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

• Good Stuff

  
  By A2MP6BVSBE2CWO on 2007-09-11
  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.
  
  

• The best writer on the subject of language

  
  By A3G8EBGEHLJF4N on 2007-09-15
  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!
  
  

• Pinker's command on language almost too commanding

  
  By A104F27AD3OX1 on 2007-09-24
  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.
  
  

• A Waste Of Time

  
  By AEUFDV0D2Y02U on 2007-10-18
  Pretentious self-serving drivel.
  Exploitative.
  Most original (!) analogies are questionable at best (and ridiculous at worst). Never mind his oft-used terms such as "construal," "gestalt, and "postulates" to "help" us understand his particular version of thought/word abstractions (which he then tells you how carefully he explained all of this in a previous chapter or will carefully explain it in a future chapter - so tiring to hear after a dozen times or so).
  How about this sentence on Page 90: "In pressing this case, it would have been a rhetorical godsend to sculpt a sacrificial innatist with views far more extreme than this - say, someone who believed that our standard equipment includes not just a few emotions and thinking skills but tens of thousands of full-blown, concrete concepts like "trombone," "carburetor," and "doorknob."? It gets worse. Much worse...
  Who, may I humbly ask, is this man writing this "stuff" for?
  For a guy with a good vocabulary, Steven Pinker simply cannot communicate in a way that we can learn from him...
  Einstein's quote (as a bit of advice, Steven): "Simplify as much as possible, and then a little bit more."
  I'm sorry someone paid good money for this book to give me...
  Bottom Line: Save your money and time, IMHO. The useful and practical things you might learn from this book are not worth the heartbeats it will take to find them...
  
  

• Just Plain Wrong

  
  By A2CIFNDIX068B1 on 2007-12-08
  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.
  
  
• Good, but not as good as his other books
  By A104QVFVM3WGUC on 2007-10-16
  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...
  
  
• Why doesn't a hammer 'ham'?
  By A1R4VHGGF1H23Y on 2007-09-14
  If waiters wait and bankers bank, why don't hammers ham? Stephen Pinker asks this question along with numerous other questions in his interesting and enlightening book "The Stuff of Thought", which focuses on the bizarre quirks of language and its interaction with human conception. He also wonders why we abbreviate things but end up making them longer (it's longer to say 'www' than 'world wide web'); why the f-bomb is considered obscene, but the word 'rape', with its vile definition, is not; and how the tautological phrase 'enough is enough' actually says anything worthwhile. The reader will be quite familiar with the bizarre quirks in the English language that Pinker brings up and they will certainly come to the same conclusion that there may be rhyme, but no reason.
  
  Among dozens of entertaining anecdotes and studies, Pinker reveals that what we take in in language is not what we actually conceive or remember and this mismatch is the root of much of the antagonism in today's society. One study described in the book showed that we don't remember exact sentences, but we remember the gist of the idea. This leads to insight on how the human brain actually works. Pinker explains how Schankian reminding (placing a new concept in the same mental basket as previous events) is why we humans are so smart but also why language is so abstract and imperfect. The brain may be able to respond to 10,000 words, but it puts all of them in just seven basic constructions of thought, which most languages work with: basic concepts, relationships, taxonomy, spatial concepts, time line, causal relationships, and goals.
  
  Pinker is witty, but doesn't waste time getting technical though the entire book is fairly approachable by a non-scientific mind. The book is reminiscent (Schankian?) of Stumbling on Happiness and delves deeper than another interesting book on language, Words That Work. However, there is no unifying idea and the book really just serves to sum up the oddities in our language. Despite this, the book deserves many rereads and is recommended to anyone who is interested in society, culture, psychology, or why hammers don't 'ham'.
  
