The Stuff of Thought
author Steven Pinker possesses that rare combination of scientific aptitude and verbal eloquence that enables him to provide lucid explanations of deep and powerful ideas. His previous books—including the Pulitzer Prize finalist The Blank Slate—have catapulted him into the limelight as one of today's most important and popular science writers.Now, in The Stuff of Thought, Pinker marries two of the subjects he knows best: language and human nature. The result is a fascinating look at how our words explain our nature. What does swearing reveal about our emotions? Why does innuendo disclose something about relationships? Pinker reveals how our use of prepositions and tenses taps into peculiarly human concepts of space and time, and how our nouns and verbs speak to our notions of matter. Even the names we give our babies have important things to say about our relations to our children and to society.With his signature wit and style, Pinker takes on scientific questions like whether language affects thought, as well as forays into everyday life—why is bulk e-mail called spam and how do romantic comedies get such mileage out of the ambiguities of dating? The Stuff of Thought is a brilliantly crafted and highly readable work that will appeal to fans of readers of everything from The Selfish Gene and Blink to Eats, Shoots & Leaves.
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10recommend
18mentions
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2008–2023years
61% recommend39% neutral
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What Hacker News says
- This is a great diverging discussion about the "censorship" and the commenting style in public forums. Let me add something: when I was writing the original comment that started all this, I wanted it to be funny, catchy, snarky, and karma-point-worthy. So, I decided to put a swear word as a stylistic choice. Then, to add some extra to the short comment, I decided to poke fun at the whole FCC bleeping regulation. Here, I will warmly recommend a book dedicated to bleeping over the seven "unspeakable words": the famous Steven Pinker's famous book "The Stuff of Thought".
Now, about the number of asterisks: I really didn't think that much about this, I kind of think I counted the right number of letters, but then there is no caret overwrite mode in the bleeping browser, which is yet another story...
- To give a full list would be impossible, simply because the book is so dense, plus it wouldn't make much sense without context. The "Reception" section of the book's wikipedia entry gives a good general overview of what's good and bad about it[0].
Basically, McGrilchrist makes claims about what we know about how the brain works with a certainty that we simply don't have, let alone draw conclusions from it as if they're facts. He's also prone to "start from a viewpoint and find evidence that matches it"-line of thought (Popper would not be happy...). But if you are aware of that and appreciate more how the whole overarching narrative fits together it's a very enlightening book with very inspiring lines of thought.
Anyway, in my experience it goes very well with:
- "Metaphors We Live By" and other works by Lakoff & Johnson, the book that introduced the concept of "conceptual metaphor" to the world. They are referred to a lot and having read them helps you spot when McGilchrist might be misinterpreting their work.
- "The Stuff of Thought" by Steven Pinker, who asides from writing a really fun book on language, also gives some good arguments tempering Lakoff & Johnson's overenthusiasm a bit without being dismissive of them (although in their defense, metaphors are criminally underrated in their importance to thinking).
- most books by Oliver Sacks, who is more qualified to make statements about the brain than anyone else on this list, but "Seeing Voices" especially, because it really dives into the connection between language and brain development.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Master_and_His_Emissary#Re...
- The apropos book is Steven Pinker's The Stuff of Thought. [0]
(language <~~> culture) ~~> world-view ~~> intention ~~> behavior ~~> result.
- Language affects how you think, there is no question about that.
Quite to the contrary, it is an old and tired notion which has been refuted and refuted and refuted (see, e.g., the third chapter of "The Stuff of Thought" by Steven Pinker) and yet it can't die because some people just find it too appealing to let go.
- Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan - Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The (Mis)behavior of Markets - Benoit Mandelbrot
The Stuff of Thought - Steven Pinker
The Logic of Scientific Discovery - Karl Popper
The Four Steps to Epiphany - Steven G. Blank
- Steven Pinker discusses this topic in his books:
- "The Language Instinct" covers it in detail - "The Stuff of Thought", in which he pretty much responds directly to this article.
I definitely side with his views on this one, though it's too complicated to discuss here, and he does too good a job not to recommend the read (which is why I'm pointing to his books!).
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