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| The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature | 
 enlarge | Author: Steven Pinker
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Category: Book
List Price: $16.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  (43 reviews)
Sales Rank: 2312
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Paperback
Edition: Reprint
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 512
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 8.4 x 5.5 x 1
ISBN: 0143114247
Dewey Decimal Number: 302
EAN: 9780143114246
ASIN: 0143114247
Publication Date: August 26, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
Excellent October 16, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Take One: Steven Pinker is the premier purveyor of the parsed poesy of plain prose.
No, that won't do. No matter how accurate that statement is, its excessive alliteration is bound to sound too cutesy for such an engaging read as his latest foray into the way mankind thinks and speaks.
Take Two: In his previous bestselling books, such as The Blank Slate, How The Mind Works, and The Language Instinct (to name just the most influential), Pinker- a Harvard cognitive psychologist, has emerged as the premier science researcher and writer on the human mind and language. Yes, there are people who would point to philosopher Daniel Dennett as being a greater expert in the way the mind arose and works, and linguists and cognitive psychologists would likely point to Noam Chomsky as the granddaddy of all language theory, but as well theorized and as influential as the ideas of the other two men have been (not to mention the controversial natures of their ideas and personae) it is Pinker who has emerged as the public's foremost educator in the field. He is to language and the mind what Carl Sagan and Stephen Jay Gould were to astronomy and evolutionary science, respectively.
His latest book is The Stuff Of Thought: Language As A Window Into Human Nature, although a more accurate title might be The Stuff Of Language, since the book focuses far more on language, and parsing it down into its constituent elements. Yes, language represents thoughts we communicate, but when one views the word thought one is led to think that Pinker might be writing of the biochemical firings of neurons, and how one that zigs left results in memories of the smell of Aunt Bea's cherry pies when a child, and when one zigs right a memory of losing your first fistfight is dredged up.
Nonetheless, at 439 pages, with over 40 pages of footnotes, the book is not a difficult read, and this is because Pinker, aside from being a gifted thinker, possesses an even rarer quality- he is a gifted writer. No, his gift is not in the creative field. I cannot speculate on how he would guide a fictive narrative nor end a poem. But, he has an elemental grasp of how to use words to sell ideas. First, he will elucidate the terms of what he is attacking or explaining, by using a lucid metaphor or analogy, and that is further heightened by his very apt use of pop cultural detritus- from the obscure to the profane, and back again, and then he will usually contrast this to a pre-formed idea. That notion can be one that is put forth by another thinker, or rival, or may just be common knowledge, or even mythos....The Stuff Of Thought is an excellent book, and while it may not be as groundbreaking and controversial as some of his earlier works, it is easily his most accessible and fun book to read, as it is so suffused in pop culturata. Yet, on a scientific level, the book does something quite amazing: it bridges the chasm that many Academics have over language itself. Postmodernists believe language is a circular self-referential trap, while pragmatists believe it lends insight into what reality is. Pinker's book seems to posit that that is a false dichotomy, not because both claims are false, but because both are fundamentally true. And in the gullies created by the force of this remarkable fact lie the careers of men like Pinker, ever the Lokis of language to the obtuse, but the Prometheuses of polysemy to those in the know.
Now, about that beginning: Steven Pinker is the premier purveyor of the parsed poesy of plain prose....fire from strange gods, indeed!
Still a Good Read in Spite of its Flaws October 14, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I confess to being an unabashed fan of Steven Pinker's books on language (I am a multilingual life-long student of linguistics with time to read and study in retirement), which is why I bought this book.
I agree it has some serious flaws that have been mentioned in negative reviews, such as political and social beliefs intruding where they do not really belong. (Well, he's a psychologist, not a linguist, so I don't expect anything different.)
Still, the book is quite fascinating and contains some very compelling analysis. In particular, I find his dissection of political (or perhaps better, politically correct) speech of various groups to be well worth reading.
But what is most fascinating to me is the analysis of what I think of as "subconscious grammar." My personal favorite example of what Pinker is explaining here is when my Russian-born cleaning lady scares my cat with the vacuum and says "He is scary." (I answer, "No, the vacuum is scary, Tashi is scared.") What is there in our brains that figures out that "scary" is what emanates from elsewhere, but "scared" is what we feel?
Why is it that in German I would say "She came back to her home town" (even though I am not in her home town and never have been, but for her it is "homecoming"), but in English I am supposed to say "She went back to her home town" because she moved somewhere other than towards me?
For anyone fascinated by this sort of linguistic analysis, this book is valuable and interesting.
I also enjoyed the analysis of "slow evolution" -- the fact that we humans change our environment much faster than our brains can evolve to cope with current circumstances. He says nothing new and startling here, I think, but as always with Steven Pinker, his detailed examples and apt analogies make the subject matter come alive.
If, like me, you don't need the political stuff or the overly explicit analysis of cursing, just skim over that.
Good but dense September 30, 2008
I am a Pinker fan and I enjoyed this book but it is closely written with much detailed linguistic background to support Pinker's ideas on the relation between cognition and language. Entertaining sections include the one on dirty words and his critique of Fodor's "Extreme Nativism":
"Fodor is a brilliant, witty, and pugnacious scholar who, among other things, helped to lay the conceptual foundations for cognitive science and to develop the scientific study of sentence comprehension.5 His notorious theory that we are born with some fifty thousand innate concepts (a conventional estimate of the number of words in a typical English speaker's vocabulary) makes an appearance here not as a player in the nature-nurture debate but as a player in the debate over how the meanings of words are represented in people's minds. In the preceding chapter, I proposed that the human mind contains representations of the meanings of words which are composed of more basic concepts like "cause," "means," "event," and "place." Fodor begs to differ. He believes that the meanings of words are atoms, in the original sense of things that cannot be split. ......"
 Pinker overrated September 12, 2008
2 out of 12 found this review helpful
Pinker is a walking repository and critic of the ideas and written expressions of others, and he's the man to explain, say, Chomsky to you (if you can stomach it), but he's stuck in academdom. Everything I have experienced Steve saying somehow disappoints me--it's fluffed up, and can be condensed into smaller packs of information. He seems, perhaps innately, to be constructing an impenetrable wall of unnecessary denseness in an effort, woont u kno it, to simplify and clarify "language". The result is gunk in the engine of communication.
 Great book that covers the most important part of linguistics September 8, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
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.
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