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

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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 booksincluding the Pulitzer Prize finalist The Blank Slatehave catapulted him into the limelight as one of todays 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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5 out of 5 stars

Good Stuff September 11, 2007
278 out of 284 found this review helpful

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

Is there a difference between the meanings of these two sentences?

(1) Hal loaded hay into the wagon, and,

(2) Hal loaded the wagon with hay.

Well, Steven Pinker claims there is a difference and it's a difference that reveals something about the way the mind conceptualizes experience. That is "the stuff of thought" with which Pinker's latest book is concerned, and this "stuff," as he convincingly demonstrates, can be made accessible through a careful analysis of "the stuff of language," i.e., word categories and their syntactic habitats.

In the case of the two sentences above, we can see the human capacity to frame events in alternate ways through the dual function of verbs like "load." This verb draws attention to the hay and its movement in the first sentence, but to the transformation (a kind of metaphorical "movement") of the wagon in the second.

That children can learn the dual use of "load" and the dual conceptualizations that it entails, and distinguish this verb from others (like, say, toss) that don't work in both sentences (E.g., we don't say "Hal tossed the wagon with hay" even though we can say "Hal tossed the hay into the wagon") is evidence that distinct ways of thinking underlie our ability to master language. There are, after all, many thousands of verbs that fall into scores of different categories based on their applicability to different contexts like those involving Hal's hay in the cases above. Pinker believes that our ability to learn the subtle distinctions that control these and other word usages is evidence of their role as reflectors and enablers of the basic elements of human thought, elements like causality, animation, possession, time-as-space, and so on.

Pinker faces quite a challenge in bringing to life profound truths about human nature through a systematic, fine-grained analysis of mundane words like "drip" and "pour," but he succeeds admirably. This is a book that will amply reward a careful reading.

Of course some words are inherently more interesting than others, and for my money the chapter on "The Seven Words You Can't Say on Television" is by itself worth the price of the book. A number of features that help condemn a word to the realm of taboo are revealed here. For example, there are clear syntactic distinctions between the usually unprintable words for sex (which Pinker, I'm happy to report, audaciously prints) and their more presentable cousins, such as have sex, make love, sleep together, copulate, etc. I had never before noticed that the taboo and vulgar forms, which tend to specify physical motion, differ from the non-taboo terms in that they usually occur in a subject-verb-direct object construction (e.g., Austin shagged Vanessa). The more respectable terms lack a direct object and do not specify "a particular manner of motion or effect." Furthermore, they are semantically symmetrical, so that if Austin had sex with Vanessa, Vanessa also had sex with Austin. More fundamentally Pinker ties the cathartic effect of some swearing with "the Rage circuit, which [is]... connected with negative emotion." The Rage circuit, as part of the limbic system, is found in other animals and is associated with "a reflex in which a suddenly wounded or confined animal would erupt in a furious struggle to startle, injure and escape from a predator, often accompanied by a bloodcurdling yowl."

This is rich stuff, the drawing of a neat connection between a specific category of words and an emotional pattern linked to specific parts of the brain. This chapter also helps make sense of Tourette's syndrome and otherwise identifies swearing as "a coherent neurobiological phenomenon." Other chapters are similarly rewarding. Pinker's analysis of metaphors both expands on, and, to an extent, revises the classic works in this field by George Lakoff, Mark Johnson and others.

I have some quibbles with parts of Pinker's overall model, but this is to be expected with a work so ambitious and wide-ranging. I am surprised, for example, that Pinker doesn't mention the extensive work on cognitive prototypes by such authors as Brent Berlin and Eleanor Rosch since their research seems to overlap with his.

Another point: His arguments against connectionist models of language and thought I found to be not quite convincing. Here Pinker is arguing for a genetically-based set of neural patterns to explain the complexities of language, where connectionism points to a more flexible, post-natal learning system. Pinker demonstrates that connectionism is probably not adequate to explain language learning if one assumes (as he apparently does) that learning after puberty is just as permanent as that which is learned in childhood. But such an assumption is unwarranted, and if childhood learning does have a special durability, his criticism of connectionism loses its punch.

