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 the type of thought which fuels human perceptions of reality operates in much the same way as stuffing a sausage (Pinker, 2007: 5) and that space and time are used by thinkers in a manner akin to using a zoom lens on a camera (Pinker, 2007: 5).
Indeed, human beings' ability to speak in metaphors is cited as a crucial element in Pinker's (2007:59-439) delineation of the relationships between language and semantics. In particular, the point is made that human beings generate non-intui...