Stuff of thought language window into human nature steven pinker

The Stuff of Thought by Steven Pinker

Penguin/Allen Lane

Reviewed by RITA CARTER

This review first appeared in The Daily Mail
 
When Steven Pinker first appears on stage at a scientific conference you half expect him to grab the mike and start singing. His cascading curls, chiseled jaw and Perma-tan give him the look, famously,  of a (now slightly superannuated) pop star. Then he starts speaking, and you become aware of the  awesome combination of analytical and imaginative thinking that has earned this Harvard psychologist a place among Time’s list of “100 Most Influential People”.
 
Pinker’s latest book,“The Stuff of Thought – Language as a Window into Human Nature” is a perfect example of his special skill. By scrutinising  seemingly trivial oddities of language, Pinker illuminates fundamental truths about the human mind.
 
His subject matter – tiny shifts in grammatical construction, for example - seems, at first,  unpromising. Why , he asks, do the words “drink from a glass of water” and “drink a glass of water” mean different things even though the action described in both is identical? Why can you say,  “I’ll send a message to the boarder” or “I’ll send the boarder a message” and mean the same thing, but if the message is going to a “border” rather than a “boarder” you can only phrase it the first way? Why is the past “behind” us in some languages, but “in front” of us in others”? Why  do we ask absurd questions like “Can you pass the salt?” (as if it might be too heavy to shift). And why, when we swear, do we place  the rude words randomly in sentences rather than positioning them, like other words, according to whether they are nouns, verbs, adjectives or adverbs?
 
Most of us take  language so much for granted that we fail to notice these  funny little anomalies or  assume they are insignificant.  Pinker, however, teases out  the deep meanings wrapped within them. This is the Big Idea of “The Stuff of Thought” - that language is not just a  way of communicating  but a keyhole which reveals the (largely innate) brain mechanisms that force us to see the world in a uniquely human way. 
 
He shows that the circumlocutions we use to issue requests and orders ( “would you mind terribly if I shut that window?”) are not just cultural conventions but indicators of our need constantly to negotiate social relationships. Our disregard for grammar when we swear suggests that  cursing comes straight from the deeper, older, and more primitive parts of the brain which are unconcerned about niceties of syntax .   As for seemingly unimportant  curiosities of speech like the border/boarder distinction, Pinker shows that these often reveal deeply embedded intuitions about space, time, causation, intention and agency – ideas that seem so obvious we rarely bother to question them.
 
When people do things, for instance, we assume the cause of the act is inside them, whereas non-sentient things do things because of external causation. This is  why we  say “rain dissolved the salt” but not “Judy cried Johnnie” , even if Johnnie’s tears are as much a  direct result of Judy’s cruelty as the salt’s dissolution is a result of it being rained on. In other words, the notion of freewill is central to our view of the world and declares itself whenever we describe human behaviour. 
 
Such a belief is not necessarily correct, though, any more than are our ideas about time and space.. As Pinker puts it “the foundations of common sense are just the design specs of one of our organs” and science suggests that many of them are wrong. By scrutinizing these built-in concepts we may come to see them as illusions created by our brains  rather than a reflection of the real world.. So Pinker is not just offering us insights into our own thought processes   –  he wants to help us understand universal truths that we are not biologically prone to grasp.
 
Pinker writes lucidly and elegantly, and leavens the text with  scores of  perfectly judged anecdotes, jokes, cartoons and illustrations. Given the ambition, scope and 500-odd  pages of “The Stuff of Thought” , though , you should not expect to romp through it. Give it a month.

© Rita Carter 2007 - www.ritacarter.co.uk