by Steven Pinker
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Product Description
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.
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Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
Good but dense, 2008-09-30
I am a Pinker fan and I enjoyed this book but it is closely written with much detailed linguistic background to support Pinker's ideas on the relation between cognition and language. Entertaining sections include the one on dirty words and his critique of Fodor's "Extreme Nativism":
"Fodor is a brilliant, witty, and pugnacious scholar who, among other things, helped to lay the conceptual foundations for cognitive science and to develop the scientific study of sentence comprehension.5 His notorious theory that we are born with some fifty thousand innate concepts (a conventional estimate of the number of words in a typical English speaker's vocabulary) makes an appearance here not as a player in the nature-nurture debate but as a player in the debate over how the meanings of words are represented in people's minds. In the preceding chapter, I proposed that the human mind contains representations of the meanings of words which are composed of more basic concepts like "cause," "means," "event," and "place." Fodor begs to differ. He believes that the meanings of words are atoms, in the original sense of things that cannot be split. ......"
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
 Pinker overrated, 2008-09-12
Pinker is a walking repository and critic of the ideas and written expressions of others, and he's the man to explain, say, Chomsky to you (if you can stomach it), but he's stuck in academdom. Everything I have experienced Steve saying somehow disappoints me--it's fluffed up, and can be condensed into smaller packs of information. He seems, perhaps innately, to be constructing an impenetrable wall of unnecessary denseness in an effort, woont u kno it, to simplify and clarify "language". The result is gunk in the engine of communication.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
 Great book that covers the most important part of linguistics, 2008-09-08
The Stuff of Thought is a book that covers the interaction between language and reality. I've read some other books on linguistics, but I found this to be the most interesting. Part of it is the fact that Pinker is a good author that bridges the gap between popular science and real research. The other part is that I think that semantics is the most important, and interesting part of linguistics.
Steven does a great job of presenting his views on how language shows us the inner workings of the brain, and I think he makes a very strong, and interesting, case.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
not as good as Language Instinct, 2008-08-10
Steven Pinker's Language Instinct was a pleasure. But The Stuff of Thought is a disappointment. I couldn't get through it. The writing is dull and lacked the lively quality of Language Instinct. The points that Pinker is trying to make are less compelling than in previous books, and I wound up unconvinced as well as uninterested. Even Pinker seems to realize that he is boring us: at one point in Chapter 3, he says "My point - and I do have one - is...." I thought to myself, I sure hope you will get to it soon, but he did not.
The one exception is marvelous chapter 7 "The Seven Words You Can't Say on Television". The writing in this chapter is more classic Pinker, lively, funny and instructive. Don't buy the book. Rather, read chapter 7 in the bookstore or library.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
The chicken-and-egg of language, 2008-07-21
Steven Pinker is an experimental psychologist involved in research into the human mind, but he is also an unabashed popularizer whose books are full of pop culture references (especially comic strips). Apart from a few tedious sections, "The Stuff of Thought" is one of his best books. It applies a scientific perspective to a favorite subject of mine, the relationship between language and thought. But it does it with style, exploring a range of Americana from the semantics of Bill Clinton's lies (a topic that has already received far more attention than it deserves) to the grammar of profanity (a section I find hard to read without smiling).
The overarching theme is how the human mind influences the structure of language. Like most linguists, Pinker largely dismisses the notion that the influence goes the other way. That notion is the basis of the controversial Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which predicts, for example, that if you grew up speaking a language like Hopi, which lacks verb tenses, you would end up with a different perception of time than if you grew up speaking a language like English.
Pinker discusses some of the alleged evidence for this hypothesis before disposing of it. For example, one Mayan language has no words for left and right. The speakers orient themselves using the mountain slope where they live, with the words "upslope" and "downslope" corresponding roughly with south and north, respectively. Researchers found that the speakers have trouble distinguishing left from right but can locate north and south after having been spun around blindfolded while indoors!
Pinker spoils the picture by revealing that another Mayan people with the same aptitudes does have words for left and right. Apparently, since both groups spend most of their lives outdoors, they have a stronger sense of north and south than we do but little use for the concept of left and right. The absence of those words from the language of one group is an effect, not a cause, of the group's traits.
Distinguishing cause and effect is the subject of the book's most fascinating chapter, where Pinker explains how the whole concept of causality, so central to our common experience, is tantalizingly hard to define. We perceive the flow of time as consisting of nothing but causes and effects, and this intuition is deeply entrenched in language. But "the world is not a line of dominoes in which each event causes exactly one event.... The world is a tissue of causes and effects that criss and cross in tangled patterns" (p. 215). The challenge of identifying which causes are most relevant and guessing what would have happened if not for certain events--effectively imagining an alternate universe--underlies everything from scientific knowledge to moral responsibility.
One of his examples is President Garfield's assassin, who argued that "The doctors killed him; I just shot him." The wound was potentially nonfatal, but the doctors were wildly incompetent even by the standards of their day. Did this get the assassin off the hook? The jury didn't think so, and they sent him to the gallows.
A more recent example came in the aftermath of 9/11. Insurance companies were pledged to reimburse for each destructive event. But was the destruction of the Twin Towers one event or two? This question held billions of dollars at stake.
Questions like these are almost unanswerable because the world, contrary to our perceptions, is a continuum without clear boundaries between things. This dichotomy can be seen in the two categories of nouns, count and mass. Count nouns are words like "book," which you can count: you can talk about one book, two books, etc. Mass nouns are words like "jello" which lack that property. You can't talk about one jello or two jellos; there's just jello.
Curiously, some mass nouns, like furniture, refer to material that should be countable. (We get around this problem by talking about "pieces of furniture.") And many nouns can perform both roles: "rock" is a mass noun in the sentence "The ground is made of rock" and a count noun in the sentence "I'm holding two rocks."
Speakers will occasionally transform a count noun into a mass noun by imagining that something discrete is made up of an amorphous substance. Pinker's example is the distasteful statement "After he backed up, there was cat all over the driveway." His point is that the count/mass distinction doesn't force us into any particular way of thinking, because we can escape that thinking by manipulating the language. But the distinction does reveal how we choose whether to view matter as a collection of objects or as a lump of "stuff."
I've only mentioned a fraction of what the book covers. With each topic, Pinker builds on the thesis that language reflects more than affects our minds, which can see past the constraints it imposes on us. Identifying these constraints helps us understand how we perceive the world and thus provides a way for us to transcend those perceptions.
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