  
  
• Another Milestone in Understanding Human Behavior
  By A3V2ZTIX1BIVZZ on 2007-09-20
  Arguably, the human race is at the cusp of a new Enlightenment, the point at which enough has been learned about how our brain functions to begin to understand how it unconsciously affects our behavior more than we have realized. The discoveries of the left-brain's interpreter function and of mirror neurons have been recognized as important milestones in this unfolding saga, and Steven Pinker's revealing of how the brain's innate language processing modules and methods affect our interpretation and understanding of reality will undoubtedly be recognized as another milestone, another piece of the puzzle.
  
  I must be honest: Dr. Pinker's book, "The Stuff of Thought," is both large and fact filled, and is consequently not an "easy read" in spite of Dr. Pinker's excellent and witty writing. That said, it is a necessary book for all who endeavor to understand the underpinnings of human behavior, and Dr. Pinker makes it as painless as is possible for such serious material.
  
  Adam Leonard (Author of "Man by Nature: The Hidden Programming Controlling Human Behavior.")
  
  
  
• Language - a window to the way our minds work. Good and clear insights from Pinker.
  By A31I0CBSCOPRLK on 2007-11-18
  Once Steven Pinker gets over his difficult first chapter (he's hunting around trying to find first gear) this book really takes off. Pinker uses the way we structure our language, with all of its grammatical rules and foibles, as evidence of how our minds work. Thus if we accept that children don't learn grammar by rote memory, but more through induction and the creation of general rules, then we can see that the way these rules are framed are a reflection of the way we think.
  
  Pinker cites hundreds of references, dozens of fascinating experiments, and calls on - often with great wit and brio - many entertaining examples of our language and what it really says about us. A whole chapter on "the seven words you can't use on television" shows the almost magical qualities we attach to words.
  
  For me the most fascinating work in this book focuses on the way we speak indirectly to each other, often alluding to what we mean to say. Why say: "It would be awesome if you would pass the ketchup," when we really mean "Pass the ketchup." The answer lies in our complex social brain: and our desire to get on with others by removing the power implications of a direct order. Pinker takes his examples much deeper than this.
  
  This is wonderful reading for people who are either fascinated by the human mind, or fascinated by our living language - or both. Five stars.
  
  
• Mind-Numbing
  By A1QE2WGCCH9V4A on 2007-10-26
  It's not fair for me to write a review, I suppose, as I gave up half-way thru the 1st chapter when I looked ahead to see just how long Pinker was going to belabor the point of how children learn verbs. So, I'm into chapter two and was forcing myself to persevere.
  
  This author is no Dawkins or Diamond. His text is stultifying. I don't really know if there's anything worthwhile in the book or not and am so sorry I spent the money on it.
  
  After reading some other reviews, it seems the 2nd half may offer something, so I'll skip ahead to see.
  
  This happened with "How the Mind Works" too by Pinker. His writing style is not readable to me. Who knows if he has anything worth knowing as he doesn't seem able to convey it in his highly tauted understanding of the English language.
  
  
• A Scientist's view of "The Stuff of Thought"
  By A2OJ0O7IE65R50 on 2008-01-07
  Even though I am a scientist with deep interests in language and reason, I found this book too frequently getting bogged down in minutia to keep my interest. The introductory sections were very interesting and promised much would be revealed in the text - but to garner that revelation took too much effort for me, and I gave up after about 100 pages. It reads more like a PhD dissertation than a popular book for the enlightened masses.
  
  
• Interesting and well worth a reading but...
  By A1TAOWK7RSNAKT on 2007-12-14
  It should be noted that this book is primarily the follow-up of 'The Language Instinct'.
  Readers who were expecting something along the lines of "How the Mind Works" and "The Blank Slate" might encounter a slight disappointment since some chapters of the book are somehow less fun and engaging for the lay person who is not very much into linguistics.
  Having said so, it is definitely well worth a reading; Pinker punch lines are alive and kicking and at the end it is a highly informative and extremely well written book.
  
  
• Unfortunately misguided amid amusing anecdotes
  By A23UAATRRQISB6 on 2008-03-05
  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.
  
