), syntactics (the relations among words and the ways in which they can be used with each other), and pragmatics (the effect that words have on human behaviour, including what and how words are used) into a very imprecise theory of language. He knows that only words define other words, that these definitions slip and slide continuously in the way they are used with each other, and that their effects on human activities are consequently uncertain in many critical situations. Yet he says: “The logic of names, and of other words that are connected to events... allay these concerns [about misidentifications and falsehoods] by anchoring the web of meanings to real events and objects in the world.”

If only it were so. At any given time much of what we refer to as reality simply doesn’t exist (the sun doesn’t actually rise; the moon doesn’t shine). Quite aside from the casual use of everyday language, when we try to be very precise about what we mean, we find ourselves in a pickle about reality. For example, for centuries Isaac Newton’s gravitational ‘action at a distance’ was an important scientific ‘thing.’ Turns out it never was anything at all except a phrase used by scientists. Now we say that what we see astronomically is all down to relativistic time-space distortion. Perhaps in resolving the contradictions of quantum physics, we will find that time-space distortion isn’t a thing either. That AI arrow, in other words, points not toward somewhere ‘out there’ but something ‘in here.’ Most probably what is in here is a residual religious hope that the universe is as orderly and benign as our cultural legacy says it is.

So we can, and frequently do, have serious conversations about absolutely nothing. We accept the possibility of an ontological faux pas with reasonably good grace. Yet we worry constantly about the somewhat lesser linguistic sin of ‘error,’ either accidental or intentional, which is the subject of epistemology. Here we are culturally proud of ourselves that the ‘scientific method’ can ultimately sort out the factual core from the fictional chaff of any assertion and that through unrelenting ‘objectivity’ we can distinguish Trump’s lies from his covfefe’s (it seems safe to presume all his statements are somehow defective). Pinker calls this philosophical realism in the sense that people “... are tacitly committed, in their everyday use of language, to certain propositions’ being true or false, independent of whether the person being discussed believes them to be true or false.”

But this sort of realism gets sorely tested to breaking point more and more frequently. Beliefs about Trump, climate change, Russian assassinations and cyber-attacks, abortion, as well as my neighbour’s intentions regarding the shaping of our shared hedge, to name just a few examples, are beliefs held by many as true or false without a fact in sight. Assertions about these topics tend to be true or false precisely because they are believed not because they can be proven. Facts emerge as a matter of faith.

Epistemology is, consequently, as political as any other investigation. Interests - personal, material, psychological, familial, religious, reputational - are a dominant force in any attempt to connect words and things. That’s just the way it is. And the way it is is being demonstrated as I write in the impeachment trial in the US Senate. Trump’s innocence or guilt is a purely political conclusion, as indeed is every ‘fact’ provided by any investigation, criminal, civil, scientific, or corporate.

This is distressing to some people including Pinker. Bertrand Russell’s famous quip, “I am firm; you are obstinate; he is pigheaded,” is the epitome of the politics of language. It seems too obvious to need saying but apparently it does need saying yet again: Reality is nothing more (or less) than a transient political consensus about what constitutes facts. And facts are those assertions which, at least for the moment, are not contradicted by any other facts. And just as no one is quite sure what they mean by ‘scientific method,’ no one is any wiser about what constitutes the definitive rules of language and how to tell fact from fiction - except through politics. So Pinker is certainly right to suggest that the language we use discloses our model of reality. In fact it is our model of reality tout court (his analysis of verbs in shaping thought is exemplary).

Reality is the elephant in Pinker’s rather elegantly laid out phenomenological room of language, however. There are a multitude of lovely linguistic furnishings, the erudition of extensive research lines the bookshelves, quirky incidental knowledge is apparent in the quaint knickknacks strewn throughout, and there are even quite a few saucy paintings on the walls. And all this is set off by a veritable Aubusson carpet of lucid and witty prose.

But right in the middle of that carpet sits an enormous turd of that which is not-language. The odd thing is that Pinker put it there. He could have written about the quaint vagaries of (mostly English) language semantics and its implicit politics and left it at that. But by insisting on this strange thing he calls reality, a deus ex machina of absolute rationality, he leaves a strange smell around his entire enterprise. I wish I could remember the names of the AI engineers. I’d send them a copy asking them where they think Pinker’s arrow should point.

I am also reminded of an important Yiddish saying which might have originated with Isaac Breshevis Singer but I can’t be sure. It sums up the politics of reality nicely, and shows where the arrow really points: ‘If one person calls you a horse, ignore him. If two people call you a horse, look in the mirror. If three people call you a horse, YOU'RE A HORSE.’
Profile Image for Trevor.
1,336 reviews22.7k followers
March 10, 2009
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.
Profile Image for Jennifer Welsh.
271 reviews294 followers
September 9, 2020
DNF: Have you heard of top-down learning vs. bottom-up learning? If not, top-down learners prefer to see the big picture before the supporting details can become meaningful, whereas bottom-up learners like to build the big picture by first understanding the details. I am a top-down learner, and this book is written for the bottom-ups.

This book’s subtitle is “Language as a Window into Human Nature,” and that’s what I kept waiting for. Pinker spent a lot of time on details such as how “in a palm” suggests a hand curvature, whereas “on a palm” suggests hand flatness, and after 140 pages of that...ugh.

I bought this book after reading a Japanese translation that gave details of how images combine differently to create specific characters of their language. It got me wondering whether using different symbols for communication affects how we see the world.

