Book notice: Pinker's The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature

[Harold Schiffman]

The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature

by Steven Pinker
How You Think

A Review by Colin McGinn

The Stuff of Thought is Steven Pinker's fifth popular book in thirteen
years, and by now we know what to expect. It is long, packed with
information, clear, witty, attractively written, and generally
persuasive. The topic, as earlier, is language and the mind --
specifically, how language reflects human psychological nature. What
can we learn about the mind by examining, with the help of linguistics
and experimental psychology, the language we use to express ourselves?

Pinker ranges widely, from the verb system of English, to the idea of
an innate language of thought, to metaphor, to naming, obscenity, and
politeness. He is unfailingly engaging to read, with his aptly chosen
cartoons, his amusing examples, and his bracing theoretical rigor. Yet
there are signs of fatigue, not so much in the energy and enthusiasm
he has put into the book as in the sometimes less than satisfying
quality of the underlying ideas. I don't blame the author for this: it
is very hard to write anything deep, surprising, and true in
psychology -- especially when it comes to the most interesting aspects
of our nature (such as our use of metaphor). A popular book on biology
or physics will reliably deliver well-grounded information about
things you don't already know; in psychology the risk of banality
dressed up as science is far greater. Sometimes in Pinker's book the
ratio of solid ideas to sparkling formulations is uncomfortably low (I
found this particularly in the lively and amusing chapter on
obscenity). He has decided to be ambitious, and there is no doubt of
his ability to keep the show on the road, but it is possible to finish
a long chapter of The Stuff of Thought and wonder what you have really
learned -- enjoyable as the experience of reading it may have been.

To my mind, by far the most interesting chapter of the book is the
lengthy discussion of verbs -- which may well appear the driest to
some readers. Verbs are the linguistic keyhole to the mind's secrets,
it turns out. When children learn verbs they are confronted with a
problem of induction: Can the syntactic rules that govern one verb be
projected to another verb that has a similar meaning? Suppose you have
already learned how to use the verb "load" in various syntactic
combinations; you know that you can say both Hal loaded the wagon with
hay and Hal loaded hay into the wagon. Linguists call the first kind
of sentence a "container locative" and the second a "content
locative," because of the way they focus attention on certain aspects
of the event reported -- the wagon (container) or the hay (content),
respectively (the word "locative" referring here to the way words
express location). The two sentences seem very close in meaning, and
the verb load slots naturally into the sentence frame surrounding it.
So, can other verbs like fill and pour enter into the same
combinations? The child learning English verbs might well suppose that
they can, thus instantiating a rule of grammar that licenses certain
syntactic transformations -- to the effect that you can always rewrite
a content locative as a container locative and vice versa. But if we
look at how pour and fill actually work we quickly see that they
violate any such rule. You can say John poured water into the glass
(content locative) but you can't say John poured the glass with water
(container locative); whereas you can say John filled the glass with
water (container locative) but you can't say John filled water into
the glass (content locative).

Somehow a child has to learn these syntactic facts about the verbs
load, pour, and fill -- and the rules governing them are very
different. Why does one verb figure in one kind of construction but
not in another? They all look like verbs that specify the movement of
a type of stuff into a type of container, and yet they behave
differently with respect to the syntactic structures in question. It's
puzzling.

The answer Pinker favors to this and similar puzzles is that the
different verbs subtly vary in the way they construe the event they
report: pour focuses on the type of movement that is involved in the
transfer of the stuff, while neglecting the end result; fill by
contrast specifies the final state and omits to say how that state
precisely came about (and it might not have been by pouring). But load
tells you both things: the type of movement and what it led to. Hence
the verbs combine differently with constructions that focus on the
state of the container and constructions that focus on the manner by
which the container was affected.

