The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature | 
| Author: Steven Pinker
Publisher: Viking Adult
Category: Book
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Avg. Customer Rating:  32 reviews
Sales Rank: 7431
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 512
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.7
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.4 x 1.7
ISBN: 0670063274
Dewey Decimal Number: 401
EAN: 9780670063277
ASIN: 0670063274
Publication Date: September 11, 2007
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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 booksincluding the Pulitzer Prize finalist The Blank Slatehave catapulted him into the limelight as one of todays 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 lifewhy 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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| Customer Reviews: Read 27 more reviews...
 The chicken-and-egg of language July 21, 2008
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.
Insightful, but broad at the expense of depth July 17, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Pinker makes a very good case for neo-Kantianism based on liguistics. In a nutshell, we humans are hardwired to categorized our experience in certain ways.
His arugument for this is based on the observation that children make some very subtle linguistic distinctions in cases for which they could not possibly have had enough exposure for learning from experience.
My only complaint is that I wish he had gone deeper on this particular issue instead of giving us a broad catalog of language traits.
Not quite as great as some of Mr. Pinker's other books July 15, 2008
I have read some of Prof. Pinker's books (How the mind works, the language instinct, the blank slate), and I bought this one only because those books were phantastic!
The stuff of thought was not that interesting to me. It seemed more "technical" to me, particularly the first chapter. It got better, but never reached e.g. "How the Mind Works".
Still, Prof. Pinker can write! The same subject by anybody else would have been very boring.
I guess, only Richard Dawkins is a match for Steven Pinker.
It is definitely worth reading! I only deducted one star relative to his previous books!
 Too Stuffy for my Thoughts July 13, 2008
I admire Steven Pinker and have heard him present his work in one of the most interesting, educational, and entertaining presentations. Having 4 of his books puts me in the category of major fan. I was astounded at the brilliance of insight presented here, but just could not follow it, so gave up after Chapter 2. I spot checked a few of the later chapters, finding too much minutia for me to comprehend. I am astounded that one human mind can understand so much and write a book like this, but I am far from the target market.
I recommend this book only if you want a deep, detailed understanding of the subject. Although this was beyond my comprehension, in my defense I'll point out that I enjoy science books and have an above average number of doctoral degrees (two).
Unfortunately misguided amid amusing anecdotes March 5, 2008
6 out of 19 found this review helpful
It was my intention to mark the book for at least three stars, because of its many entertaining jokes, cartoons, quotations and linguistic quirks, whatever my estimation of the rest of the content. But on reaching chapter 7 on obscenities, I couldn't make myself mark a third star. Perhaps I haven't read much of recent concerned literature in finding the chapter surprising, but I definitely reject the author's thinking there is nothing wrong with his flagrant use of "taboo" language.
The author reasons (p.19): "...the phenomenon [meaning the disapproval] of taboo language is an affront to common sense. Excretion is an activity that every incarnate being must engage in daily, yet all the English words for it are indecent, juvenile, or clinical". The taboo words are of course the indecent ones. And (p.20): "No curious person can fail to be puzzled by the illogic and hypocrisy of linguistic taboos. Why should certain words, but not their homonyms or synonyms, be credited with a dreadful moral power?"
Ironically he observes elsewhere that taboo words carry certain offensive connotations, and even admits they should be avoided on occasions. But his defense in principle of them lacks the logic he talks about. Excretion, for instance, has, in contrast to nutrition, unpleasant odors, etc., and the taboo language for it connotes its objectionable aspects. The same holds for taboo words in general, and thus there is good reason for avoiding them.
However, I do not wish to dwell on this topic, but concentrate on the author's logic in more critical areas. It also enters politics, where his reasoning is evidently biased and where I don't wish to tread, not desiring associated polemics. My attention rather is more on his logic per se, alongside his use of it for fundamental causal laws.
He faults Hume's famed description of causation, quoting (p.211) Hume's passage (I corrected some punctuation in keeping with the original): "we may define a cause to be an object, followed by another, and where all the objects similar to the first are followed by objects similar to the second. Or in other words where, if the first object had not been, the second never had existed" (An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (The Clarendon Edition of the Works of David Hume)). Hume committed in his second sentence the fallacy of "denying the antecedent"; from "A implies B" does not follow "not-A implies not-B".
The reviewed author, however, seizes on that sentence as "an improvement over the constant-conjunction theory". He along with other referenced authors elaborates it into a "counterfactual theory of causation", invoking a fantastic infinity of "possible worlds". The reason for this elaboration is that the authors mistakenly interpret "not-A implies not-B" as contradicting the "fact" of A. But these don't concern facts, but rules. "Not-A implies not-B" doesn't follow from "A implies B", but not-A can be as much part of this world as can A.
The real trouble is that inference. If A causes B, it doesn't follow that B cannot happen without A. The author keeps saying that only striking the match will make it burn. How wrong; it will burn if you hold it to any fire. "There is more than one way to skin a cat."
He, not quite satisfied, brings further with other authors force or power into the action (p.217), insisting that Hume's conjunction of events is inadequate. Hume, however, was fully aware of "force" or "power" or "energy", his very point having been that these cannot be observed outside the conjunction of events. The author persistently complains that many events follow each other but are not causally connected, as if Hume had been ignorant of this. Our experiences are very rich, and even animals become discriminatory in apprehending what event brings about another.
To give one more illustration of the author's faulty logic, he mentions (p.214) the transitive law, "if A causes B, and B causes C, then A causes C". He then decides (p.223) that since "our concept of causation [is] based on intuitive physics, rather than a formula in formal logic, it needn't respect logical necessities such as transitivity. If...A launches...B, which is then stopped by...C, there is no reason to conceive of A as impinging on C at all". But B, meant in transitivity to be caused by A, is here not the likewise meant cause of C. If it were, A indeed would cause C. Logical laws, like mathematical ones, are universal.
Aside from the preceding, most of this tome of over 500 pages consists of pointless inventories of linguistic usage, lightened, as indicated, by comic relief. To me the numerous linguistic theories of various authors cited in the book are wasted, since linguistic forms, as is recognized, are arbitrary.
Allow me to mention that I discuss all these issues extensively in On Proof for Existence of God, and Other Reflective Inquiries.
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