It turns out that language is more a result of innate thinking, development, and a response to our environment, rather than the other way around - at least as of 1/3 of the way through.

The latter chapters look interesting. But, I tried skipping and felt lost without the prior points.

Pinker at least talks to me as an equal.
Profile Image for Jafar.
728 reviews286 followers
August 3, 2008
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 intelligence. Is intelligence possible, or even meaningful, without language, or is it a slave to language? Fascinating theories there. Another chapter is on how causality, time, and space are represented in language, and how this representation affects our understanding of these notions. More fascinating stuff. There are more chapters on metaphors, names, profanity, and indirect language. All intensely fascinating stuff. Steven Pinker is a genius, yessir!

Pinker wants to show what language – words, their meanings, constructions, and how they’re used – can teach us about human nature. Except for the discussion on Nativism vs. Pragmatism (whether mental representation of word meanings are innate or not) he stays clear of the nature vs. nurture debate. In the course of the book, we do encounter a lot of insight into human nature based on language. It may seem obvious if put abstractly, but language, being the most prominent thing that separates us from other animals, do say a lot about what we are.

I think the chapter on swearing by itself should qualify this book for some grand prize.
Profile Image for Jen.
247 reviews155 followers
June 17, 2009
"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 has taken me three months, or thereabouts, to read this book. In an early status update I commented that this book was like a dense poundcake; the going was delicious but slow. That should probably be my whole review, but I am going to go on. Gird thyself.

This book did indeed let me learn what I wanted to know. The chapters on metaphors, naming, and the taboo were incredibly interesting and insightful. Why isn't rape a taboo word, when the word that represents my genitalia is? How is it possible that the Morning Star and the Evening Star represent the same thing? What curious cerebral happening allows us to come to better understanding through metaphor and analogy? The book also let me learn what I didn't want to know, which mostly involved words that have -ing attached to them....the author's exuberance for verbs seemed to culminate in an almost orgasmic manner: "Our trip down the rabbit hole has taken us to a semantic wonderland. We encountered a lush profusion of verbs- a dozen verbs of emitting substances, twenty verbs of changing the aesthetics of a surface, and no fewer than sixty-nine verbs of manner of speaking." (!)
It was during those passages that Pinker took on the voice of the count from Sesame Street in my head..."Crinkling! One verb! Crumpling! Two verbs! Screeching! Three verbs! AHAHAHAHA!"

But perhaps Pinker would argue with me, in fact, I know he would. He argues with everyone! And he mostly wins, which makes him a genius in the field of linguistics AND a world class smartass, which makes me want to smack him over the head with his 499 page work. There are a few things I don't think he is fair about- and one of those things is religion (Surprise!) He makes this statement: "The earthly representatives of God would just as soon preserve the belief that he (God) does listen and act in matters of importance, and so are unhappy about people diluting the brand by invoking God as the muscle behind their small time deals. Hence the proscriptions against taking the name of the Lord in vain." Now, Pinker can say that this is how it is being used now,and he might even be right, (the smartass!), but it is wrong to assume that that is THE very reason that it was written down thousands of years ago. Pinker does this quite a bit- smacks down a topic or a rival linguist's theories and then uses the "hence" or "of course" and "obviously" to draw the reader to a conclusion that makes sense, but might not really be fully true or able to be conclusively proved to anyone but Pinker. He is a linguist, after all, and who can blame him for using his masterful command of language to explain, sway, discuss, or provoke- doing so butters his bread and gets him all "verbingly" excited. Did I just make a new word? I think I did! Curl my hair and color it gray and call me Pinker!

4.5 stars for the Pinkerman from me, the coiner of "verbingly", and the mistress of nothing in particular

Profile Image for Miles.
478 reviews156 followers
May 17, 2014
I am a big fan of Steven Pinker. I think he's a very smart man, and a great advocate for science and reason in the public sphere. In interviews, he's witty, informed, and able to make concise points about a vast swath of intellectual topics. His book The Blank Slate had a very significant impact on me when I read it in late 2011. I had just finished a teaching credential program and was unsure about my next step in life; one of the only things I knew I wanted to do for sure was to read and self-educate as much as possible. The Blank Slate helped me understand psychology via methods I didn't encounter in my undergraduate philosophy classes, and pointed me in directions that would further integrate my love of philosophical inquiry with a more scientifically-informed perspective. Pinker is famous for being polemical and is often disparaged by conservatives and liberals alike, but I typically find his opinions to be well-reasoned and as responsibly middle-of-the-road as possible. Even so, my respect for Pinker was not enough to guide me contentedly through this book, which I generally found repetitive, esoteric, and––worst of all––boring.

Though he has suffered much criticism for his flouting of traditional psychological theories and the pleasure he seems to take in prodding people toward revisiting their foundational ideas and values, I actually think Pinker is at his best when he has a bone to pick. If I had to identify just one reason why this book didn't work for me, it would be that Pinker doesn't have anyone to argue against––no unifying target on which to set his intellectual sights. There are a couple minor exceptions to this, the first of which is Pinker's advocacy for the theory of conceptual semantics, which he posits as superior to extreme nativism, linguistic determinism, and radical pragmatics (all of which Pinker portrays as rather extreme positions, possibly falling into straw man territory). In another chapter, Pinker challenges Johnson and Lakoff's theory of metaphor with varying success, making a few good points but also portraying their theory as far more relativistic than it truly is. These are interesting but not hotly controversial arguments, and neither provides the kind of overarching strength that would provide the book with a firm thematic backbone.