The syntactic rules that control the verbs are thus sensitive to the
precise meaning of the specific verb and how it depicts a certain
event. And this means that someone who understands these verbs must
tacitly grasp how this meaning plays out in the construction of
sentences; thus the child has to pick up on just such subtle
differences of meaning if she is to infer the right syntactic rule for
the verb in question. Not consciously, of course; her brain must
perform this work below the level of conscious awareness. She must
implicitly analyze the verb -- exposing its deep semantic structure.
Moreover, these verbs form natural families, united by the way they
conceive of actions -- whether by their manner or by their end result.
In the same class as pour, for example, we have dribble, drip, funnel,
slosh, spill, and spoon.

This kind of example -- and there is a considerable range of them --
leads Pinker to a general hypothesis about the verb system of English
(as well as other languages): the speaker must possess a language of
thought that represents the world according to basic abstract
categories like space, time, substance, and motion, and these
categories constitute the meaning of the verb. When we use a
particular verb in a sentence, we bring to bear this abstract system
to "frame" reality in certain ways, thus imposing an optional grid on
the flux of experience. We observe some liquid moving into a container
and we describe it either as an act of pouring or as the state of
being filled: a single event is construed in different ways, each
reflecting the aspect we choose to focus on. None of this is conscious
or explicit; indeed, it took linguists a long time to figure out why
some verbs work one way and some another (Pinker credits the MIT
linguists Malka Rappaport Hovav and Beth Levin). We are born with an
implicit set of innate categories that organize events according to a
kind of primitive physics, dealing with substance, motion, causality,
and purpose, and we combine these to generate a meaning for a
particular verb that we understand. The grammar of our language
reflects this innate system of concepts.

As Pinker is aware, this is a very Kantian picture of human cognition.
Kant regarded the mind as innately stocked with the basic concepts
that make up Newtonian mechanics -- though he didn't reach that
conclusion from a consideration of the syntax of verbs. And the view
is not in itself terribly surprising: many philosophers have observed
that the human conceptual scheme is essentially a matter of substances
in space and time, causally interacting, moving and changing, obeying
laws and subject to forces -- with some of those substances being
agents -- i.e., conscious, acting human beings -- with intentions and
desires. What else might compose it? Here is a case where the
conclusion reached by the dedicated psycholinguist is perhaps less
revolutionary than he would like to think. The chief interest of
Pinker's discussion is the kind of evidence he adduces to justify such
a hypothesis, rather than the hypothesis itself -- evidence leading
from syntax to cosmology, we might say. Of course the mind must stock
basic concepts for the general structure of the universe if it is to
grasp the nature of particular things within it; but it is still
striking to learn that this intuitive physics shapes the very syntax
of our language.

Not that everyone will agree with the general hypothesis itself -- and
Pinker has a whole chapter on innateness and the language of thought.
Here he steers deftly between the extreme nativism of Jerry Fodor,
according to which virtually every concept is innate, including
trombone and opera (despite the fact that the concepts must therefore
have preceded the invention of what they denote, being merely
triggered into consciousness by experience of trombones and operas),
and the kind of pragmatism that refuses to assign a fixed meaning to
any word. Pinker sees that something conceptual has to be innate if
language learning is to be possible at all, but he doesn't believe it
can be anything parochial and specific; so he concludes that only the
most general categories of the world are present in the genes -- the
categories that any human being (or animal) needs to use if he or she
is to survive at all. Among such categories, for example, are: event,
thing, path, place, manner, acting, going, having, animate, rigid,
flexible, past, present and future, causality, enabling and
preventing, means and ends.

The picture then is that these innate abstract concepts mesh with the
individual's experience to yield the specific conceptual scheme that
eventually flowers in the mind. The innate concepts pre-date language
acquisition and make it possible; they are not the products of
language. Thus Pinker rejects the doctrine of "linguistic
determinism," which holds that thought is nothing other than the
result of the language we happen to speak -- as in the infamous
hypothesis of the linguists Benjamin Whorf and Harold Sapir that our
thoughts are puppets of our words (as with the Eskimos who use many
different words for snow). The point Pinker makes here -- and it is a
good one -- is that we mustn't mistake correlation for causation,
assuming that because concepts and words go together the latter are
the causes of the former. Indeed, it is far more plausible to suppose
that our language is caused by our thoughts -- that we can only
introduce words for which we already have concepts. Words express
concepts; they don't create them.