Also, in discussing social change (part of his analysis of changing tastes in the naming of children), he cites data indicating that most disappearances such as the end of hat-wearing among men in the 1960s, were the natural outcome of a long and steadily declining trajectory for this fashion. However, there are so many distinctly abrupt social changes that can be identified in this era (including such linguistic ones as the disappearance of the basic slang term "swell" and its replacement by "cool") that this argument for gradual social change leaves me skeptical.

Naturally these are the kinds of disputable points that a book like this is bound to stir up, and that's, of course, all to the good. All in all, Pinker has succeeded, once again, in writing a book which, while effectively tackling a very knotty set of issues, manages to be both accessible and engaging. Five stars.

5 out of 5 stars

The best writer on the subject of language September 15, 2007
91 out of 97 found this review helpful

For the verbivore, no one sets out a feast like Steven Pinker. For my money, The Language Instinct is still the best, most comprehensive, and most entertaining introduction to linguistics ever composed, and I have been waiting for more than 10 years for this book (Words and Rules was also a great book, but a little technical for my taste; I am more drawn to semantics than grammar).

The Stuff of Thought can be a little technical as well. After an introduction in the most appealing Pinker style, chapters 2 and 3, on the ways verbs imply metaphorical categories and the reasons competing language theories are wrong, are both persuasive and engaging, but only if you think about them really, really hard. I remember feeling the same way about the sentence trees and bushes early on in The Language Instinct. But the rewards for the persevering reader comes later. Should you find yourself bogging down, skip to the chapter The Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television, which treats the subject of George Carlin's famous monologue in a manner that is more comprehensive and penetrating (sorry), but at times equally hilarious. That should provide the fuel to travel the rest of his landscape.

The subject of this book is incredibly important and it represents the culmination of a number of themes. Pinker himself says that it completes two parallel trilogies of books he has been writing for the past ten years, and I also read this as the fulfillment of Lakoff and Johnson's brilliant 1980 book "Metaphors We Live By," which lists the fundamental ways our physical reality structures our mental constructs, as revealed by pervasive metaphors. Pinker argues convincingly that Lakoff's later work pushes the metaphorical envelope too far, but he agrees that metaphor provides key insights into thoughts and understanding. He explores the theme of how language reveals and subtly shapes the ways the human mind makes sense of the world in a comprehensive, thoughtful, and compelling manner, carrying Lakoff's initial premise to a compelling, comprehensive theory of the function of metaphor in language and thought.

The linguist S.I. Hiyakawa observed that the last thing fish would think to study would be water; as we increasingly live in a world where words impinge on our every moment of consciousness, unpacking language helps us all understand the way it reveals and shapes our mental worlds. It also helps us understand what is not up for debate, and one of Pinker's most compelling themes is the universal community of human minds revealed by language commonalities. Pinker's philosophy of language somehow makes me feel both that language reveals individual creative genius (often in unexpected speakers) and a central set of commonalities among all human minds.

As a final note, the beauty of Pinker's writing in itself is sufficient reason to read this book. As a language lover, I find it a discouraging irony that so many linguists are so poor at articulating their arguments and insights, and that so much written about language is difficult and boring to read. Pinker, while taking on complex, abstruce topics, writes with clarity, enthusiasm, and humor. Aside from Richard Lederer, he is the only linguist I know who makes me laugh regularly.

Basically,I feel about Steven Pinker approximately the way Wayne and Garth felt about Aerosmith, and I am certainly dancing happily to The Stuff of Thought. Rock on, Steve!

4 out of 5 stars

Pinker's command on language almost too commanding September 24, 2007
43 out of 50 found this review helpful

Pinker's book, `The Stuff of Thought', is a thorough survey of linguistics and word use that is often very funny and insightful. The countless examples of word origins and of the logic that goes into sayings and lingual mechanisms (like metaphors) are brilliant and really do lend insight to the way our minds work. The thorough survey of naming (possibly the most entertaining chapter) could well be the quintessential treatment of the subject.

