Steven Pinker

The Stuff of Thought

The relationship between language and thought is a topic which has generated a considerable amount of argument. In The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature Steven Pinker shows that a deep look at the ins and outs of language can move us away from empty philosophising and give some valuable insights into the workings of our minds.

The book starts by looking at the subtle differences in grammar based upon the things talked about. For instance we can load or throw hay into a wagon, but we can't throw a wagon with hay. Pinker goes on to examine the various theories people have had on the nature of thought - is the mind a 'blank slate' or do we come preprogrammed with huge numbers of concepts. He then looks at how we use the concepts of space and time in our language, which brings the reader on to a chapter on metaphors, and how their metaphorical nature is forgotten over time. The chapter 'What's in a name' looks at how words and names can vary in popularity, and at how new words can arise - but they're usually not the ones on the lists of 'This year's new words'. This is followed by a chapter on the sort of language by which we might express our thoughts directly - obscenities and the like. Pinker then looks at how our culture affects the way we say things, for example in the use of euphemisms.

In his treatment of a philosophical topic, Pinker seems to have caught a bit of the philosophers disease - the chapters are pretty long and some readers might struggle to get through this book. Also, I would have liked more of a summary at the end of what the book has told us about the nature of thought. But if you're the sort of person who likes finding out lots of details about the peculiarities of language then I would think that this is a book for you.

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Paperback 512 pages
ISBN: 0143114247
Salesrank: 3598
Weight:0.97 lbs

Published: 2008 Penguin (Non-Classics)

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Hardcover 512 pages
ISBN: 0713997419
Salesrank: 21815
Weight:2.03 lbs

Published: 2007 Allen Lane

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Paperback 512 pages
ISBN: 0143114247
Salesrank: 10313
Weight:0.97 lbs

Published: 2008 Penguin Paperbacks

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Product Description
*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 books—including the Pulitzer Prize finalist The Blank Slate—have catapulted him into the limelight as one of today’s 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.

Product Description

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 books—including the Pulitzer Prize finalist The Blank Slate—have catapulted him into the limelight as one of today’s 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.

not as good as Language Instinct **
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.

not as good as Language Instinct **

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.

The chicken-and-egg of language *****
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.

The chicken-and-egg of language *****

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 ****
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.

Insightful, but broad at the expense of depth ****

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 ****
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!

Not quite as great as some of Mr. Pinker's other books ****

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 **
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).

Too Stuffy for my Thoughts **

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).

Wonderful words *****
Pinker has done it again; another book of mesmerising intelligence and very smart ideas. But be warned: this book is not easy to digest, notwithstanding the lucidity of the writing. But then it deserves to be read very closely indeed: there is so much punch and weight on almost every page. Pinker has already destroyed the simplistic notion that human nature is a social phenomenon, demonstrating how much of our behaviour and psychology is a product of our genetic evolution, and therefore instinctive. In this book, he shows how language has evolved to reflect the mental concepts we have developed to make sense of the world: that is to say, although the real world may exist 'out there', it is mediated through our senses and the brain's interpretation of the data that they send to it. The concepts relate to time and space, matter and causality - and these concepts have been woven into our language. Pinker shows how, and does so in his characteristically enthusiastic, witty fashion. A fabulous read and an intellectual treat.

Wonderful words *****

Pinker has done it again; another book of mesmerising intelligence and very smart ideas. But be warned: this book is not easy to digest, notwithstanding the lucidity of the writing. But then it deserves to be read very closely indeed: there is so much punch and weight on almost every page.

Pinker has already destroyed the simplistic notion that human nature is a social phenomenon, demonstrating how much of our behaviour and psychology is a product of our genetic evolution, and therefore instinctive.

In this book, he shows how language has evolved to reflect the mental concepts we have developed to make sense of the world: that is to say, although the real world may exist 'out there', it is mediated through our senses and the brain's interpretation of the data that they send to it. The concepts relate to time and space, matter and causality - and these concepts have been woven into our language. Pinker shows how, and does so in his characteristically enthusiastic, witty fashion.

A fabulous read and an intellectual treat.

Phew... a tough row to hoe ****
Pinker pontificates on the particles of ponderment, and it's not always much easier to read than the start of this sentence. I found myself skipping through the denser passages on linguistics and skimmed his more egregious excursions into strawmanderism, but there are plenty of gems here. The chapter on swearing is a scream and I thought he fairly convincing debunked some other theories of the mind (the idea that metaphor is the stuff of thought, for example). Some tantalising glimpses of what our grey matter may be doing up there does come out in Pinker's detailed analysis of language, and this is well worth a read for anyone who's wondered about how it is they wonder.

Phew... a tough row to hoe ****

Pinker pontificates on the particles of ponderment, and it's not always much easier to read than the start of this sentence. I found myself skipping through the denser passages on linguistics and skimmed his more egregious excursions into strawmanderism, but there are plenty of gems here. The chapter on swearing is a scream and I thought he fairly convincing debunked some other theories of the mind (the idea that metaphor is the stuff of thought, for example). Some tantalising glimpses of what our grey matter may be doing up there does come out in Pinker's detailed analysis of language, and this is well worth a read for anyone who's wondered about how it is they wonder.

Not up to his previous books ***
Although there are many interesting ideas in this book, especially the analysis of what fine-grained grammatical distinctions show about our mechanisms of thought, there is too much speculative philosophy. Steven Pinker has lots of facts about language at his disposal, so these excursions are disappointing - let's have more fact and less speculation next time. Not worth the hardcover price, so you may want to wait for the paperback.

Not up to his previous books ***

Although there are many interesting ideas in this book, especially the analysis of what fine-grained grammatical distinctions show about our mechanisms of thought, there is too much speculative philosophy. Steven Pinker has lots of facts about language at his disposal, so these excursions are disappointing - let's have more fact and less speculation next time.
Not worth the hardcover price, so you may want to wait for the paperback.