THE STUFF OF THOUGHT
Language as a Window into Human Nature
By Steven Pinker
Viking 481 pages, $37.50
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Space-time, sexuality, justice, divinity and degradation, power and fairness - these, according to Steven Pinker's The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature, are "ingrained in our mother tongue." Of course, the expression of such concepts varies depending on the language. Nevertheless, Pinker insists, "our conversations, our jokes, our curses, our legal disputes, the names we give our babies" reveal the nature of the beast. Tell me what you say, and I will tell you who you are.
In 2006, Time magazine named Pinker, a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, one of the 100 most important people in the world today. A former Montrealer, now the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, Pinker is famous for several bestselling books. They include The Language Instinct (1994), which argues that language acquisition is innate in humans; How the Mind Works (1997), an overview of several theories of evolutionary psychology; and The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, which hypothesizes that evolutionary psychology and behavioural genetics between them can explain much, if not all, of human behaviour and history.
In How the Mind Works, Pinker tried to reverse-engineer a model of the mind from cognitive theory and evolutionary psychology. Pinker's cavalier declaration, "This book is about brain, but I will not say much about neurons, hormones and neurotransmitters," infuriated neurobiologists. (It was as though an aviation writer had said, "This book is about the plane, but I will not say much about avionics, engines or pilot training: Flight is what the plane does but the plane is not flight.")
Now "human nature" and the mind have this much in common: Everyone knows what they are, but it is not so easy to say what they are. One searches The Stuff of Thought vainly for a definition of human nature. Perhaps it is wise of Pinker not to shackle himself so. But if one cannot nail the sapient jelly to the cognitive tree, what is left to study scientifically?
The answer is: plenty. Functional magnetic resonance imaging reveals that specific regions of the brain in Broca's area and Wernicke's area "sort" nouns and verbs. It may be that individual neurons or neuron clusters distinguish between various noun classes and verb types, and that language itself can change brain. For example, the work of Kevin Shapiro, a PhD candidate in medicine at Pinker's own university, indicates that certain verbs - action words such as "run," "jump" etc. - light up neurons in the so-called motor strip of the pre-frontal gyrus, which is adjacent to one of the "verb spots" of the left frontal lobe.
Different lexical categories have corresponding cortical counterparts, though a different "cascade effect" may be involved when we read or hear a word. Indeed, any writer knows that the ear may detect what the eye does not see, and that for this reason it is a good idea to read work aloud. Alas, one finds little of the neural substrate in The Stuff of Thought, for Pinker is not interested so much in the actual stuff of thought as in its effects - effects that can be both weird and entertaining.
Thus, a discussion of David Kemmerer's study of a patient who had "lost the ability to distinguish drip from pour from spill" (Pinker's italics) reveals that the verbs are "three members of a locative microclass that differ in the details of the motion but that share a conceptual skeleton (enabling downward motion of a liquid or aggregate)." A "locative microclass" sharing a "conceptual skeleton" sounds scientific, but one should be aware that it is the psychologist's way of calling a spade a shovel.
Kemmerer's patient knew that "Sam spilled beer on his pants was grammatical and that Sam spilled his pants with beer was not. Two other patients, with damage to different parts of their brains, showed the opposite pattern: they could tell the difference between pouring, dripping and spilling, but couldn't hear anything wrong in sentences ... like Sam spilled his pants with beer." Such cognitive quirks may come from pathology or art. If art seems increasingly pathological, the Red Queen would certainly understand Sam's spilling his pants with beer, even if The Stuff of Thought conflates her with the Queen of Hearts.
Like Pinker's previous books, The Stuff of Thought is often amusing. Also like his previous books, it can be irritating. It kicks off with a discussion of 9/11, "the most significant political and intellectual event of the twenty-first century so far." (Well, yes.) Pinker then examines the question of whether George W. Bush lied when he told Congress in his 2003 State of the Union Address that Saddam Hussein sought to buy yellowcake uranium ore from Niger. Who knew what, when, where, how and why - Rudyard Kipling's "Rule of Six" - does provide an opportunity of introducing readers to the linguistic concept of a "factive verb," in this case the verb "to know."
To this reviewer, who has compared intelligence agencies to dysfunctional neural networks, it does seem that the yellowcake example is ill chosen, given that the truth may never be known. Words certainly create worlds, but here we are in a shadow world ruled by spooky denizens of Plato's cave. (As lying is a supremely conscious activity, the yellowcake example also raises doubts about Bush's consciousness, doubts that Pinker again is wise to avoid discussing.) Perhaps the best that can be said is that the president's handlers let stand an allegation they knew to be false - an allegation, in former secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld's words, puckishly quoted by Pinker, that was "technically accurate" (as good a functional definition of a certain type of lie as one could wish for).
The worst that can be said is that Bush "out-Nixoned Nixon" (Pinker's italics), but this, Pinker observes, says as much about the 37th president as it does about the 43rd. To be politically ecumenical (and Pinker is that), much may depend "upon what the meaning of the word is is."
"The human imagination," Pinker avers, "is a wondrous concocter." Politics is a cornucopia of technically accurate lies.
If words create worlds, they also distort whole universes. Bearing this in mind (whatever mind may be and whatever human nature may be), The Stuff of Thought is a spicy stew. It is compounded of folklore, word games, parables, metaphors, mathematics (a meta-language after all), philosophical conundrums, cartoons (mostly Calvin and Hobbes) and jokes. (Pinker cites the opening of George Gamow's 1947 book on relativity, One, Two, Three ... Infinity, in which two Hungarian aristocrats battle over who can find the largest number. After 15 minutes, the first one says "Three." After a great deal of reflection, the second says, "You win.")
An extensive chapter, The Seven Words You Can't Say On Television, bombards readers with an excursus on cursing. It originates, we are told, from some deep basal ganglia. Coprolalia (literally "dung-speech," a phenomenon that occurs in Tourette's syndrome) is due to some underlying pathology, but we are not told what - perhaps because no one knows. The chapter comprises a thesaurus of nouns for male and female genitalia and verbs signifying the act of copulation. Once unspeakably vulgar, such words are now merely boring. Or the palate grows jaded. Oddly, in this context, perhaps because he was born in 1953 and therefore went to school after formal grammar ceased to be taught, Pinker omits the verb "to be," which used to be called a copulative verb.
His entertaining done, Pinker concludes with uneasy slogans. "The goal of education is to make up for the shortcomings in our instinctive ways of thinking about the physical and social world." And: "With the use of metaphor and combination, we can entertain new ideas and new ways of managing our affairs."
Chris Scott has written several philosophical novels investigating the relationship between truth and language.
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