A downside to this book that the prospective reader should consider is that there seems to be no real idea. The author makes many good points about language in general and phrases a question about why we say what we don't mean, but it doesn't really add up to anything. By the end of the book, after the author has shuffled through a brief examination of words' roles in society, the reader is left grasping for something more useful.

It is possible that I (typical American English-user) was not able to `pick up' the idea of the book. The author does get rather scientific in his treatise and it is likely that I missed some of the more pedantic lines of thought. But this would seem to be counterproductive in a book about language. In many instances, Pinker employs words that will not connect with the average reader for their very scientific (abstract and cold) style, which piles up heaps of what looks like an argument, but does not issue an idea.

The reader should be prepared to read a lot of `scientisms' including the following: The Wholism Effect, locative construction, Gestalt shift, Anti-causative, polysemy, ungrammaticality, combinatory, dysphemistic, metonym / hypernym, count noun, combinatorics, and, my favorite, "causation from correlation by experimental manipulation". To some degree, the author expects the reader to know what all these mean because he does not explain them very well.

Getting beyond the linguistic jargon, which is quite heavy in the first half, the reader is treated to mesmerizing explorations of metaphors and word origins in the second half of the book. This is most likely where the popularity of the book will come from. The reader will connect, most likely because Pinker is talking about things that we all know about: names, cliches, catch phrases, etc. The section on cursing will also titillate the modern reader and sheds some discerning light on the contemporary speaker's overuse of profanity (much like Tom Wolfe's excellent survey in I Am Charlotte Simmons: A Novel). Readers should note that to survey cursing, Pinker uses the vulgarities regularly and so this book is quite vulgar in itself.

It is ironic that at the same time Pinker is explaining the effects of profanity, the reasons why we use it, and the consequences of overusing it, he is guilty of perpetuating the phenomenon. This is a problem throughout the book. Looking at something scientifically doesn't exempt one from being a part of it, especially if both the subject and method used are the same things--words. Indeed, it would seem that Pinker is unable to take the fully scientific objective perspective on this topic because of that innate challenge.

Overall, Pinker does remain meticulously objective (especially compared with noted colleagues of his) and one can read the text without being bombarded with irrelevant and annoying logical errors. His subtle Bush-bashing and Clinton-praising are done in ways pertinent to the subject matter, and he tries not to fall prey to other modern requisites of academia (he acknowledges that even liberals reserve taboos [the N-word], for example).

Worth the time and money for its analysis of language, `The Stuff of Thought' also touches on and could probably expand into a really useful survey of human thought and the human condition as a whole. For that, it is recommended.

1 out of 5 stars

Just Plain Wrong December 8, 2007
29 out of 76 found this review helpful

It is amazing to me that Steven Pinker continues to churn out books on a topic for which he is completely off-track and that readers continue to buy into these theories.

Pinker continues to insist that language is a reflection of the user's "nature" rather than the user being shaped by language that is reflective of the environment in which he or she is shaped and molded. Anyone who has raised children understands that Mr. Pinker is not so much wrong, but that he purposely rejects theories that suggest that there is more going on than Pinker chooses to address.

The almost partisan rejection of scientific evidence that suggests that Pinker is grossly singular in his beliefs gives the reader the impression that the author has a wider political or social agenda rather than the desire to provide true scientific data that truly reflects what goes on in the relationship between society, language, and the human being.

3 out of 5 stars

Good, but not as good as his other books October 16, 2007
28 out of 35 found this review helpful

I read it and enjoyed it. It is more densely written than Pinker's other recent books, or perhaps I'm denser; but the prose was not quite as lucid and captivating as the earlier stuff, especially How the Mind Works. Its overall theme is a bit hard to tease out.
There's a lot of good material, especially plain old grammar-- not so plain, actually, and I got some grammar lessons that I at last understood after all these years. This alone makes it worth it.
There was some especially good writing about examples of "false metaphors" that had my wife and I rolling in the aisle...

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