  
  
• A linguistics plate with some metaphor on the side
  By A2UTZ4O5E2W4DK on 2007-12-18
  A self-professed verb freak, "Verbs are my little friends," Steven Pinker uses his intellectual brilliance to write a book for the specialist. Only the first and last chapters are readable for the layman.
  
  Simply because it is about language, which we all think we know, does not make this any less facile than an engineering text. He hardly mentions that 100 trillion (?) neuron device we have perched on our shoulders which is responsible for all this 'thought stuff.'
  
  Academics will find this meaty beyond their wildest dreams. The lay reader will be loath to put away a book for which he has paid $30, but will suffer for his persistence. I admire Pinker's humor, scholarship, wide ranging knowledge, sheer intellectual power, and his writing style. However, his subject matter is stifling. I hope he applies his formidable ability to less pedantic subject matter in future publications.
  
  
• Relationship Types as a Window to Political Affiliation
  By A2ZOY2KZLLHX0U on 2007-10-12
  Previous reviewers have already commented that the book is well written, in a manner available to both the layman and professional, with little of the normal academic speak and bias. I concur. One thought occurs to me, which seemed alluded to by at least one of the other reviewers, that is seeing the materials presented here as a model for all of human behaviiour. Late in the book there is a discussion of four relationship types, their origins in human evolution and their exhibition by specific behaviours and language. It is interesting to compare the Market Pricing example to the other three, and ask if the ability / comfort of an individual with Market Pricing relationship-language, abstract models, mathematics, etc. might explain individual's preference for a specific political framework?
  
  Read the book. Gets a bit long in the middle, but worthwhile for the layman.
  
  
• The Stuff of Pinker
  By A1C2K3NAUS7Y5M on 2007-11-25
  Steven Pinker is a quite energetic fellow and an apparent sponge for quite a breadth of subjects and people's views. This seems not to leave a great deal of room for modesty, and he has thus created some controversy in academic circles around his thoroughness on the one hand and his penchant for publicity on the other, somewhat as Carl Sagan used to be regarded in the academic astronomical world. Aware of the controversy surrounding him, I had not looked as his earlier books. I then had the opportunity to hear him speak in public about the current work, and this experience persuaded me to have a look.
  
  The book's central premise is that universal patterns of human thought can be adduced from common patterns observed in many natural languages. The bulk of the book is about the patterns, and the connection back to conclusions about the innateness of various ways of looking at the world sometimes takes the back burner. But what is useful about the book is that he does it in a way that is not as complex and convoluted as the previous sentence. The book is quite heavy with endnotes and references, and at times he seems to be looking to score points in a debate among academics that is going on in the background. I do not know enough about the field to understand the subplots. The net effect to me was a perhaps avoidable distraction.
  
  I would suggest reading the last chapter (number 9) first or else after chapter 1 - it is short and sweet and lays out what he claims to have established in the rest of the book. Chapter 2 will be heavy going for those without prior exposure to formal grammars or current views of linguistics, but much of the later argument is not lost by skimming if it gives the impression of endless hair-splitting. The interesting behavioral meat comes in chapters 7 and 8, so skip ahead to them if necessary as an alternative to abandoning the book in midcourse.
  
  When I don't know a great deal about the central subject or premise, I tend to calibrate the author's credibility by what he tosses off that I do know something about. Thus, at the start of chapter 2 (page 25), he compares what he is setting out to do in analyzing English verb constructions with the film and book "Powers of Ten" by Charles and Ray Eames. He compares his adventure "Down the Rabbit Hole" with theirs, and implies that he is going to take us down sixteen orders of magnitude of complexity. Well, the Eames book covers 41 orders of magnitude (the sponge had a slight leak), and I think it would be generous to grant that he goes as much as two orders of detail into his analysis. (Even as much as one might be arguable.) This certainly calibrates Pinker's view of himself, but it also leads me to wonder how many of the 690 endnotes and/or what they claim to cite have been hastily slapped into place. This will matter greatly to academics, and for the rest of us should only be taken as a variant of "caveat emptor".
  
