Steven Pinker: The Stuff of Thought: Book Review

The mind owes its power to its syntactic, compositional, combinatorial abilities...Our complicated ideas are built out of simpler ones and the meaning of the whole is determined by the meaning of the parts and the meaning of relations that connect them...these logical and law like connections provide the meanings of sentences in everyday speech and, through analogies and metaphors, lend their structures to the esoteric concepts of science and mathematics where they are assembled into bigger and bigger theoretical edifices.

-Steven Pinker

The purpose of this paper is to provide a book review of Steven Pinker's new book, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature. The review presents the basic theme and central conceptual notions that can be found in the book; this presentation is offered within the context of a thesis or argument, which holds that while Pinker's logic may be relatively sound, there are problems with the book. These problems include one of the book's central assumptions as well as its failure to significantly ground claims made about language and the brain into current neurobiopsychological research.

The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature is about the relationships between language, words and their meaning, and human thought. It is filled with interesting, sometimes even startling, metaphors for said relationships. For example, we are told that

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ypically unstated categories of meaning. The book also makes the point that there are certain concepts that are basic to all human thinking yet not necessarily fundamental to the reality that encompasses human beings. (This point is particularly interesting in that quantum physicists often make the same claim). In other words, the surprising point that the book appears to be revealing is that language is not causally involved in how we perceive the world. In addition, the world does not determine what language is or even how it is used. Language, therefore, allows people to perceive beyond its own limits; moreover, of itself, it reveals the basics of human nature. It is important to realize that the latter point is foundational to the book. While the foregoing points made by Pinker are interesting and extremely well written, the book is not without problems. Specifically, it should be noted that although Steven Pinker's (2008) book The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature, is about language and its meaning as a revelation of human nature, it is based on an assumption that can be strongly contested. The central assumption of the book is that when discussing language and human nature as revealed throu

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