Stuff of Thought, Steven Pinker, Book

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Product Details

Pub. Date: August 2008
Publisher: Penguin Group (USA)
Format: Paperback, 512pp
Sales Rank: 90,222

ISBN-13: 9780143114246
ISBN: 0143114247
Edition Description: Reprint

Synopsis

Every time we swear, we reveal something about human emotions. When we use an innuendo to convey a bribe, threat, or sexual come-on (rather than just blurting it out), we disclose something about human relationships. Our use of prepositions and tenses tap into peculiarly human concepts of space and time, and our nouns and verbs tap into mental models of matter and causation. Even the names we give our babies, as they change from decade to decade, have important things to day about our relations to our children and to society. By looking closely at our everyday speech-our conversations, our jokes, our legal disputes-Pinker paints a vivid picture of the thoughts and emotions that populate our mental lives.

Pinker takes on both scientific questions-like whether language affects thought, and which of our concepts are innate-and questions from the headlines and everyday life. Why does the government care so much about dirty words? How do lobbyists bribe politicians? Why do romantic comedies get such mileage out of the ambiguities of dating? Why do so many courtroom dramas hinge on disagreements about who really caused a person's death? Why have the last two American presidents gotten into trouble by the semantic niceties of their words? And why is bulk email called spam?

The Stuff of Thought marries the two topics of Pinker's earlier bestsellers: language (The Language Instinct, Words and Rules) and human nature (How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate). It presents entirely new material, while written in the style that made those books famous: lucid explanations of deep and powerful ideas, presented with irreverent wit, elegant style, and a deft use of examples from popular culture and everyday life.

The Washington Post - Johah Lehrer

"In The Stuff of Thought, Pinker pitches himself as the broker of a scientific compromise between "linguistic determinism" and "extreme nativism." ... He advocates the middle ground of "conceptual semantics," in which the meaning of our words depends on an underlying framework of basic cognitive concepts. ... Pinker tries hard to make this tour of linguistic theory as readable as possible. ... But profanity from Lenny Bruce can't always compensate for the cryptic vocabulary and long list of competing 'isms. ... The Stuff of Thought concludes with an optimistic gloss on the power of language to lead us out of the Platonic cave, so that we can "transcend our cognitive and emotional limitations." It's a nice try at a happy ending, but I don't buy it. The Stuff of Thought, after all, is really about the limits of language, the way our prose and poetry are bound by innate constraints we can't even comprehend."

More Reviews and Recommendations

Biography

Besides challenging conventional wisdom about how we think, cognitive scientist Steven Pinker has a talent for conveying his findings about the brain, language and perception with a clarity and cleverness that has brought him a following outside his field.

More About the Author

Customer Reviews

Reader Rating:
Ratings: 14Reviews: 5
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Theoretical discussion of languageby RolfDobelli

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August 25, 2009: Steven Pinker's enthusiasm about language comes through everywhere in this book - which is a good thing, because the subject matter itself is dense and complex. This combination results in a curious reading experience: Pinker's lively style, many anecdotes and extreme lucidity pull you forward in the text, but the difficulty of the questions he raises could stump you for some time. He explores many linguistic theories in such depth that readers without a particular interest in the field may, frankly, get lost or find the book too abstract, despite Pinker's numerous attempts to ground his discussions in reality. Therefore, while this is a fine book, getAbstract recommends it primarily to patient readers who have a strong interest in language and philosophy. Bring along an open mind and a sense of humor, since Pinker explores language practices - such as obscenities and insults - that may provoke emotional responses.

Steven Pinker's The Stuff of Thoughtby Hosea_G43

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June 05, 2009: Pinker is a competent student of language and occasionally has interesting things to say about the various topics he chooses to discuss in this book. But he does not come close in terms of brilliance and insight when compared with George Lakoff.

I Also Recommend: Moral Politics, Metaphors We Live By.

More Customer Reviews

Fact File

Name:
Steven Pinker

Current Home:
Boston, Massachusetts

Date of Birth:
September 18, 1954

Place of Birth:
Montreal, Canada

Education:
B.A., McGill University, 1976; Ph.D., Harvard University, 1979

Awards:
Humanist Laureate, International Academy of Humanism, 2001; William James Book Prize for How the Mind Works, 1999, and for The Language Instinct, 1995

Biography

"When a gifted scientist and a gifted writer are all in one, you have Steven Pinker," writes fellow cognitive scientist Michael S. Gazzaniga. With his crisp prose style and zany, pop culture-inflected sense of humor, the MIT psychology professor has become famed for his ability to turn something like a discussion of regular and irregular verb forms into a rollicking good read.