The rest of the book is essentially a group of loosely related chapters that all center around the idea that "language is a window into human nature"––a claim I can't imagine anyone trying to refute. So while this might represent the side of Pinker who is more concerned with responsible scholarship in his particular field of study rather than shaking things up in town square, I didn't find the premise intriguing enough to explore with much enthusiasm.

This book also reminded me why I studied philosophy instead of linguistics. Past a certain point, I just don't care enough about the intricacies of language. When I feel like the conversation has traveled away from pragmatic explications of how language helps or hinders people and toward abstruse descriptions of grammatical and speech constructions, I begin to check out. To be fair, Pinker does include many examples of how such rules can be relevant to the lives of normal people, but over the course of the book I wasn't convinced that most of the topics were adding anything significant to my understanding of people's relationship with language.

This disappointment is probably my fault more than Pinker's. I've read many popular science books over the last few years, so I was already familiar with much of his research, some of which was probably cutting-edge when the book was first published in 2007. However, many of the insights found here would no longer be considered news to anyone with a passing interest in modern psychology. As a result, the information that was new to me almost exclusively had to do with obscure linguistic theories I'd never heard of, and I finished the book feeling like there are probably many good reasons for that. Much of the first half felt like repeated instances of Pinker saying gleefully: "You can do this with language, but you can't do that! And it's all because of this: (insert recondite linguistic theory here)!" This approach sent me spiraling into inanition, and also opened the way for an additional problem: Pinker occasionally comes off as being imperialistic with language rules in a way that excludes the important contributions of poets and creative writers, who often work very hard to challenge or reformulate traditional methods of usage and structure.

There are definitely some strong points to be found in these pages. Pinker includes many visual aids that helped me understand some of the finer points of grammar that have eluded me over the years, which made me wish such aids were more widely used in junior high and high school classrooms. Ironically, sometimes an image is a better vehicle for explaining a language construction than language itself. He also offers some good information about why early exposure to linguistic conventions is so crucial in developing the basic tools for success in modern education. In my experience, this is especially important when the time comes in adolescence for young people to start formulating their ideas using academic concepts, abstract language, and advanced argumentation. Finally, the second to last chapter provides salient (if not exactly solution-based) explanations of why people have such a difficult time with directness, causing us to create all kinds of elaborate ways to communicate without having to take full responsibility for the possible negative outcomes of our intimations to others. This is an important issue in social life, but I was dissatisfied that Pinker didn't offer many thoughts about how we can overcome this problem; he seemed more concerned with justifying why it is okay for people to avoid being open about their motives and desires. I'm not naive enough to advocate for complete honesty all the time, but I think our social lives would improve immensely if we consciously developed new linguistic and behavioral mechanisms for being upfront about what we want from ourselves and others, while still allowing a safe space for people to give potentially disappointing responses to our entreaties. It's a tough project, but one with potentially huge gains for quality of life. I wonder if Pinker would agree.

I'm sure this is a great book for the right kind of reader. For those who don't enjoy Pinker's snarky side, this would perhaps be a better choice than one of his works in which he seeks to subvert what he perceives as unfounded popular beliefs or sentiments. This is in no way a book rife with objectionable claims or disingenuous scholarship––it's just not my cup of tea.
Profile Image for Kevin Lopez (on sabbatical).
85 reviews22 followers
May 22, 2021
Though language shows us the walls of our cave, it also shows us how we venture out of it, at least part way. People do, after all, catch glimpses of the sunlit world of reality. Even with our infirmities, we have managed to achieve the freedom of a liberal democracy, the wealth of a technological economy, and the truths of modern science. Though I doubt we will ever reach a cognitive utopia in which all the problems we dream up for ourselves are solvable, the human mind does have the means to go beyond a few reruns perpetually showing on the wall of the cave. Indeed, language offers the clearest window on how we can transcend our cognitive and emotional limitations.



NEW WORDS LIST!:
Whenever I read a book I keep a running list of new or novel words (and also word derivatives and novel usages), plus new phrases and idioms. So, for example, the word ‘telic’ is (for me at least) a novel adjectival sense of a word—‘telos’—which I knew and have encountered before (and which I recently encountered in yet another novel usage, this time in its plural form--‘teloses’--in China Miéville’s excellent short story “The Rope is the World”), but in this form, as it's new to me, I write it down. A conceptual linguistic phrase like ‘container locative’, and an idiomatic phrase like ‘hammer and tongs’—which I either haven't encountered before, or have encountered but never bothered to identify or define—are the sorts of phrases I'd note down. I hope that a few people will (maybe? probably not) find these lists interesting—perhaps even useful (though that's even more unlikely)—as I’m going to try to include my novel words-and-phrases lists from now on when I review a book, rather than just leaving them in the notes folder I keep on my phone, gathering digital dust. So, here’s my list from Stephen Pinker’s “The Stuff of Thought.”

