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

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The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature
by Steven Pinker
from Viking Adult

Customer Reviews:

• Avg. Customer Rating: 4.0 / 5.0

• Still a Good Read in Spite of its Flaws
  I confess to being an unabashed fan of Steven Pinker's books on language (I am a multilingual life-long student of linguistics with time to read and study in retirement), which is why I bought this book.
  I agree it has some serious flaws that have been mentioned in negative reviews, such as political and social beliefs intruding where they do not really belong. (Well, he's a psychologist, not a linguist, so I don't expect anything different.)
  Still, the book is quite fascinating and contains some... more info

• Good but dense
  I am a Pinker fan and I enjoyed this book but it is closely written with much detailed linguistic background to support Pinker's ideas on the relation between cognition and language. Entertaining sections include the one on dirty words and his critique of Fodor's "Extreme Nativism":
  "Fodor is a brilliant, witty, and pugnacious scholar who, among other things, helped to lay the conceptual foundations for cognitive science and to develop the scientific study of sentence comprehension.5 His notorious... more info

• Pinker overrated
  Pinker is a walking repository and critic of the ideas and written expressions of others, and he's the man to explain, say, Chomsky to you (if you can stomach it), but he's stuck in academdom. Everything I have experienced Steve saying somehow disappoints me--it's fluffed up, and can be condensed into smaller packs of information. He seems, perhaps innately, to be constructing an impenetrable wall of unnecessary denseness in an effort, woont u kno it, to simplify and clarify "language". The result is gunk... more info

• Great book that covers the most important part of linguistics
  The Stuff of Thought is a book that covers the interaction between language and reality. I've read some other books on linguistics, but I found this to be the most interesting. Part of it is the fact that Pinker is a good author that bridges the gap between popular science and real research. The other part is that I think that semantics is the most important, and interesting part of linguistics.
  Steven does a great job of presenting his views on how language shows us the inner workings of the brain,... more info

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