"Engaging and provocative...filled with humor and fun."
-Douglas Hofstadter, Los Angeles Times
"Pinker is a star, and the world of science is lucky to have him."
—Richard Dawkins
"Curious, inventive, fearless, naughty."
-New York Times Book Review
"An important and inviting book."
—Science
"There's plenty of stuff to think about, but a lot of fun stuff too."
-Boston Globe
"Fascinating."
Wired
"Unfailingly engaging to read."
—New York Review of Books
Cognitive scientist Steven Pinker has a publishing history that stretches back to the mid-'80s, but it was his 1994 book, The Language Instinct, that marked him as a major public intellectual. In The Stuff of Thought, he returns to questions about language; in Pinker's words, "how a mind that evolved to think about rocks and plants and enemies can invent physics and math." As in all his writings, he translates his advanced ideas about evolutionary psychology into real-world examples accessible even to general readers. The Harvard professor's theories of language and mind have far-reaching implications for scientist and philosophers, but his discussions here about semantic wars and metaphor battles can fascinate all of us. A major book by one of the world's most influential public intellectuals.
"In The Stuff of Thought, Pinker pitches himself as the broker of a scientific compromise between "linguistic determinism" and "extreme nativism." ... He advocates the middle ground of "conceptual semantics," in which the meaning of our words depends on an underlying framework of basic cognitive concepts. ... Pinker tries hard to make this tour of linguistic theory as readable as possible. ... But profanity from Lenny Bruce can't always compensate for the cryptic vocabulary and long list of competing 'isms. ... The Stuff of Thought concludes with an optimistic gloss on the power of language to lead us out of the Platonic cave, so that we can "transcend our cognitive and emotional limitations." It's a nice try at a happy ending, but I don't buy it. The Stuff of Thought, after all, is really about the limits of language, the way our prose and poetry are bound by innate constraints we can't even comprehend."
—The Washington Post
…Pinker's nature turns out to be the book's organizing principle. The linguistic arcana, the academic squabbles, the Tom Lehrer songs, the Lenny Bruce quotations—they're all part of the tale of one man's journey to understanding human nature. The majesty of Pinker's theories is only one side of the story. The other side is the modesty of how he built them. It all makes sense, when you look at it the right way.
—The New York Times
Unless you have a reasonably good background in linguistics, you'll find this excellent book much easier to read than to listen to. Olsher is not to blame; he reads clearly and at a (slightly rapid) conversational speed. Pinker aims for the educated lay reader, using wit and popular metaphor to clarify his meanings and bring abstruse linguistic concepts to life. But his sentences are dense; you need to reread them and think them through. And the jargon, though clearly defined, requires time and thought to absorb: "Though hypernyms are not really examples of polysemy the way metonyms are, their use in emotionally tinged speech is another illustration of how choice among words can make a psychological difference." Such sentences are followed by clarifying illustrations, but they require cogitation-work that is well rewarded by a deeper and more complex understanding of language as a window into the mind. The chapter on the semantics of swearing is particularly fun and enlightening. In every culture swear words concern gods, diseases, excretions and sex, and Pinker tells us why. A person with some knowledge of linguistic theory will enjoy this audio enormously; a person without it will be enriched and delighted by the book, but have great difficulties with the audio version. Simultaneous release with the Viking hardcover (Reviews, May 21). (Sept.)
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Engaging and provocative . . . filled with humor and fun.
— Los Angeles Times
Pinker is not only wonderfully clear; he is also blessedly witty.
Consider the lexicon, Watson: The words a person uses tell you who that person is. Language shapes thought; language, at least in some senses, is thought. How words relate to thoughts is the object of semantics, which, writes Pinker (Psychology/Harvard; The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, 2002, etc.), "is about the relation of words to reality-the way that speakers commit themselves to a shared understanding of the truth, and the way their thoughts are anchored to things and situated in the world." Of course, there is one planet but many different worlds, and so there are many different truths. Or are there? Pinker considers many cases, including the one in which George Bush lied-maybe-when he claimed that "the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." Learn, Pinker points out, is a factive verb: It requires a degree of certainty that does not attend to semantically allied verbs such as think, so that when Bush used it, "he was committing himself to the proposition that the uranium seeking actually took place, not that the British government believed it did." Were we more certain about what goes inside Bush's brain, we could call it a lie pure and simple, but the brain is a curious thing, capable of equating and uniting "events that have nothing in common," such as, perhaps, reality and politics. Pinker's narrative makes for an advanced textbook in semantics and linguistic theory, and none too lightly worn; each page is a challenge, full of packed sentences that require careful reading ("Several experiments have shown that people distinguish causal chains that exemplify different force-dynamicinteractions even when they are logically equivalent"). Yet Pinker writes clearly and has an eye for meaningful real-world examples such as the "Prenup Paradox" to bring his points home. Call it continuing education for brain owners, an instruction manual on how thought works-and how to think better. Agent: John Brockman/Brockman, Inc.