Let's suppose, then, that Pinker and others are right to credit the
mind with an original system of basic physical concepts, supplemented
with some concepts for number, agency, logic, and the like. We
innately conceive of the world as containing what he calls "force
dynamics" -- substances moving through space, under forces, and
impinging on other objects, changing their state. How do we get from
this to the full panoply of human thought? How do we get to science,
art, politics, economics, ethics, and so on? His answer is that we do
it by judicious use of metaphor and the combinatorial power of
language, as when words combine to produce the unlimited expressions
of a human language. Language has infinite potential, because of its
ability to combine words and phrases into sentences without limit:
this is by now a well-worn point.

More controversial is the suggestion that metaphor is the way we
transcend the merely mechanical -- the bridge by which physics leads
us to more abstract domains. Pinker notes, as many have before, that
we routinely use spatial expressions to describe time ("he moved the
meeting to Tuesday," "don't look backward"), as well as employ words
like rise, fall, went, and send to capture events that are not
literally spatial (prices rising, messages sent, and so on). Science
itself is often powered by analogies, as when heat was conceived as a
fluid and its laws derived accordingly. Our language is transparently
shot through with metaphors of one kind or another. But it is far from
clear that everything we do with concepts and language can be
accounted for in this way; consider how we think and talk about
consciousness and the mind, or our moral thinking. The concept of
pain, say, is not explicable as a metaphorical variation on some sort
of physical concept.

It just doesn't seem true that everything nonphysical that we think
about is metaphorical; for example, our legal concepts such as
"rights" are surely not all mere metaphors, introduced on the
shoulders of the concepts of intuitive physics. So there is a question
how Pinker's alleged language of thought, restricted as it is, can
suffice to generate our total conceptual scheme; in which case we will
need to count more concepts as innate (what about contract or
punishment?) -- or else rethink the whole innateness question. Not
that I have any good suggestions about how human concepts come to be;
my point is just that Pinker's set of basic Kantian concepts seems too
exiguous to do the job.

If the Kantian categories are supposed to make thought and language
possible, then they also, for Pinker, impose limits on our mental
functioning. This is a second main theme of his book: the human mind,
for all its rich innate endowment, is fallible, prone to confusion,
easily foiled. The very concepts that enable us to think coherently
about the world can lead us astray when we try to extend them beyond
their natural domain. Pinker discusses the concepts of space and time,
exposing the paradoxes that result from asking whether these are
finite or infinite; either way, human thought reels. As he says, we
can't think without these concepts, but we can't make sense of them --
not when we start to think hard about what they involve. For example,
if space is bounded, what lies on the other side of the boundary? But
if it's not bounded, we seem saddled with an infinite amount of matter
-- which implies multiple identical universes.

The concept of free will poses similar paradoxes: either human choices
are caused or they are not, but either way we can't seem to make sense
of free will. A lot of philosophy is like that; a familiar concept we
use all the time turns puzzling and paradoxical once we try to make
systematic sense of it. Pinker has fun detailing the natural errors to
which the human mind is prone when trying to reason statistically or
economically; human specimens are notoriously poor at reasoning in
these matters. Even more mortifying, our prized intuitive physics,
foundation of all our thought, is pretty bad as physics: projectiles
don't need impetus to keep them in steady motion, no matter what
Aristotle and common sense may say. As Newton taught us, motion, once
it begins, is preserved without the pressure of a continuously applied
force -- as when a meteor keeps moving in a straight line, though no
force maintains this motion. And relativity and quantum theory violate
commonsense physics at every turn.