*(All definitions are from that yet unsurpassed lexicographic opus, the Oxford English Dictionary, unless otherwise stated.)


phonaesthesia: attribution of common elements of meaning or connotation to certain sound sequences, especially consonant clusters, for example initial sl-, as in slow, sleep, slush, slide, slip.
(Origin, 1950s: modern Latin, from Greek phōnē ‘sound’ + aesthesthai ‘perceive’.)

coprolalia: the involuntary and repetitive use of obscene language, as a symptom of mental illness or organic brain disease.
(Origin, late 19th century: from Greek kopros ‘dung’ + lalia ‘speech, chatter’.)
^ (Pinker writes that coprolalia “literally means ‘dung speech’” [and of course he’s right]; it is mentioned in the book in association with Tourette’s syndrome.)

dubiety: the state or quality of being doubtful; uncertainty: [illustrative sentences] “his enemies made much of the dubiety of his paternity” | “anxiety has been excited by the dubiety of his fate
(Origin [clearly (or, better yet, indubitably) a nounal derivative of the common adjective “dubious”], mid 18th century: from late Latin dubietas, from Latin dubium ‘a doubt’.)

sidereal: (pronunciation: sī-’DEE-ree-ul) of or with respect to the distant stars (i.e. the constellations or fixed stars, not the sun or the planets).
(Origin, mid 17th century: from Latin sidereus [from sidus, sider- ‘star’] + the suffix ‘-al’.)



More to come (I underestimated how tiresome it is to convert notes on my phone--which are easily put into italics or bold print--into similar notes using GR's clunky word-processing software)!
Profile Image for Dan.
78 reviews35 followers
January 24, 2009
I am always hesitant to completely pan a book that is clearly written by someone vastly more intelligent than I, but in this case I would have to say that this book definitely did not work for me.

The root of my problem with this book is that the claims and synopsis printed on the cover seem to bear little relation to the actual material contained within. We are led to believe that this is a book solidly within the "popular science" category and that it will deal primarily with the concept of how language molds the way that we think and interact.

Instead, we crack open the novel to find what would best be suited as a textbook for the aspiring linguist. The first third of this book is devoted almost entirely to what seems like some sort of painful flashback to 6th grade English grammar lessons - on speed. Its been a long while since the days of transitive/intransitive/ambitransitive verbs, content-lockatives, and the like. I'll admit that I do not share Pinker's sense of thrill when discussing such topics, but I did slog through them and can vaguely see why he begins his discussion with this approach. Yet the "meat" of this initial discussion seems fairly scanty relative to the painfulness of the necessary effort on the part of the reader.

The book picks up a little steam as it heads into the next few chapters. Describing those on the "fringe" of the language & thought debate. First we hear of academics that make claims that imply that nearly all words are innate to the human mind, and are inborn as part of our genetic makeup (i.e. that our vocabulary is essentially hard-wired). Pinker dispatches this idea summarily - a feat that hardly seemed heroic, given how ludicrous the concept is.

Then Pinker goes on to disarm the arguments of the opposing camp, Determinists that believe that language controls thought. As an uninitiated, arm-chair philosophizer on the subject of language and thought, I had always given more credit to this idea. I am aware of how much of my inner life and thoughts seem to use a dialog that is carried out in words. However, Pinker gives scientific evidence that suggests that our minds control language moreso than the other way around. This was my favorite part of the book. Yet, by deflating this argument, Pinker also takes away a good deal of the relevance of the book, thereby deflating my interest as well...

The major themes in the rest of the book take the form of:
1. Dissecting the ideas of other academics in the field. Which again, would be a great deal more interesting if I had actually decided to go into graduate school for linguistics and was familiar with these persons.

2. Discussing tangental psychological/cultural concepts, often in terms that seem so divorced from language that one might wonder if they are sections taken from another book.

3. Hand-wavy ideas about the evolution of the human brain.

And last, but certainly not least...

4. LOOOOOONNNNGGGG paragraphs of word-"play" in-between.

Its not so much that Pinker doesn't have interesting ideas wedged in here and there, its just that if you've followed other sciences, you've most likely encountered most of these concepts before. Then again, even some of the original ideas that I found in this book were fairly obvious and were ones that I had already conceptualized myself, even if I wouldn't have been able to frame them as well as Pinker does. Furthermore, Pinker writes with a playfulness towards language that is fun in short bursts, but can obscure his point and be exhausting in the long haul. The delivery of some ideas were so couched in unnecessary detail that I almost felt like Steven Pinker and "The English Language" were sharing some sort of private joke. Frequently, after spending a few moments to decrypt some of his more florid paragraphs, I found that the concept they contained was fairly banal.

Pluses: Pinker clearly knows his stuff and presents it with what appears to be an unbiased eye. The sections involving direct scientific experiments were revealing and fun, as were the sections on polite language and sex (as sex always is...). The language of the book is a great exercise in concentration and is peppered with lots of great SAT/GRE-Prep words! Doubles in value as a good Kaplan study book! The take-home message seemed to be that language is not in control, we (and culture) are... Which is a reassuring thought, and is one that I am grateful to have learned.

Negatives: By thereby castrating the power of language to affect our thought process with his initial arguments, much of the remainder of the book is left floundering around in the domains of other disciplines. We hear of psychology, cultural practices, and evolution. Yet, language must now take a passive back-seat to these issues, only acting to give us tiny clues to their nature. The novel concepts that language can teach us turn out to seem scanty and flimsy. Furthermore, manner in which Pinker doles out these intriguing little nibblets seems unnecessarily drawn-out and buried in overly technical/flowery language.

In the end, too much of this book seems to reach for something larger, but end up as merely 'semantics' (fully in the negative connotation of the word).
Profile Image for Laura Noggle.
691 reviews498 followers
May 28, 2020
A loquacious look at language.

