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

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

Steven Pinker
3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
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From Publishers Weekly

Bestselling Harvard psychology professor Pinker (The Blank Slate) investigates what the words we use tell us about the way we think. Language, he concludes, reflects our brain structure, which itself is innate. Similarly, the way we talk about things is rooted in, but not identical to, physical reality: human beings take the analogue flow of sensation the world presents to them and package their experience into objects and events. Examining how we do this, the author summarizes and rejects such linguistic theories as extreme nativism and radical pragmatism as he tosses around terms like content-locative and semantic reconstrual that may seem daunting to general readers. But Pinker, a masterful popularizer, illuminates this specialized material with homely illustrations. The difference between drinking from a glass of beer and drinking a glass of beer, for example, shows that the mind has the power to frame a single situation in very different ways. Separate chapters explore concepts of causality, naming, swearing and politeness as the tools with which we organize the flow of raw information. Metaphor in particular, he asserts, helps us entertain new ideas and new ways of managing our affairs. His vivid prose and down-to-earth attitude will once again attract an enthusiastic audience outside academia. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

Experimental psychologist and cognitive scientist Pinker is fascinated by the symbiosis between language and thought. In this stimulating volume, a continuation of the discussion found in The Language Instinct (1994), he argues for the "real-world importance" of "the relation of language to our inner and outer worlds." Anchoring his discussion of why semantics matter to 9/11 and other momentous public events, Pinker teases apart the gap between the literal meanings of words and their elaborate connotations, which leads to fresh explanations of humor, the importance of metaphors, and the significance of swearing. Some of the most mind-expanding chapters involve the subtlest, most taken-for-granted aspects of mind, namely our sense of time, space, and causality. Drawing on philosophy, evolutionary psychology, physics, neurology, anthropology, and jokes, Pinker presents a convincing theory of conceptual semantics, itemizing the "fundamental ideas" that form the "language of thought." From politics to poetry, children's wonderful malapropisms to slang, Pinker's fluency in the nuances of words and syntax serves as proof of his faith in language as "a window into human nature." Seaman, Donna --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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On September 11, 2001, at 8:46 A.M., a hijacked airliner crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center in New York. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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6 Reviews
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3.8 out of 5 stars (6 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars Phew... a tough row to hoe, Nov 17 2007
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.
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6 of 8 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars The Stuff of Thought, Feb 10 2009
By 
D. C. Reid (Canada) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   
This review is from: The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature (Paperback)
The Stuff of Thought - Steven Pinker, 2007

The Stuff of Thought ought to be titled The Stuff of Language - a tale told by a linguist full of sound and parsing signifying a fair bit of neat info about language but not a lot spot about the brain. This is because the book leans heavily on linguistics rather than the biological sciences and talks of how language has been taken apart by linguists and what this suggests about how our linguistic minds work. And if that is what you want in a book of this title, written by a well-known, clever, disciple of Chomsky, this is it. Pinker is an engaging, magpie intellectual in that he has an almost endless, tantalizing list of interesting facts, jokes and permutations at his fingertips while ripping through such subjects as: the social purpose of language, the mind as metaphor machine, the relation between language and the 'reality' we share, the relation between words and thinking and emotions, the etymology of words, for example, names, and naming, the symbolism in language, how we say one thing while meaning something quite different, how we use language as a medium of mental exchange, and so on.

The last paragraph of Chapter 1, Words and Worlds, is a quick summary of this book. If you are looking for someone to disaggregate language and show what this reveals about humans, this is a good book to buy. On the other hand, at 439 pages (before chapter notes) of medium-sized print, the book is 100 pages too long. I found myself skipping here and there. Read the first and last chapters first. They tell you the entire book in short form, though there is much fun missed, for ex, the Monty Python Spam skit and the chapter on swearing.

On the other hand, what I would have been more interested in a book of this title was to hear an update on books by Damasio and Panskepp about the role of the sub-conscious in our thoughts, particularly as we do not think in our emotions in words, an important distinction, because when we think consciously, much of what we do is in words. So that words have a primacy in our conscious thinking, and thus the world that Pinker is talking about, but have zero, zilch, nada, nothing to say about the mid-brain where emotion is situated and sends its tendrils up into our conscious brain behind the right front eyebrow for us to focus our attention on and then be brought to life.

I would have liked to hear his take on how Wernicke's (recognition of language) area in our left temporal lobe has a role in recognizing what others are saying to us and our visual understanding of written language (whether in letters or hieroglyphs). I would have liked to hear him address the role of Broca's area (speech) in our being able to communicate with one another through making our lips, tongue, lungs, mental feedback loops and etc. work.

And I was interested, as a poet, in his take on metaphor, because that is a primary part of poetry. Here, again, in chapter 5, he breaks metaphor down into different types based on this and that distinction on subject matter, time sequence, spatial separation and so on. All of these are important to the student of language in that person's quest to understand our medium of mental exchange. And how our language is saturated with metaphor to an extent that we don't even recognize that many things we say are metaphors. If someone offers the symbolic ice-breaker: 'Hi, how are you?' And we answer: Feeling up. Feeling down., or, I'm dead. All of those responses are metaphors, as in, to feel good is up, to feel bad is down, and being dead simply conveys how tired we are. All three are metaphors, but trivial ones.

I found it fascinating that our speaking is drenched in metaphor. On the other hand, the distinctions, of different metaphor type as parsed in this book is irrelevant to a poet. A poet is interested in producing more, more apt, more original, non-cliche metaphors out of the endless manic creativity that we have in Wernicke's area linked to frontal creativity, influenced by the subterranean currents of the subconscious. But, perhaps this is expecting too much out of this kind of book. dcreid.ca.

And, one final thought: the image of the book on this site is not large enough to give you the book's sub-title: Language as a Window into Human Nature. Since the title is: The Stuff of Thought, knowing the sub-title is highly relevant to the slant of the book, and thus who would be interested in buying it.
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8 of 11 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars Not up to his previous books, Nov 13 2007
By 
Eric Lawton (Ontario, Canada) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   
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.
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