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The Stuff of Thought: Language As a Window Into Human Nature is a New York Times best-selling book by Harvard
Harvard University

Harvard University is a private university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Massachusetts, United States, and a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1636 by the colonial Massachusetts legislature, Harvard is the Colonial Colleges institution of higher learning in the United States....
 experimental psychologist
Experimental psychology

Experimental psychology approaches psychology as one of the natural sciences, investigates it using the experiment. The focus of experimental psychology is on discovering the underlying processes behind behavior and the specific nature of mental life....
 Steven Pinker
Steven Pinker

Steven Arthur Pinker is a prominent Canadian-American experimental psychology, cognitive science, and author of popular science. Pinker is known for his wide-ranging advocacy of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind....
 published in 2007. It is his fifth book on the topics of language
Language

A language is a form of symbol communication in which elements are combined to represents something other than themselves. Language can also refer to the use of such systems as a general phenomenon....
 and cognitive science
Cognitive science

Cognitive science may be concisely defined as the study of the nature of intelligence. It draws on multiple empirical disciplines, including psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, linguistics, anthropology, computer science, sociology and biology....
 written for a general audience. In it, Pinker "analyzes how our words relate to thoughts and to the world around us and reveals what this tells us about ourselves." Put another way, Pinker "probes the mystery of human nature by examining how we use words".

er argues that language provides a window on human nature, and that "analyzing language can reveal what people are thinking and feeling." He asserts that language must do two things:
  1. convey a message to an audience, and
  2. negotiate the social relationship between the speaker and the audience.


Therefore, language functions at these two levels at all times.






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The Stuff of Thought: Language As a Window Into Human Nature is a New York Times best-selling book by Harvard
Harvard University

Harvard University is a private university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Massachusetts, United States, and a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1636 by the colonial Massachusetts legislature, Harvard is the Colonial Colleges institution of higher learning in the United States....
 experimental psychologist
Experimental psychology

Experimental psychology approaches psychology as one of the natural sciences, investigates it using the experiment. The focus of experimental psychology is on discovering the underlying processes behind behavior and the specific nature of mental life....
 Steven Pinker
Steven Pinker

Steven Arthur Pinker is a prominent Canadian-American experimental psychology, cognitive science, and author of popular science. Pinker is known for his wide-ranging advocacy of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind....
 published in 2007. It is his fifth book on the topics of language
Language

A language is a form of symbol communication in which elements are combined to represents something other than themselves. Language can also refer to the use of such systems as a general phenomenon....
 and cognitive science
Cognitive science

Cognitive science may be concisely defined as the study of the nature of intelligence. It draws on multiple empirical disciplines, including psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, linguistics, anthropology, computer science, sociology and biology....
 written for a general audience. In it, Pinker "analyzes how our words relate to thoughts and to the world around us and reveals what this tells us about ourselves." Put another way, Pinker "probes the mystery of human nature by examining how we use words".

Summary

Pinker argues that language provides a window on human nature, and that "analyzing language can reveal what people are thinking and feeling." He asserts that language must do two things:
  1. convey a message to an audience, and
  2. negotiate the social relationship between the speaker and the audience.


Therefore, language functions at these two levels at all times. For example, a common-place statement such as, "If you could pass the salt, that would be great," functions as both a request (though none is inherent to that statement) and a means of being polite or non-offensive (through not directing the audience to demands). Pinker says of this example:

Through this lens, Pinker asks questions such as "What does the peculiar syntax of swearing tell us about ourselves?" Or put another way, "Just what does the 'fuck' in 'fuck you' actually mean?", which is covered in the chapter The Seven Words You Can't Say on Television. The arguments contained within ride on the backs of his previous works, which paint human nature
Human nature

Human nature is the concept that there are a set of characteristics, including ways of thinking, feeling and acting, that all 'normal' human beings have in common....
 as having "distinct and universal properties, some of which are innate – determined at birth by genes rather than shaped primarily by environment."