As a psychology student at McGill University in Montreal, Pinker was drawn to the emergent field of cognitive science: "I found alluring the combination of psychology, computer science, artificial intelligence, the philosophy of mind, and linguistics," he said in a Scientific American interview. He earned his Ph.D. at Harvard, where his mentor was the psychology professor Roger Brown, who was a pioneer in the study of language acquisition and one of the first to apply Noam Chomsky's theories of language to field research. After accepting a post at MIT in 1982, Pinker began studying language acquisition in children, amassing enough data to demonstrate that children have an inborn facility for language.

Pinker's academic works on language development were admired by many of his peers, but in 1994 he sought -- and gained -- a broader audience with The Language Instinct, which suggests that human language is a biological adaptation, like web-spinning in spiders, rather than (as it is sometimes seen) a cultural invention, like the wheel. Pinker's lively and engaging treatise held tremendous appeal for a popular audience. Michael Coe, writing in The New York Times, called The Language Instinct "A brilliant, witty and altogether satisfying book."

But if humans have an instinct for language, how was that instinct acquired? That question led Pinker to the field of evolutionary psychology, and to the writing of his next book, How the Mind Works. If a particular behavior is common among humans, evolutionary psychologists reason, that behavior probably contributed to the ability of earlier humans to survive and pass along their genes. How the Mind Works, which uses this approach to examine behaviors from music-making to murder, was a finalist for the 1998 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Following its release, Pinker publicly tangled with Stephen Jay Gould over the scientific legitimacy of evolutionary psychology. Although the two scientists clashed on some issues, Pinker admired Gould's ability to write entertaining explications of complex ideas -- "profundity with a light touch," as Pinker wrote in his Time magazine eulogy for Gould.

Pinker's next book, Words and Rules, returned to the subject of language; specifically, it explores the different mechanisms involved in learning regular and irregular verb forms. In his recent book The Blank Slate, Pinker tackled the objections some people have to a biological view of human nature. "There are fears that if you acknowledge that people are born with anything, it implies that some people have more of it than others, and therefore it would open the door to political inequality or oppression, for example," he explained in a New York Times interview. The Blank Slate is Pinker's attempt to demonstrate that there's no inherent contradiction between evolutionary psychology and the concepts of free will and moral behavior. "It's a fallacy to think that hunger and thirst and a sex drive are biological but that reasoning and decision making and learning are something else, something nonbiological," he said. "They're just a different kind of biology."

Good to Know

Journalists often comment on Pinker's rock-star mane of curls, and indeed Pinker once flirted with the idea of becoming a rock musician: "I have to confess that watching rock 'n' roll concerts, I did fantasize about being up on stage," he told The Guardian. "Not in the lead. I never wanted to be Mick Jagger. Maybe the bass-player or the drummer. But I never, ever played air guitar."

Research at Pinker's lab, in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, focuses on the different mental processes involved in using grammatical rules (e.g., an English plural can be formed by adding �s to the end of a noun) and using exceptions to the rules (e.g., the plural of mouse is not mouses but mice). The lab has undertaken magnetoencephalographic (MEG) studies to identify "the time course of the processing of words and rules in the brain."

Pinker was named among Newsweek's "100 Americans for the Next Century" and included in Esquire's "Register of Outstanding Men and Women."

Feature Interview

In 1997, Steven Pinker answered some of our questions about influences and recommended reads.

You still teach Psych 101 in addition to your graduate classes. Do you enjoy teaching?
Yes. Teaching a large introductory class is a lot like writing a popular science book. You have to weave the facts into a coherent story, present it succinctly, and keep the audience's attention with a well-placed joke or demonstration. Students and readers have little patience for vague ideas masked by a fog of highfalutin verbiage -- they want to know who did what to whom.

Who were some of your scientific and literary influences while growing up in Montreal?
Scientific influences: D. O. Hebb, who was an emeritus professor at McGill when I was a student there; Noam Chomsky and B. F. Skinner, via colleagues of theirs who also taught at McGill; and Al Bregman, my senior research advisor, who studies auditory perception.

Literary influences? Vigorous, clear, witty nonfiction writers: Galileo, George Orwell, David Hume, A. J. Ayer, E. B. White. George Miller and Roger Brown, two of the first psycholinguistists (Brown later became my advisor at Harvard). Style manuals by Strunk and White and Theodore Bernstein (look up the entry for "Topsy"). Encyclopedias (the entry for "snakes" in the Britannica is a literary masterpiece).