“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.”

“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.”

Interesting at points—though not as quite as I'd hoped—and periodically a total slog.
Profile Image for Helio.
511 reviews75 followers
September 8, 2022
a lot of this was familiar territory > for an easier read try Bill Bryson's "The Mother Tongue and How It Got Tha Way." However Pinker goes into quite a bit of detail on analyzing unspoken rules, that we as users are not cognizant when we speak English. Subtitlies that bedevil English learners that we with English as a first language have trouble explaining. It is reminiscent of the ordering of adjectives. We are not taught this in school yet we know which category (of seven) adjectives come first, making for mllions of possibilities, that we chose the correct one. I'm suprised Steve didn't touch on that rule.
105 reviews1 follower
January 21, 2008
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 sleep with anyone to spread their seed, but not take a chance of impregnating a less-than-attractive woman? Huh. Interesting.
Profile Image for Alex.
Author 78 books21 followers
April 23, 2008
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.

Profile Image for Rossdavidh.
535 reviews183 followers
October 6, 2015
Steven Pinker is as close to a famous linguist as we have today (Noam Chomsky doesn't count, because he's famous for his politics, not his linguistics). He is also a clever writer, willing to think originally about deep topics, and to say unconventional things about them. Here, he more or less says that when you understand how language works, you have figured out how human thinking works. He seems to think it has a lot to do with verbs. He also spends an entire chapter (50 pages long) telling us how to use profanity with correct grammar.

It's a bit odd. He points out that all of the impolite verbs for sex (f*ck, scr*w, sh*g, etc.) are transitive verbs, while all the polite verbs for sex (have sex, make love, sleep together, have intercourse, copulate) are intransitive. How could we explain that people who don't know the difference between transitive and intransitive verbs, make sure to use transitive ones for sex, but only when used as profanity?

It's the sort of odd things that linguists discover: patterns in how we use language, that we follow without knowing. This is very different than "don't end your sentence in a preposition", the kind of rules which are broken more often than not. These are rules which a poorly educated blue collar worker who considers the very word "grammar" to be effete, much less the concept, will nonetheless follow, and make fun of anyone who doesn't. Try saying 'they made f*ck together', or 'sex you!', and you will find that they take the rule of transitive vs. intransitive seriously.

We don't spend the whole book on this, but it's an eye-opener, and not only because if this book ever becomes a PBS mini-series they would have to skip the whole chapter. It's because Pinker's basic proposition is that the way our grammar rules work (in English and in other languages) is a clue as to how our brain works. We study language, what it does and (perhaps more importantly) doesn't do, to see how concepts are manipulated in our brain.

Which is all fairly abstract stuff, and Pinker does a good job of finding concrete examples to keep our interest. Why is it that 'Steve' (and variations such as Stephen) went from being 75th in popularity, to being so omnipresent that Stephen Pinker admits to getting some extra sales because Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, and Stephen Jay Gould all gave the name some extra cachet? If you try to bribe a maitre d' at a trendy New York restaurant to get seated early without a reservation, how often will it work (answer: nearly always, but not if you say what you want too plainly)? There are also a fair number of comic strips, especially from the series "Robotman".

Pinker's book is not to be read late at night in bed; this is a 'sit up straight and pay attention' kind of book. But he's a gifted writer with sympathy for those among his readers who haven't spent half their waking life pondering verb tenses, and he makes us laugh as often as furrow our brow. If language is the stuff of thought, this book is the best kind of language, that makes you think better and more deeply about topics like space, time, causality, free will, and the Seven Words You Can't Say on TV. Highly recommended.
Profile Image for Justin.
87 reviews59 followers
June 10, 2008
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 convey concepts in alien and unrecognizable form but to package concepts in a way that inspires original thought while relating ideas to past experience. Ideally we can educate people to compensate for the fallacies induced by normal brain operation. A noble and explicit goal for the teaching structure of society.

Perhaps we are trapped in the cave that is the mind but every so often we have a book that shines some light in that cave. The Stuff of Thought is one of those books.
Profile Image for Joshua Nomen-Mutatio.
333 reviews940 followers
November 2, 2009
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 that anyone actually does this around here...
12 reviews
February 25, 2008
This book presented some interesting ideas on how language is shaped by the way we think, and how it enables us to think in new ways, but ultimately i found it to be too academic, like attending a long lecture by a Harvard professor, which the author is. But others may have more patience with it, especially if they don't read it while recovering from a head cold. My favorite sections talked about how new words and metaphors arise and how names come into and out of fashion, as well as how we selectively use direct or indirect, "polite" language, including cases where obscurity of meaning or openness to interpretation is helpful such as in international diplomacy.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Profile Image for Христо Блажев.
2,318 reviews1,575 followers
April 15, 2020
Метафора: езикът е прозорец към човешката природа: http://knigolandia.info/book-review/m...

Но ако мога все пак да сумирам какво представлява книгата – една смайващо вивиксекция на езика, на думите и на скритите значения за тях. Стивън Пинкър демонстрира виртуозно умение да поставя под въпрос наглед подразбиращи се и прости идеи и внезапно да открива под тях смайващи дълбини, които говорят за човешкия ум и човешката природа. Не съм чел друга негова основополагаща книга, “Езиковият инстинкт” (и тя краси библиотеката, де), но тук той просто демонстрира не само смазваща ерудиция, но и магарешко (цяла глава има за метафорите, ей!) търпение да разчепква дума по дума езика. Има буквално цели страници с думи, които доказват гледната му точка – например, че в повечето езици глаголите за естествена и насилствена смърт се отличават рязко и никога не се припокриват. На много места Пинкър спори оживено с други учени, като коректно излага и техните теории, така че книгата му има и справочна стойност за достиженията на науката за езика.