  One curious piece of understatement comes on page 85, where he writes of an example "very much in the news" about understanding gender differences. When former Harvard president Larry Summers made his ill-fated remarks in January 2005, it was Pinker's earlier work (or at least the endnotes therein) that he felt he was citing, and Pinker came early and often to Summers' defense. That he addresses this here (and somewhat out of context) with a whimper rather than a bang is a bit curious.
  
  Overall, then, this is an accessible book by someone who is likely to be discussed quite a ways into the future, much as his mentor and colleague Noam Chomsky has been. It is certainly worth taking a look if you have an interest in this general area.
  
  
  
• Pinker's latest
  By AUKX1PYR7O63N on 2007-10-24
  Having read all of Pinker's books for the general public, I found this one even more entertaining. As always, Pinker will require that you scratch your head and ponder issues from time to time. His insight into how the mind processes data and experience is amazing. Time and again, I said to myself, "Oh yeah, now it makes sense why we say/think/do certain things." A brilliant mind, an unparalleled science writing skill, and a delightful insouciance towards political correctness--all make for a good read.
  
  This is not a page-turner in the sense of a mystery novel, but it does leave one with that rare satisfying feeling of having stretched one's mind to grasp a conceptual matrix that leads to a better understanding of the human animal.
  
  W. L. Prichard, Jr. MD
  
  
• facinating book
  By A3IF0EF0HO290R on 2007-12-08
  This is fascinating book. English is not my native tongue and I was always wondering why there are so many usage idioms in tense, verbs and propositions. Actually, they are not strange exceptions at all. This book explains the subtle "rules" behind:
  * verbs like "load", "fill" and "pour" and why "pour the glass with water" and "fill water into the glass" sound strange.
  * the difference between tense and apsect.
  * under water (rather than inside water) and after dark (rather than light)
  The book also explores many other aspects of the language and mind, which is written in a clear and entertaining way.
  
  
• The Meaning of the Meaning of Words
  By A1XXJ6I7K2I7SI on 2008-01-01
  I don't mind that I can't tell what the cells within my kidneys are doing. My heart beats regularly, and it doesn't bother me at all that there are mystifying connections of nerves and muscles that are making it happen in ways that I will never fathom and that I never have to think about. But that billions of neurons are connected together to process my thoughts and I cannot feel any of them working away, that they manufacture consciousness and that no one understands consciousness in general and that I don't even understand how my own comes about: that is positively spooky. There are ways we can come to understand something about how brains work, and they don't have to involve surgery or brain scans. For years, Steven Pinker has been showing us how the way language works is a vital clue to the way brains work. Language is automatic, like thinking is, but its patterns can be set down and evaluated for clues as to how our brains make us conscious or help us get along with each other. In _The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature_ (Viking), Pinker covers such topics as how swearing and innuendo show human emotion and how our words show the way brains parse space, time, and causality. Pinker loves jokes (both making them and examining them for linguistic lessons), and illustrates the chapters here with cartoons from the comics pages. Here is a big book full of big ideas derived from microscopic examination of word usage, and he has made it fun.
  
