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

Cognitive scientist and experimental psychologist Steven Pinker is well-known for a number of popular science books on language (The Language Instinct, 1994; Words and Rules, 2000), as well as on cognitive science and human nature (How the Mind Works, 1999; The Blank Slate, 2002). In his latest book The Stuff of Thought--Language as a Window into Human Nature, he sets out to unite those two strands and round out both trilogies with one throw, so to speak. (He says so in his Preface, so kindly address any objections to him.)

In other words, The Stuff of Thought continues the examination of what it is we have been able to find out about the mysterious ways in which the human mind works, and about why it might work that way, but this time using language (perhaps the most unique characteristic of our species) as the main source of information. The premise of this approach is that the way we use words reflects our intuitive theories of time, space, matter, causality, and biology, models which are quite different from the objective understanding of reality that our best science and logic reveal. In addition, there are conceptions about human relationships--sex, intimacy, power,fairness--as well as ideas of divinity, degradation, and danger deeply ingrained in all the world's languages. (Even though there's a lot of variation in details across different languages, the overall logic they demonstrate is the same.) This intuitive model of reality, Pinker and other evolutionary psychologists argue, is a product of natural selection: the way it parses the world around us, the way it uses shortcuts and assumptions would have served our hunter-gatherer ancestors well, but it is less than perfect for dealing with some of the problems we face today. This discrepancy is the reason we have difficulty understanding large numbers, the way statistics works, scientific theories like Newtonian physics and evolution (let alone relativity or quantum mechanics), or how to navigate our complex modern society, which is so different from a small tribe of hunter-gatherers.

In order to illustrate our intuitive theory of matter and space, for example, Pinker turns to one of his favorite topics: the behavior of verbs (the bulk of Words and Rules is about regular v. irregular verbs). He examines what verbs can occur in what kinds of constructions and finds that there are curious patterns and restrictions. For example, we can say "Hal loaded the hay into the wagon" (a construction he calls a content-locative) or "Hal loaded the wagon with hay" (container-locative). They are not exact synonyms--even though they describe the same action, in one our attention zooms in on the hay and how it moves, and in the other, on the wagon and how its state changes. (These "gestalt shifts", or different ways of "framing", are typical of the way language and apparently the human mind works, and in another section Pinker addresses and to some extent refutes George Lakoff's idea that all our thinking consists of is competing frames and metaphors, by pointing out that the mere fact that we can discuss and analyze these frames, and of course base our funniest jokes on them, shows that we are not completely their slaves.) Back to the verbs: many other verbs that describe moving a substance into a container allow the transformation described above, but not all of them--for example, we can say "pour water into the glass", but we cannot say "pour the glass with water." Pinker identifies a number of other subclasses of verbs according to the kinds of structures they participate in, and, as he did in Words and Language, he wonders how a child acquiring his or her native language manages to learn it all. The answer seems to be in the assumptions the mind makes about the nature of matter, force, space, time, causation, possession, etc; and while again languages differ as to which exact verbs belong to which subclasses, the same concepts pop up in all of them. (The difference between the "loading the hay" class and the "pouring the water" class, by the way, is the difference between directly causing something and letting it happen: in the second class, gravity does thework.)

There are many other topics addressed, such as what concepts might be innate (Pinker makes short work of Jerry Fodor's "fifty thousand, including trombone and carburetor" position), or to what extent language might determine our thoughts (he gives several versions of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, rejecting all but the mildest and most banal ones).

In a chapter called "The Metaphor Metaphor" (no, I won't delete the "repeated word", thank you, MSWord) he deals with how our abstract concepts are based on spatial metaphors, how these metaphors aid or hinder our thinking, and what the difference is between "dead metaphors" and fresh, literary ones.

There is an chapter organized around the strange phenomenon of baby naming fads, an attempt to approach that mysterious "first act of dubbing" that had to have been the origin of every word meaning, as well as to examine the development of connotation. Steve--what better example?--was an obscure name until the 20^th century, Pinker says (in the Franco-Anglo-Saxon world, Iwould add--it was doing much better in Eastern and Southern Europe), and then it was first associated with the image of a burly working-class character, until, around mid-century, it rocketed to the top of the popular baby name charts (a phenomenon Pinker, with his characteristic humor, calls hyperstevism). Today, he observes, its connotation is more that of a sciency type than of rough masculinity. (Insert cartoon from The Sunday Times, showing bookstore shelves packed with popular science books by Hawking, Gould, and other Stevens, and a shopper buying Pinker's How the Mind Works while saying to himself "If he's called Steve, he must know what he's talking about.")

I suspect, however, that the most popular chapter in The Stuff of Thought is Chapter 7, entitled "The Seven Words You Can't Say on Television." This chapter, apart from providing long lists comprising many more than seven words that I can't reproduce here, examines the psychology of taboo, why it would involve concepts centered around sex, bodily secretions, and gods and their trappings (such as the Tabernac! and Sacrament! of Québecois French), and what the "blaspheming brain" is really doing. Pinker even suggests that swearing might be our oldest form of language, given that the basal ganglia, a brain structure that is evolutionarily older than the cerebral cortex, seems to be involved, and that many aphasic patients, who cannot make or understand sentences, retain the ability to swear. So: if you want to know what on earth the common English phrase that Woody Allen once paraphrased as "I told him to be fruitful and multiply, but not in those words" is actually supposed to mean, or how our dysphemistic vs. euphemistic expressions for sex reveal two very different mental models for that activity, this is the chapter for you.

Don't get me wrong though: Pinker is always entertaining. Even the more technical parts of the book are full of the usual cartoons, jokes, song lyrics, and anecdotes he uses to illustrate his points. The second to last chapter, "The Games People Play"addresses indirect speech and implied meanings, and what they tell us about our conceptions of social relationships. If you ever need a game theory matrix to decide whether to attempt bribing a police officer who seems intent on giving you a speeding ticket, or to choose which sexual come-on to employ with a date, don't miss this chapter.