The stuff of thought
Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker has a new book out entitled The Stuff of Thought, in which he argues that language is a display of our inner nature. Douglass Hofstadter wrote a thorough, if somewhat unfavorable, review for the LA Times.
That language reveals our inner nature is not a terribly revolutionary premise — language is, after all, our primary means of expression — but the book also tries to take the academic notion of semantics down from the ivory tower to show that the meanings of words matter more than we suspect.
Coining the term verbivores (a species that lives on words), Pinker argues that “our verbivorous, highly biased perception of reality differs radically from the findings of science yet allows us to thrive in a complex universe.”
Translation: there are many classes and “microclasses” of verbs, some of which incorporate alterations into their usage based on the objects which they describe, and some of which don’t.
These classifications are used to support “the idea that we sometimes frame events in terms of motion in physical space and sometimes in terms of motion in state-space”, a notion that makes it seem as though Pinker may have failed in plebeian-izing the theoretical study of semantics; still, it sounds like a good read.
Get the complete Los Angeles Times review here.