  How language shows hidden brain activity is well illustrated over and over again here (remember, Pinker is the one who has devoted a book to what we can learn about cognition by examining those objects of popular fascination, the irregular plurals and irregular verbs). Pinker shows different ways that verbs show the way our minds organize big ideas like substance, space, time, and force, sometimes slicing up reality in different ways. Part of the fun in reading Pinker is that he makes you conscious of how complicated simple sentences or words can be. When we park a car or land a space shuttle, we have to handle spatial relations very carefully, but our words for descriptions of relationships of one object to another are often maddeningly ambiguous. You know, for instance, what it means for one object to be "on" another; if you think of it, you might picture, say, a coffee cup on a coffee table. But then consider: A picture goes on a wall. A ring goes on a finger. An apple is on a branch. It is rather amazing that we can understand each other, or that children so effortlessly learn to talk. New objects and ideas get new names but seldom by design. Sniglets are the famous words that ought to exist but do not, like "elbonics - the actions of two people maneuvering for one armrest in a movie theater." Pinker shows why these invented words seldom catch on; each seems to refer to a common folly or blunder that we all recognize, but they seldom refer to something that we want to converse about. Pinker is genuinely entertaining about a type of word that is like no other, the taboo word. If you think of any of the sexual words that fit in the slot "John ____ed Mary," they are, as Pinker says, "jocular or disrespectful at best, and offensive at worst". We would rather say "have sex", "make love", or "sleep together". That second category has non-transitive words that emphasize a model of sex that is a mutually enjoyed activity; the ones in the first category are darker and hint that sex is a forceful act that exploits or damages the female.
  
  Time and again Pinker shows in this way that words have meanings, but more importantly for his theme, they mean more than their meanings. Every page has examples that he has culled from conversation, popular culture, or from the internet. Like many researchers, he is using the latter as a research tool. Examining for instance the difference between painting a ceiling or painting a picture on the ceiling, another language theorist had written that what Michelangelo did was the picture version. But Pinker finds, "In a Google search, the phrase `Michelangelo painted the ceiling" gets 335 hits, although admittedly one of them locates the ceiling in the `Cistern Chapel' and another in the `Sixteenth Chapel'". It's an example of Pinker's sense of fun applied to explaining linguistic complexities vital to his own studies but foreign to most of the rest of us. This is good stuff.
  
  
  
• fantastic book
  By A2X02ASLG5YMH9 on 2007-10-07
  Steven Pinker's most recent book is as intelligent and witty as those which came before. The information herein is accessible to professionals and lay people alike.
  
  
• Premium Pinker
  By A35DI28HRSEEP6 on 2007-11-28
  This is premium Pinker, and while he ranges across the social sciences his primary focus here is on language, where he is unparalleled. His goal is to examine the nature of language and tease out the aspects of human nature that language embodies and elucidates. Note that the very concept of `human nature' is anathema to many of the postmodernists. Have no fear, because Pinker doesn't. He relishes the opportunity to burst the bubbles of political correctness, particularly with the use of hard facts and common sense.
  
  His task here is complex, since language is so complex, but his writing is always lucid and to the point. He takes verbs, for example, and examines the ways in which they can and cannot be used, the functions that they can and cannot serve and the forms of human reasoning which they undergird. This can be heady stuff but it reads beautifully as we watch a mind that is both rigorous and playful catch us in the act of being, quintessentially, ourselves.
  
  He is at his best when he is pulling together the insights of linguists, evolutionary psychologists and neuroscientists--something he does with ease and clarity. After he proceeds step by step and chapter by chapter he sums it all up in a concluding chapter that is a model of transparent complexity.
  
  Although the materials are different, this book is like Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, its goal being the identification of those aspects of ratiocination that are uniquely human. The difference here is that Pinker draws specifically (and extensively) on the materials of language, draws more conclusions than Kant and does so in accessible and often amusing prose.
  
  Pinker is one of a handful of centrally-important public intellectuals in America. Don't miss his latest (and if you've missed such important, former books as The Blank Slate--you know now what to request for Christmas).
  
  
• In depth analysis based upon recognized behavorial standards
  By A19K58G1T6VUVV on 2007-10-24
  Steven Pinker's analysis in this book helps me understand our human use of words and speech in our human communications.
  
  
• Human thoughts are built around core ideas
  By A14OJS0VWMOSWO on 2007-11-03
  Steven Pinker's THE STUFF OF THOUGHT: LANGUAGE AS A WINDOW INTO HUMAN NATURE receives Dean Olsher's excellent radio speaking background which here shows as an attention to quiet drama and detail as he reads professor Pinker's exploration of human emotions and language. Human thoughts are built around core ideas: Pinker examines how these ideas develop from childhood on, how they are applied to the world, and what happens when they are misapplied.
  