See also

  • Computational theory of mind
    Computational theory of mind

    In philosophy of mind, the computational theory of mind is the view that the human mind is best conceived as an information processing system and that thought is a form of computation....
  • Sociobiology
    Sociobiology

    Sociobiology is a Neo-Darwinism synthesis of scientific disciplines that attempts to explain social behavior in all species by considering the evolutionary advantages the behaviors may have....
  • Evolutionary psychology
    Evolutionary psychology

    Evolutionary psychology attempts to explain Mind and psychology Trait theorys?such as memory, perception, or language?as adaptations, that is, as the functional products of natural selection or sexual selection....
  • Imprinting
    Imprinting (psychology)

    Imprinting is the term used in psychology and ethology to describe any kind of phase-sensitive learning that is rapid and apparently independent of the consequences of behavior....
  • Chomsky, Noam
    Noam Chomsky

    Avram Noam Chomsky is an United States linguistics, philosopher, cognitive science, political activist, author, and lecturer. He is an Institute Professor emeritus and professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology....
  • Hofstadter, Douglas
    Douglas Hofstadter

    Douglas Richard Hofstadter is an United States academic whose research focuses on consciousness, thinking and creativity. He is best known for G?del, Escher, Bach, first published in 1979, for which he was awarded the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction....
  • Social semiotics
    Social semiotics

    Social semiotics is a branch of the field of semiotics which investigates human signifying practices in specific social and cultural circumstances, and which tries to explain meaning-making as a social practice....
  • Kant, Immanuel
    Immanuel Kant

    Immanuel Kant was an 18th-century German Philosophy from the Kingdom of Prussia city of K?nigsberg . He is regarded as one of the most influential thinkers of modern Europe and of the late Age of Enlightenment....


Other books by Pinker

  • The Language Instinct
    The Language Instinct

    The Language Instinct is a book by Steven Pinker for a general audience, published in 1994. In it, Pinker argues that humans are born with an innate capacity for language....
     (1994)
  • How the Mind Works
    How the Mind Works

    How the Mind Works is a book by Canadian-American cognitive science Steven Pinker, published in 1997. The book attempts to explain some of the human mind's poorly understood functions and quirks in evolutionary terms....
     (1999)
  • Words and Rules
    Words and Rules

    Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language is a 1999 popular linguistics book by Steven Pinker on the subject of regular verb and irregular verbs....
     (2000)
  • The Blank Slate
    The Blank Slate

    The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature is a best-selling 2002 book by Steven Pinker arguing against tabula rasa models of the social sciences....
     (2002)


External links

  • Douglas Hofstadter
    Douglas Hofstadter

    Douglas Richard Hofstadter is an United States academic whose research focuses on consciousness, thinking and creativity. He is best known for G?del, Escher, Bach, first published in 1979, for which he was awarded the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction....
    's review for The Los Angeles Times
    Los Angeles Times

    The Los Angeles Times is a daily newspaper published in Los Angeles, California and distributed throughout the Western United States. It is the second-largest metropolitan newspaper in the United States and the fourth-most widely distributed newspaper in the United States....
     
  • William Saletan
    William Saletan

    William Saletan is the national correspondent at Slate.com. Saletan gained notoriety in the fall of 2004 with nearly daily columns covering the ups and downs of the Presidential race....
    's review for The New York Times Book Review,
  • Seth Lerer
    Seth Lerer

    Professor Seth Lerer is a contemporary Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Stanford University, specialising in historical analyses of the English language, in addition to critical analyses of the works of several authors, including in particular Geoffrey Chaucer....
    's review for The New York Sun
    New York Sun

    'The New York Sun' was a contemporary five-day daily newspaper published in New York City from 2002 until 2008. When it debuted on 2002-04-16, it became "the first general interest broadsheet newspaper to be launched in New York in two generations." The newspaper's president and editor-in-chief was Seth Lipsky, former editor of The Forwar...
    ,