Our natural concepts are as much a hindrance to thought as they are a
springboard for it. When we try to turn our minds away from their
primitive biological tasks toward modern science and
industrial-electronic society we struggle and fall into fallacies;
it's an uphill battle to keep our concepts on track. Our innate
"common sense" is riddled with error and confusion -- not all of it
harmless (as with the economically naive ideas about what constitutes
a "fair price").

Pinker also has three bulky chapters on the social aspects of
language, dealing with naming and linguistic innovation in general,
with obscenity and taboo words, and with politeness and authority
relations in speech. The chapter on naming achieves something I
thought was impossible: it gives an accurate exposition of the
philosopher Saul Kripke's classic discussion of proper names by a
nonphilosopher -- the gist of which is that the reference of a name is
fixed not by the descriptive information in the mind of the speaker
but by a chain of uses stretching back to an initial identification.
For example, I refer to a certain Greek philosopher with the name
"Plato" in virtue of the chain of uses that link my present use with
that of ancient Greeks who knew him, not in virtue of having in my
mind some description that picks him out uniquely from every other
Greek philosopher.

Apart from this, Pinker worries at the question of fashions in names
and how they change. He refutes such popular theories as that names
are taken from public figures or celebrities; usually, the trend is
already in place -- and anyway the name "Humphrey" never took off,
despite the star of Casablanca. It is fascinating to read that in the
early part of the twentieth century the following names were reserved
primarily for men: Beverly, Dana, Evelyn, Gail, Leslie, Meredith,
Robin, and Shirley. But not much emerges about why names change as
they do, besides some platitudes about the need for elites to stand
out by adopting fashions different from the common herd.

I very much enjoyed the chapter on obscenity, which asks the difficult
question of how words deemed taboo differ from their inoffensive
synonyms (e.g., shit and feces). It can't obviously be the referent of
the term, since that is the same, and it isn't merely that the taboo
words are more accurately descriptive (excrement is equally accurate,
but it isn't taboo). Pinker reports, no doubt correctly, that swearing
forces the hearer to entertain thoughts he'd rather not, but that too
fails to distinguish taboo words from their nontaboo synonyms. The
phenomenon is especially puzzling when we note that words can vary
over time in their taboo value: damn used to be unutterable in polite
society, while cunt was once quite inoffensive (Pinker reports a
fifteenth-century medical textbook that reads "in women the neck of
the bladder is short, and is made fast to the cunt").

Of particular interest to the grammarian is the fact that in English
all the impolite words for the sexual act are transitive verbs, while
all the polite forms involve intransitive verbs: fuck, screw, hump,
shag, bang versus have sex, make love, sleep together, go to bed,
copulate. As Pinker astutely observes, the transitive sexual verbs,
like other verbs in English, bluntly connote the nature of the motion
involved in the reported action with an agent and a receiver of that
motion, whereas the intransitive forms are discreetly silent about
exactly how the engaged objects move in space. The physical
forcefulness of the act is thus underlined in the transitive forms but
not in the intransitive ones. None of this explains why some verbs for
intercourse are offensive while others are not, but it's surely
significant that different physical images are conjured up by the
different sexual locutions -- with fuck semantically and syntactically
like stab and have sex like have lunch.

Pinker's discussion of politeness verges closest to platitude --
noting, for example, that bribes cannot usually afford to be overt and
that authority relations are sometimes encoded in speech acts, as with
tu and vous in French. Here he relies heavily on lively examples and
pop culture references, but the ideas at play are thin and rather
forced. But, as I say, he has a tough assignment here -- trying to
extract theoretical substance from something both familiar and
unsystematic. Laying out a game theory matrix, with its rows and
columns of payoffs, for a potential bribe to a traffic cop adds little
to the obvious description of such a situation.