What are a couple of your favorite television shows? What about movies? Why?
TV: Lions chasing wildebeests on the Discovery channel, VH-1, Seinfeld, Law and Order, hockey. Why? Because they're all unpredictable.

Movies: The Last Waltz, The Godfather, North by Northwest, Charade, Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Maltese Falcon, To Have and Have Not, The Shop on Main Street, Enemies. They have some combination of crisp dialogue, visual wit, great music, and recurring themes of human conflict.

Have you read anything lately that just blew you away?
Thomas Sowell's Migrations and Cultures, about why ethnic groups migrate and how they affect their adopted homelands; Diane McGuinness's Why Our Children Can't Read, a fascinating story of the history and psychology of written language and how it is being mistaught in American schools; and Lawrence Keeley's War Before Civilization. Noble savages? Forget it.

What has been your reaction to the list of celebrities whose deviant behavior has been all the news in the past couple of weeks?
That means men foolishly pursuing sex with inappropriate women. It shows that a part of the male mind desires sex with a variety of women as an end in itself, and is willing to incur huge costs for it -- costs to the men's reputations, careers, family life, and overall happiness (to say nothing of the well-being of the women). That supports the sexual-selection theory of male sexuality: that for millennia, men with a wandering eye left more descendants, who inherited those wandering eyes. It refutes the theory that men want sex only as a means of attaining prestige -- a reputation for being a manly stud who can accumulate trophies.

From Barnes & Noble

Cognitive scientist Steven Pinker has a publishing history that stretches back to the mid-'80s, but it was his 1994 book, The Language Instinct, that marked him as a major public intellectual. In The Stuff of Thought, he returns to questions about language; in Pinker's words, "how a mind that evolved to think about rocks and plants and enemies can invent physics and math." As in all his writings, he translates his advanced ideas about evolutionary psychology into real-world examples accessible even to general readers. The Harvard professor's theories of language and mind have far-reaching implications for scientist and philosophers, but his discussions here about semantic wars and metaphor battles can fascinate all of us. A major book by one of the world's most influential public intellectuals.

From the Publisher

Every time we swear, we reveal something about human emotions. When we use an innuendo to convey a bribe, threat, or sexual come-on (rather than just blurting it out), we disclose something about human relationships. Our use of prepositions and tenses tap into peculiarly human concepts of space and time, and our nouns and verbs tap into mental models of matter and causation. Even the names we give our babies, as they change from decade to decade, have important things to day about our relations to our children and to society. By looking closely at our everyday speech-our conversations, our jokes, our legal disputes-Pinker paints a vivid picture of the thoughts and emotions that populate our mental lives.

Pinker takes on both scientific questions-like whether language affects thought, and which of our concepts are innate-and questions from the headlines and everyday life. Why does the government care so much about dirty words? How do lobbyists bribe politicians? Why do romantic comedies get such mileage out of the ambiguities of dating? Why do so many courtroom dramas hinge on disagreements about who really caused a person's death? Why have the last two American presidents gotten into trouble by the semantic niceties of their words? And why is bulk email called spam?

The Stuff of Thought marries the two topics of Pinker's earlier bestsellers: language (The Language Instinct, Words and Rules) and human nature (How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate). It presents entirely new material, while written in the style that made those books famous: lucid explanations of deep and powerful ideas, presented with irreverent wit, elegant style, and a deft use of examples from popular culture and everyday life.

The Washington Post - Johah Lehrer

"In The Stuff of Thought, Pinker pitches himself as the broker of a scientific compromise between "linguistic determinism" and "extreme nativism." ... He advocates the middle ground of "conceptual semantics," in which the meaning of our words depends on an underlying framework of basic cognitive concepts. ... Pinker tries hard to make this tour of linguistic theory as readable as possible. ... But profanity from Lenny Bruce can't always compensate for the cryptic vocabulary and long list of competing 'isms. ... The Stuff of Thought concludes with an optimistic gloss on the power of language to lead us out of the Platonic cave, so that we can "transcend our cognitive and emotional limitations." It's a nice try at a happy ending, but I don't buy it. The Stuff of Thought, after all, is really about the limits of language, the way our prose and poetry are bound by innate constraints we can't even comprehend."

The New York Times - William Saletan

…Pinker's nature turns out to be the book's organizing principle. The linguistic arcana, the academic squabbles, the Tom Lehrer songs, the Lenny Bruce quotations—they're all part of the tale of one man's journey to understanding human nature. The majesty of Pinker's theories is only one side of the story. The other side is the modesty of how he built them. It all makes sense, when you look at it the right way.