Издателство "Изток-Запад"
http://knigolandia.info/book-review/m...
Profile Image for Magdelanye.
1,783 reviews228 followers
April 21, 2012
SP seems to be a fan of reality, of the everything-is-explicable,not-a-problem type.
He is so good at what he does (explaining how come and how) that it becomes beside the point to disagree. In pointing the reader to the trap door of language theory and even holding it open, he is the perfect tour guide.Following along his inexorable logic,the reader can easily forget this, forget even his or her own position and the fact that,although the guide is especially friendly and attentive,that's all part of his job, and he works for the company after all.

The first part of the book is devoted to methodologies of classification and functional delineations of linguistic habit. SP minimizes the impact of language on thought and credits our urge to communicate with the fact that we do manage to convey quite precisely some of what we actually think.

The whole issue is complicated by the fact that, even if we do possess the capacity to think beyond words, without words we cannot express our thoughts. Our feelings, yes, can be conveyed by a gesture or a groan. And body language certainly transcends all language barriers. SP takes the postion that our reasoning and our logic are influenced more by cultural and environmental constraints than by language. At the end of this book,as much as I enjoyed and even learned from it and regardless of his persuasive arguements, I have come to the conclusion that I am in a different camp.

"Left to our own devices, we are apt to backslide to our instinctive conceptual ways." he laments towards the end. I can't help but think this might be a good thing.

Other chapters investigate the power of names and the ubiquity of metaphor. SP asks provocative questions. Where do the meaning of words live, in the world where we find the things we are talking about? Or in our head,where our understanding resides? People need some concept in their heads that corresponds to the words used. How then do we accomodate new concepts? The same word can carry quite different meanings just as regularly as different words can describe the same person, activity, or thing. The words we choose convey more than just description but also where we stand, unless we are dissembling to save face, perhaps, or to keep our options open. The great role of innuendo as social glue is examined in its full spectrum.

This was not an easy book but I do recommend it for anyone interested in the development of the thinking process as well as for those interested in language and communication.


Profile Image for liz.
276 reviews30 followers
February 26, 2008
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 way more interesting (and amusing!).

If [Lakoff] is right, conceptual metaphor can do everything from overturning twenty-five hundred years of misguided reliance on truth and objectivity in Western thought to putting a Democrat in the White House.

The Doors' song "Love Me Two Times" sounds strange at first, because the temporal phrase x times applies only to events, not to states, and loving someone is a state. Of course, we are meant to interpret the verb as a euphemism for having sex, which is an activity and an accomplishment (sometimes in more ways that one).

And a wee shout-out to my buddies from Texas: The social psychologist Richard Nisbett has noted that societies with a "culture of honor," where affronts must be quickly and sometimes violently redressed, are often extremely polite, because an unintended insult can escalate into a duel or a feud. [I have also read that this is the case in prison.] The American South was historically a culture of honor, and Nisbett, a native Texan, recalls that his first impression on arriving at Yale as a freshman was that everyone seemed to be really rude.
Profile Image for Lars Guthrie.
546 reviews173 followers
October 9, 2010
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.
Profile Image for Frankie.
231 reviews37 followers
July 23, 2010
Stunned. I've never read a book so packed with new revelations and well-researched, referenced ideas. The text moves at breakneck speed, elucidating every corner of my pitifully thin familiarity with linguistics and logic. There are myriad illustrations, statistics and studies that support and ease readability. From describing the way children learn sentence structure, showing by their cute mistakes how infant speech can help us trace the language of time, space and causality; to the surfacing of the metaphor and just how much metaphor lends to nearly every expression (the "metaphor metaphor"); to the faddish cycle of baby names as the layman's dominance over making new words; to the great chapter on taboo language (Carlin's "7 Words You Can't Say on Television" and more); and finally to the absurd but necessary use of indirect language. The concepts are astoundingly simple at heart. I don't know where to begin citing my favorites, but two should be enough.

The first epiphany I experienced on page 183, as Pinker describes how the concept of moving through space affects 2 and 3 dimensional ideas of shapes. As in "...why we say that something can be underwater or underground even though it's surrounded by, not beneath, the water or the ground. It's because water and ground are conceived as 2-D surfaces, not 3-D volumes..." The idea took me by surprise when I imagined something buried in the dirt on the ocean floor as only then literally "underwater," and something being "underground" is quite impossible (depending on your definition of "ground").

Another concept I enjoyed was the logic fable on pages 419-420 called the "Barbecue Sauce Problem." I'll paraphrase.
20 people meet for dinner and eat ribs. 3 of them get sauce on their face. There are no mirrors, and no one wants to be rude and point out the messy eaters, plus no one with even a clean face is sure if they have sauce on their face either. So no one wipes their face. the host comes in and solves the problem. "At least one of you has sauce on their face, I'll ring the dinner bell once for each person that does." He rings the bell once and no one moves. Twice, and no one moves. The third time he rings the bell, the very 3 who have messy faces immediately wipe their faces.

