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

The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature | Steven Pinker | Still a Good Read in Spite of its Flaws

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The Stuff of Thoug...

	The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature Steven Pinker Penguin (Non-Classics), 2008 - 512 pages average customer review:based on 41 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

This New York Times bestseller is an exciting and fearless investigation of language

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 popular science writers. In The Stuff of Thought, Pinker presents a fascinating look at how our words explain our nature. Considering scientific questions with examples from everyday life, The Stuff of Thought is a brilliantly crafted and highly readable work that will appeal to fans of everything from The Selfish Gene and Blink to Eats, Shoots & Leaves.

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Evolution of language

Being a newcomer to the analysis and debate of linguistics, the opening parts of the book felt a little heavy - Pinker assumes a certain level of knowledge of the topic area. Having said that, I am glad I persisted as I later found many interesting parallels to the study of NLP (Natural Language Processing) in the computer science community, and eventually the 'academic' is replaced with hundreds of references and insightful case studies on how we use our language, why we structure it the way we do, and what it says about us.

The book really picks up in the latter half as Pinker picks apart numerous examples of our speech, and life situations (politics, power, sex, and so on), and explains the language and foundation behind it. Linguistics offers a fascinating perspective on how our minds operate, and this is a great introduction. I am looking forward to reading more about the topic in the feature.

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Still a Good Read in Spite of its Flaws

I confess to being an unabashed fan of Steven Pinker's books on language (I am a multilingual life-long student of linguistics with time to read and study in retirement), which is why I bought this book.

I agree it has some serious flaws that have been mentioned in negative reviews, such as political and social beliefs intruding where they do not really belong. (Well, he's a psychologist, not a linguist, so I don't expect anything different.)

Still, the book is quite fascinating and contains some very compelling analysis. In particular, I find his dissection of political (or perhaps better, politically correct) speech of various groups to be well worth reading.

But what is most fascinating to me is the analysis of what I think of as "subconscious grammar." My personal favorite example of what Pinker is explaining here is when my Russian-born cleaning lady scares my cat with the vacuum and says "He is scary." (I answer, "No, the vacuum is scary, Tashi is scared.") What is there in our brains that figures out that "scary" is what emanates from elsewhere, but "scared" is what we feel?

Why is it that in German I would say "She came back to her home town" (even though I am not in her home town and never have been, but for her it is "homecoming"), but in English I am supposed to say "She went back to her home town" because she moved somewhere other than towards me?

For anyone fascinated by this sort of linguistic analysis, this book is valuable and interesting.

I also enjoyed the analysis of "slow evolution" -- the fact that we humans change our environment much faster than our brains can evolve to cope with current circumstances. He says nothing new and startling here, I think, but as always with Steven Pinker, his detailed examples and apt analogies make the subject matter come alive.

If, like me, you don't need the political stuff or the overly explicit analysis of cursing, just skim over that.

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Excellent

Take One: Steven Pinker is the premier purveyor of the parsed poesy of plain prose.

No, that won't do. No matter how accurate that statement is, its excessive alliteration is bound to sound too cutesy for such an engaging read as his latest foray into the way mankind thinks and speaks.

Take Two: In his previous bestselling books, such as The Blank Slate, How The Mind Works, and The Language Instinct (to name just the most influential), Pinker- a Harvard cognitive psychologist, has emerged as the premier science researcher and writer on the human mind and language. Yes, there are people who would point to philosopher Daniel Dennett as being a greater expert in the way the mind arose and works, and linguists and cognitive psychologists would likely point to Noam Chomsky as the granddaddy of all language theory, but as well theorized and as influential as the ideas of the other two men have been (not to mention the controversial natures of their ideas and personae) it is Pinker who has emerged as the public's foremost educator in the field. He is to language and the mind what Carl Sagan and Stephen Jay Gould were to astronomy and evolutionary science, respectively.

His latest book is The Stuff Of Thought: Language As A Window Into Human Nature, although a more accurate title might be The Stuff Of Language, since the book focuses far more on language, and parsing it down into its constituent elements. Yes, language represents thoughts we communicate, but when one views the word thought one is led to think that Pinker might be writing of the biochemical firings of neurons, and how one that zigs left results in memories of the smell of Aunt Bea's cherry pies when a child, and when one zigs right a memory of losing your first fistfight is dredged up.

Nonetheless, at 439 pages, with over 40 pages of footnotes, the book is not a difficult read, and this is because Pinker, aside from being a gifted thinker, possesses an even rarer quality- he is a gifted writer. No, his gift is not in the creative field. I cannot speculate on how he would guide a fictive narrative nor end a poem. But, he has an elemental grasp of how to use words to sell ideas. First, he will elucidate the terms of what he is attacking or explaining, by using a lucid metaphor or analogy, and that is further heightened by his very apt use of pop cultural detritus- from the obscure to the profane, and back again, and then he will usually contrast this to a pre-formed idea. That notion can be one that is put forth by another thinker, or rival, or may just be common knowledge, or even mythos....The Stuff Of Thought is an excellent book, and while it may not be as groundbreaking and controversial as some of his earlier works, it is easily his most accessible and fun book to read, as it is so suffused in pop culturata. Yet, on a scientific level, the book does something quite amazing: it bridges the chasm that many Academics have over language itself. Postmodernists believe language is a circular self-referential trap, while pragmatists believe it lends insight into what reality is. Pinker's book seems to posit that that is a false dichotomy, not because both claims are false, but because both are fundamentally true. And in the gullies created by the force of this remarkable fact lie the careers of men like Pinker, ever the Lokis of language to the obtuse, but the Prometheuses of polysemy to those in the know.

Now, about that beginning: Steven Pinker is the premier purveyor of the parsed poesy of plain prose....fire from strange gods, indeed!

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Always Educational

Steven Pinker is one of the greatest minds we have. The Blank Slate is on my top 20 lifetime list for books and I've enjoyed seeing him in interviews (and one outstanding debate) online. The Stuff of Thought unfortunately is fairly pedestrian by his standards. To me, this book was far more about language than it was human nature or psychology. As far as linguistics is concerned readers learn much but the same cannot be said in terms of it providing a window into our souls. Some of the wordplay was entertaining and he is insightful concerning speech but not enough psychology was illuminated here in my view to warrant opening it again.

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Lacks 'stuff' on the physiological and cognitive origins of language

Although Pinker is renown in the field of linguistics, I was a bit disappointed with the single sidedness of this book. In it, he examines the origins of the English language, but to a large degree fails to introduce the factors attributing to the physiological and cognitive results from the birth of language. I anticipated a book with more in-depth research on the origins and effects of language on the formation of consciousness and cognition. An example of such book is Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza's "Genes, Peoples, and Language,' which I highly recommend.

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