Publishers Weekly

Unless you have a reasonably good background in linguistics, you'll find this excellent book much easier to read than to listen to. Olsher is not to blame; he reads clearly and at a (slightly rapid) conversational speed. Pinker aims for the educated lay reader, using wit and popular metaphor to clarify his meanings and bring abstruse linguistic concepts to life. But his sentences are dense; you need to reread them and think them through. And the jargon, though clearly defined, requires time and thought to absorb: "Though hypernyms are not really examples of polysemy the way metonyms are, their use in emotionally tinged speech is another illustration of how choice among words can make a psychological difference." Such sentences are followed by clarifying illustrations, but they require cogitation-work that is well rewarded by a deeper and more complex understanding of language as a window into the mind. The chapter on the semantics of swearing is particularly fun and enlightening. In every culture swear words concern gods, diseases, excretions and sex, and Pinker tells us why. A person with some knowledge of linguistic theory will enjoy this audio enormously; a person without it will be enriched and delighted by the book, but have great difficulties with the audio version. Simultaneous release with the Viking hardcover (Reviews, May 21). (Sept.)

Los Angeles Times - Douglas Hofstadter

Engaging and provocative . . . filled with humor and fun.

The Boston Globe

Pinker is not only wonderfully clear; he is also blessedly witty.

Kirkus Reviews

Consider the lexicon, Watson: The words a person uses tell you who that person is. Language shapes thought; language, at least in some senses, is thought. How words relate to thoughts is the object of semantics, which, writes Pinker (Psychology/Harvard; The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, 2002, etc.), "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 situated in the world." Of course, there is one planet but many different worlds, and so there are many different truths. Or are there? Pinker considers many cases, including the one in which George Bush lied-maybe-when he claimed that "the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." Learn, Pinker points out, is a factive verb: It requires a degree of certainty that does not attend to semantically allied verbs such as think, so that when Bush used it, "he was committing himself to the proposition that the uranium seeking actually took place, not that the British government believed it did." Were we more certain about what goes inside Bush's brain, we could call it a lie pure and simple, but the brain is a curious thing, capable of equating and uniting "events that have nothing in common," such as, perhaps, reality and politics. Pinker's narrative makes for an advanced textbook in semantics and linguistic theory, and none too lightly worn; each page is a challenge, full of packed sentences that require careful reading ("Several experiments have shown that people distinguish causal chains that exemplify different force-dynamicinteractions even when they are logically equivalent"). Yet Pinker writes clearly and has an eye for meaningful real-world examples such as the "Prenup Paradox" to bring his points home. Call it continuing education for brain owners, an instruction manual on how thought works-and how to think better. Agent: John Brockman/Brockman, Inc.

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Product Details

Pub. Date: August 2008
Publisher: Penguin Group (USA)
Format: Paperback, 512pp
Sales Rank: 90,222

ISBN-13: 9780143114246
ISBN: 0143114247
Edition Description: Reprint

Table of Contents

Preface     vii
Words and Worlds     1
Down the Rabbit Hole     25
Fifty Thousand Innate Concepts (and Other Radical Theories of Language and Thought)     89
Cleaving the Air     153
The Metaphor Metaphor     235
What's in a Name?     279
The Seven Words You Can't Say on Television     323
Games People Play     373
Escaping the Cave     427
Notes     441
References     459
Index     483

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

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Synopsis

The Washington Post - Johah Lehrer

Biography

Customer Reviews

Theoretical discussion of languageby RolfDobelli

Steven Pinker's The Stuff of Thoughtby Hosea_G43

Fact File

Biography

Good to Know

Feature Interview

From Barnes & Noble

From the Publisher

The Washington Post - Johah Lehrer

The New York Times - William Saletan

Publishers Weekly

Los Angeles Times - Douglas Hofstadter

The Boston Globe

Kirkus Reviews

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Table of Contents

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

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Product Details

Synopsis

The Washington Post - Johah Lehrer

Biography

Customer Reviews

Theoretical discussion of languageby RolfDobelli

Steven Pinker's The Stuff of Thoughtby Hosea_G43

Fact File

Biography

Good to Know

Feature Interview

From Barnes & Noble

From the Publisher

The Washington Post - Johah Lehrer

The New York Times - William Saletan

Publishers Weekly

Los Angeles Times - Douglas Hofstadter

The Boston Globe

Kirkus Reviews

Product Details

Table of Contents

Related Subjects

More by This Author

Related Authors

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