I never figured this out until the author explained it, but I'm sure you can. I don't want to spoil it for anyone ruminating right now. Comment if you wish to know.

When I first sat down to read this book, I thought it might be a rough ride filled with difficult to grasp allusions at best. Something like reading Baudrillard. Pinker, however, drives his points with repetitive and humorous ease, with jokes, puns, cartoon clippings and examples. The chapters climb in complexity, bringing even the most distracted reader into his insightful take on language as a whole.
Profile Image for Sarah Clement.
Author 1 book111 followers
June 26, 2013
If I were rating this book based on the first 4 chapters, it would get two stars. The rest of the book deserves 4 stars, so I'm meeting in the middle.

The first four chapters were, from my perspective, painful, drawn out descriptions of linguistics material more appropriate for a Linguistics 101 textbook than a popular book. Although sometimes these culminated in quite interesting points, Pinker often took dozens of pages to say what he could in just a few. The early chapters, in fact, contained only a few major points that are really central to highlighting the way language can give us a glimpse into human nature. I think these points could have easily been made without throwing dozens of linguistic concepts at the reader, particularly the terminology. Perhaps knowing the terminology is a great party gag for some, but I for one don't ever expect to use most of that information again. Most of the points in this portion of the book, where interesting, were more "huh, isn't that neat?" rather than really revolutionary or central to the theme of the book. the chapter in which he debunked other linguistic theories was really not essential to the rest of the book, and if he wanted to include it, it could have gone in an appendix. My advice to readers who find themselves annoyed or uninterested in the first few chapters is to skip ahead to chapter 5. You won't miss anything that is necessary for understanding the rest of the book or understanding his thesis.

Once you get the chapter on metaphor, this book gets interesting. Linguists never tire of discussing metaphor, it seems, but I really enjoy reading about it. So many of our expressions are metaphors, whether we realise it or not, and that is a really interesting when you consider what that might tell us about the human brain. The chapter on swearing was also brilliant, particularly for me - someone who doesn't see why people are so offended by profanity. While I had to convince myself to sit down and actually read the first half, I found myself looking forward to picking up the book again when I was reading the second half. Considering the book's theme of "language as a window into human nature", this is where I actually think Pinker provides a winder and provides some rather interesting points to ponder. A lot of what he does is to point to things that are quite obvious once he's flagged it, but as a native speaker of english (and member of the human race), you never thought about before. Sure, most of these things aren't completely universal - which I think makes language a rather imperfect medium through which to explore the nature of humanity more generally - but many of them are nearly so, and that makes them all the more fascinating.

Profile Image for Cheryl.
10.6k reviews447 followers
February 3, 2020
Too wordy, too many examples, too much narrative, too much that is a retelling of what is known. I just couldn't find a focus, a significance, to all the interesting stuff. Readable, but not memorable. The intro. & epilogue would have been enough for me... except for all the references in the epilogue that weren't explained, but only allusions to stuff mentioned in earlier chapters. I dunno, maybe if I were less distracted I would have done better. But I really do think it's the book, not me.

Anyway, there is lots of interesting stuff.:

Apparently lots of computer programmers count "zero, one, two, three, four... there are five." (Mentioned in the section that refutes Linguistic Determinism.)

"Put the new material last," and "put the heavy material last" are two of the most important guidelines for good style in writing and speaking. (I assume that by 'good' he means 'effective' and in context he means 'of exposition.') (In any case, I disagree. He used that style in this book, and I found it unhelpful.)

To make a potion that changes color on demand, boil small pieces of purple cabbage in water, then fish out the cabbage and let the purple liquid cool. If you add a base to it, such as baking soda, it will turn green; if you add an acid, like lemon juice, it will turn pink.

In some languages, like Chinese, *all* nouns behave like mass nouns, standing for the concept itself rather than for separate incarnations of it, and speakers may not count or pluralize them without the use of a classifier, as in 'two tools of hammer' or 'three rods of pen.' (Not sure how credible that is. No source note is given, and which Chinese language is being referenced, anyway?)

In the decade between the sexual revolution of the early 1960s and the feminist revolution of the early 1970s, many works of popular culture celebrated the overthrow of puritanism with sympathetic portrayals of lascivious men.... (recognized now as) misogynistic today, with depictions of women as bimbos and an amused tolerance of rape, harassment, and spousal abuse. (Ah, so that explains why some novels, esp. SF, are popular among men, esp. those slightly older than I, and are seen as horrible by me!).

Well, anyway, if you do decide to try to read this, remember the lens through which the author tries to focus. As he says in the last chapter (actually an epilogue though not so titled):

"In this book I have [explored]... what we can learn about human nature from the meanings of words and constructions and how they are used."
Profile Image for Todd Martin.
Author 4 books77 followers
December 31, 2017
In The Stuff of Thought Steven Pinker, noted public intellectual and linguist at MIT, "analyzes how our words relate to thoughts and to the world around us and reveals what this tells us about ourselves". So, sure … language can provide a “window into human nature”, just as the output of a computer can tell us something about the software it is running.

The question is, whether this ‘window’ is interesting.

Let’s look at an example. You can “load hay onto the wagon” and you can “load the wagon with hay”, they mean the same thing. Along the same lines, you can “toss the cat onto the bed”, but you can’t “toss the bed with the cat”, the latter is nonsensical.

Why?