The book returns to its core themes in the final chapter, "Escaping
the Cave." Pinker sums up:

Human characterizations of reality are built out of a recognizable
inventory of thoughts. The inventory begins with some basic units,
like events, states, things, substances, places, and goals. It
specifies the basic ways in which these units can do things: acting,
going, changing, being, having. One event may be seen as impinging on
another, by causing or enabling or preventing it. An action can be
initiated with a goal in mind, in particular, the destination of a
motion (as in loading hay) or the state resulting from a change (as in
loading a wagon). Objects are differentiated by whether they are human
or nonhuman, animate or inanimate, solid or aggregate, and how they
are laid out along the three dimensions of space. Events are conceived
as taking up stretches of time and as being ordered with respect to
one another.
If that strikes you as a bit platitudinous, then such is the lot of
much psychology -- usually the good sort. What is interesting is the
kind of evidence that can be given for these claims and the way they
play out in language and behavior -- not the content of the claims
themselves.

But Pinker is also anxious to reiterate his thesis that our conceptual
scheme is like Plato's cave, in giving us only a partial and distorted
vision of reality. We need to escape our natural way of seeing things,
as well as appreciate its (limited) scope. Plato himself regarded a
philosophical education as the only way to escape the illusions and
errors of common sense -- the cave in which we naturally dwell. Pinker
too believes that education is necessary in order to correct and
transcend our innate cognitive slant on the world. This means,
unavoidably, using a part of our mind to get beyond the rest of our
mind, so that there must be a part that is capable of distancing
itself from the rest. He says little about how this might be possible
-- how that liberating part might operate -- beyond what he has said
about metaphors and the infinity of language. And the question is
indeed difficult: How could the mind ever have the ability to step
outside of itself? Aren't we always trapped inside our given
conceptual scheme? How do we bootstrap ourselves to real wisdom from
the morass of innate confusion?

One reason it is hard to answer this question is that it is obscure
what a concept is to start with. And here there is a real lacuna in
Pinker's book: no account is given of the nature of the basic concepts
that are held to constitute the mind's powers. He tells us at one
point that the theory of conceptual semantics "proposes that word
senses are mentally represented as expressions in a richer and more
abstract language of thought," as if concepts could literally be
symbols in the language of thought. The idea then is that when we
understand a verb like pour we translate it into a complex of symbols
in the brain's innate code (rather like the code used by a computer),
mental counterparts of public words like move, cause, change. But that
leaves wide open the question of how those inner words have meaning;
they can't just be bits of code, devoid of semantic content. We need
to credit people with full-blown concepts at the foundation of their
conceptual scheme -- not just words for concepts.

Pinker has listed the types of concepts that may be supposed to lie at
the foundation, but he hasn't told us what those concepts consist in
-- what they are. So we don't yet know what the stuff of thought is --
only that it must have a certain form and content. Nowhere in the
course of a long book on concepts does Pinker ever confront the really
hard question of what a concept might be. Some theorists have supposed
concepts to be mental images, others that they are capacities to
discriminate objects, others dispositions to use words, others that
they are mythical entities.

The problem is not just that this is a question Pinker fails to answer
or even acknowledge; it is that without an answer it is difficult to
see how we can make headway with questions about what our concepts do
and do not permit. Is it our concepts themselves that shackle us in
the cave or is it rather our interpretations of them, or maybe our
associated theories of what they denote? Where exactly might a concept
end and its interpretation begin? Is our concept of something
identical to our conception of it -- the things we believe about it?
Do our concepts intrinsically blind us or is it just what we do with
them in thought and speech that causes us to fail to grasp them?
Concepts are the material that constitutes thought and makes language
meaningful, but we are very far from understanding what kind of thing
they are -- and Pinker's otherwise admirable book takes us no further
with this fundamental question.

Colin McGinn teaches in the philosophy department at the University of
Miami and is a Cooper Fellow. His last book is Shakespeare's
Philosophy: Discovering the Meaning Behind the Plays.


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