Steven Pinker’s new book “The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature” is finally out! Abbas Raza wrote this excellent review in 3 Quarks Daily:

PINKER'S THINKERS

A review of The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature, by Steven Pinker

One of my favorite science books... no, wait... one of my favorite books altogether, is a shortish volume by Steven Pinker entitled Words and Rules. (I cannot remember how many copies of that book I have bought for various friends over the years,

but I can pretty safely say that Pinker owes me a drink or two from his royalties.) I admired Pinker before I had read this book because I had already admired other books he had written. The first of these was the first book Pinker wrote for a wide audience: The Language Instinct. I read this book while I was still a very serious young student of analytical philosophy of language and mind in a Ph.D. program at Columbia University. Some of my philosophy professors didn't like the book, but I did. Here's why: Pinker knew a lot about the philosophical issues we were worrying about in our seminars, and he had empirically verifiable things to say about them. In fact, he had identified important and deep linguistic issues which had testable implications. And he always backed up what he said with a lot of footnotes (meaning he always cited studies to back up whatever it was he was asserting). This was very exciting and pleasing to my sciency heart. (My undergraduate degree is in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.) What he was saying in The Language Instinct actually made predictions and retrodictions (explaining what we already know to be true from past observation is just as important in science as any soothsaying of the future) about very concrete patterns in how language is actually acquired by children, and used by adults.

In any case, the reason Words and Rules is such a favorite of mine is that in it, Pinker manages to squeeze a shocking amount of intellectual juice out of something seemingly quite dry: the nature of regular and irregular verbs (walk--walked/go--went) and regular and irregular noun plurals (kid--kids/child--children). It is truly a tour de force: one of those rare small books (like Language, Truth, and Logic by A.J. Ayer, Fact, Fiction, and Forecast by Nelson Goodman, or The Idea of a Critical Theory by Raymond Geuss) that changes how we think about something very important. But I really don't have space here to tell you why that book is so wonderful. On the other hand, before we get to The Stuff of Thought, we can and should try to answer this: why is language and how we actually use it so important? It's because of nothing less than this: we want to know what the meaning of life is.

Full review...

Subscribe to ChiliConDarwin weekly updates