Because in the first example – we are describing an activity that changes the state of the wagon … from empty to full.
In the second example – when we toss something on a bed, we don’t think of the bed’s state as being changed.

We can therefore conclude that the brain must think that an object’s state is important since it features prominently in the construction of these types of sentences. The verb “load” implies a change of state in the object, the verb “toss” does not.

Does that reveal something profound about the brain? I suppose linguists think so, but frankly … meh.

The book largely consists of an endless series of examples along the lines of the above dealing with such things as: verbs, time, place, relations of objects with respect to each other, direction, quantity, word and name origins and trends, profanity and others.

I very much enjoyed The Better Angels of our Natures and The Blank Slate, but the books Pinker has written about his own field of expertise (linguistics), not so much. They come across as too wonky (a word that is a phonaesthesia in case you were wondering) and arcane to leave much of an impression. I should say that it didn’t help that I listened to the audio version of this book, a format that isn’t particularly suited to the comprehension of abstruse concepts.
Profile Image for Rick Patterson.
282 reviews8 followers
February 20, 2021
Imagine you have been kidnapped by a former classmate (Steve, the guy who was really really weird but whom you later figured out was on the autism spectrum and therefore in retrospect forgave him for his eccentricities even though it's a condition--duh--so what's to forgive?) who has not-so-subtly threatened you with some form of harm if you try to escape, made you ride shotgun in his car, and is travelling across the country with you in tow, all the while regaling you with his very very detailed observations about different verb forms and how they do or do not work together, excruciatingly boring and clinical analyses that you have to nod and smile and agree are fascinating, just fascinating, every time he looks over at you and raises his eyebrows to see if you are following what he's saying, but then--somewhere around the time that your cardyssey crosses the Alleghenies and you officially hit the Midwest--he starts becoming more interesting, his funny asides are actually really funny and even thought-provoking because you had never ever thought about that word that way before, and you haven't put that bit of knowledge together with that other bit of knowledge in quite that illuminating way, so the whole normally boring stretch of highway that crosses from Illinois to Iowa to Nebraska to Wyoming is punctuated by occasional--and ever more frequent--fits of sudden laughter and knee-slapping merriment, including a whole state's worth of his disquisitions on profanity, which he conducts with a twinkle in his eye and one side of his lip curled up as if you really aren't supposed to take him all that seriously, but you still have to take him seriously because he's an expert, of course, and he knows really a whole lot about this and has obviously taken a lot of time and made a big effort to get all of this material under control, so by the time he pulls up in a cloud of crushed seashells at the promontory overlooking Monterey, you have accumulated, well, quite the experience, haven't you?
Profile Image for Ioannis Savvas.
339 reviews44 followers
February 14, 2013
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 υποκ��ιφάλαιο. 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.
55 reviews13 followers
February 15, 2009
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 speakers" and "in English" which I definitely don't recall him doing in Words and Rules.

It will be interesting to see if he explores how the deeper cognitive structures he posits map across languages.

I'd be interested to know if other readers had also worried about this problem and what they had learned since.

---------------

He does indeed go on to touch upon multiple languages.

I found the chapter on verbs "Down the rabbit hole" interesting for many reasons. It was fascinating not just because it showed that there are families of verbs whose existence I had never suspected existed but also because I was impressed by how this type of analysis provides a plausible window on the mind.

Unfortunately, this was, for me, the highpoint of book. I most enjoy Pinker when he's doing the detailed, example baaed stuff around language. I find him much less convincing when he moves onto the broader canvas of the mind and morality.

Still, worth the read.

Profile Image for Khari.
2,650 reviews61 followers
August 28, 2018
I am disappointed that I didn't find and read this book while I was in grad school, there are some quotes that would have worked quite well for the paper I wrote on comparative naming cultures.

There, now that I have completely sounded like an arrogant elitist intellectual, I can talk about my other impressions about this book.

Wow.

That's really the only thing I can say. Pinker thinks about verbs more deeply than I've ever thought about anything. I like abstract thought, don't get me wrong, I like linguistics, I enjoy musing about a linguistic puzzle for a couple of hours, that's just good fun. But to spend like 100 pages just talking about verbs?!? His seemingly favorite topic in this chapter was content locatives. I've never thought about content locatives. Not once. The difference between loading a wagon with hay, and loading hay into a wagon. Seriously, who spends enough hours thinking about such a thing to build a cogent theory that takes 100 pages to explain!?!? I am in awe.

Like I said, I enjoy a good abstract thought puzzle every now and again, and had the arrogance to think that I was something special until I read this book. Then I realized, nope, I'm just your run of the mill dabbler, people like Pinker take abstract and deep thought to a whole new level that I don't even want to attempt.

That said, I really enjoyed the book and I learned a lot from it. Not only is he a deep thinker, but he is a good writer and when you can't understand him, it's not because he writes in an obtuse way, it's just that you are literally incapable of going that deep into a concept.
Profile Image for John.
45 reviews
June 23, 2009
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 reader to think (not always) that the whole of those particular fields were stupid. And then later, appeals to different parts of said theories to back up what he, himself, is arguing. BUT, having said that, it was a fun read and,again, a great (re-)introduction to conceptual metaphor theory and its competition to explain everyday things, like why is it we tend to use a swear word after hitting our thumbs with a hammer? And though I don't necessarily buy into every explanation, they are still worthwhile to consider because they, again, highlight sets of problems that linguists face when trying to understand why we do the things we do with language.
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