The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature
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Written by Steven Pinker.
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Editorial Review (from Amazon.com)
New York Times 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 and popular science writers.Now, in The Stuff of Thought, Pinker marries two of the subjects he knows best: language and human nature. The result is a fascinating look at how our words explain our nature. What does swearing reveal about our emotions? Why does innuendo disclose something about relationships? Pinker reveals how our use of prepositions and tenses taps into peculiarly human concepts of space and time, and how our nouns and verbs speak to our notions of matter. Even the names we give our babies have important things to say about our relations to our children and to society.
With his signature wit and style, Pinker takes on scientific questions like whether language affects thought, as well as forays into everyday life—why is bulk e-mail called spam and how do romantic comedies get such mileage out of the ambiguities of dating? The Stuff of Thought is a brilliantly crafted and highly readable work that will appeal to fans of readers of everything from The Selfish Gene and Blink to Eats, Shoots & Leaves.
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Dale Brayden thinks this book is Excellent.
Pinker continues his analysis of language and thought in The Stuff of Thought beginning with an an analysis of non-obvious regularities in verb usage in English. The theme throughout this book is that the regularities in language reveal the human conceptual framework that underlies language and thought. He starts by examining direct- / indirect- object exchange ('he loaded the wagon with hay' vs. 'he loaded hay into the wagon'). He identifies the two concepts at work in these formulations: changing the state of the container vs. moving the contained objects. Then he moves on to show how this only works for certain types of verbs. In this way he ends up with a system of 6 core concepts that must, in his view, underlie thought. Subsequent chapters examine innate- vs. learned concepts, the information that can be gleaned from our constant use of metaphor, and the significance of names.
This is another amazing achievement by Pinker. I did not spend nearly enough time with this book to write a proper synopsis. All I can say is that if you are interested in the theory of mind, read any of Pinker's books. If you are interested in a non-Chomskian theory of language, read this book.