  
• Good Book
  By A3BQGBSP4TP3YN on 2007-11-19
  A good book, but will require that you contemplate issues from time to time. Pinker's insight into how the mind processes data and experiences is something. He examines how human thoughts are built around core ideas and how these ideas develop from childhood on. He focuses on the way we speak indirectly to each other, often alluding to what we mean to say. Although complex there are some captivating parts to this book, well worth reading.
  
  
• Too Stuffy for my Thoughts
  By ADSR048ZLVCSJ on 2008-07-13
  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).
  
  
  
  
• Insightful, but broad at the expense of depth
  By A1RNS9XJOHEBP on 2008-07-17
  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.
  
  
• Great book that covers the most important part of linguistics
  By A1AKVX6TRUMX17 on 2008-09-08
  The Stuff of Thought is a book that covers the interaction between language and reality. I've read some other books on linguistics, but I found this to be the most interesting. Part of it is the fact that Pinker is a good author that bridges the gap between popular science and real research. The other part is that I think that semantics is the most important, and interesting part of linguistics.
  
  Steven does a great job of presenting his views on how language shows us the inner workings of the brain, and I think he makes a very strong, and interesting, case.
  
  
• A Window Into Our Ways
  By A1NQ8UOWRUQFZZ on 2007-11-08
  This book grasped my attention with sufficent force to motivate me into reading his previous book "Words and Rules". If someone had told my 7th grade grammer teacher that some day I would read these two books, she might have fainted.
  
  
  
• Interesting and Thought Provoking
  By A3SYAXX59X6QPO on 2008-02-04
  Well. This is tougher review than I assumed it would be while I anxiously awaited its arrival.
  
  The first three chapters are an entertaining overview of the English language with special mention of the strange quirks and "hidden -- or are they?" intricacies. He starts out with a lawsuit based on words(what else?) to determine the amount of money an insurance company should pay for damages which occurred on 9/11. (Do they pay "double" because each tower was a separate incident ... or do they pay the planned single amount because 9/11 was "9/11" and it was a single event?) Mostly, he goes through the tiny differences in the words we choose and I was certainly left with an Aha! understanding about WHY I choose words differently and the often subtle undercurrents in that choice. (By the way, English doesn't have a monopoly on the "system" he outlines -- variance twixt the grammars of the world are remarkably consistent.) Though typically entertaining, these first chapters are also redundant to the point of sluggishness.
  
  Then the books sparkles with his usual panache for the next three chapters. I found it surprising to learn how many words (and how finite THAT number is!) are spatial prepositions, and, by the way ... why do "slow down" and "slow up" mean the same thing? Each element of language is treated with style, fun and eye-opening examples, plus lots and lots to think about.
  
  Chapter Seven follows. I couldn't finish it. For reasons which totally escape me, he is totally enamoured with "THE SEVEN" -- (inappropriate words for TV -- or in the presence oxygen, in my opinion). I think he contends that a part of the brain just can't wait to unleash them on the world. I do not believe that that is true. I was 18 before I encountered the F--- word and that was in a book printed exactly as I have printed it here. Didn't have a clue! I don't much appreciate his adding to my repertoire in the name of science; I finally gave up on the balance of the chapter.
  
  The remainder is his delightful insights into the "innateness" of language in all cultures, the sneaky applications that people can devise, the continuing "evolution".
  
  As usual he is totally professional in delivery style: his page Notes are numbered within the text, his Reference List is extensive and his Index is complete and easy to use.
  
  It's a good book but not his finest hour. (The Blank Slate -- verrry scary -- wins that award, I think.)
  
  
• Not quite as great as some of Mr. Pinker's other books
  By AQLKG5111HY85 on 2008-07-15
  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!
  
  

• The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (P.S.)
• The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language
• The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
• How the Mind Works
• The Accidental Mind: How Brain Evolution Has Given Us Love, Memory, Dreams, and God