Outstanding!
I've intended to write a review about this book (and the others I've read by him).
While I can't agree with all of his observations (or more accurately ... "points of view") Mr. Pinker is one smart and insightful thinker. He's a good writer, too, but I'll put up with lousy prose if the notion is worth reading about.
If you're new to the topic (c'est moi!), I'd surely recommend reading his books in the order he wrote them along with some Chomsky. My first introduction to his work was The Blank Slate (a very scary book), but after reading that I went back to Pinker's beginning to educate myself in his point of view.
The The Language Instinct provides more than just a peek at who we learn language, but inserts the formulas for learning in general, the commonality of different cultures and even different evolutionary eras. His sometimes touching, sometimes clinical, always vivid recounts that he discovered through his intensive and provocative research about the deaf, the voiceless, the varieties, the cultural barriers that have all been crossed because human beings share this one universal characteristic of "language" which is truly "instinctive" gives a person pause to reconsider WHAT ELSE? about our species is beyond the "nurture" and is mostly "nature"!
I've read all his books through The Blank Slate at least twice. I still can't come to terms with his entire point of view, but I get a little closer each time.
You won't quit thinking about it, once you read his books!
A well-written guide to a theory that's looking more and more doubtful
This book argues that human language is too complex to be something we learn after birth, like swimming or driving a car. Pinker believes that language is innate, the result of complex rules that we are born with and that are generated from a specific part of the brain. It's even suggested that there is a specific "language gene" in our DNA.
After over 3 decades after the popularization of Noam Chomsky's nativist theory that language is innate, someone finally wrote a book that explains it in simple, easy-to-understand terms. The problem is, its beginning to look like this book came at the twilight of the nativist theory's existence.
Language might look like a unique, one-of-a-kind ability. It may seem strange that we can speak our native language so well, yet have so much trouble with foreign languages as adults.
But actually, childhood is a time when we learn a great deal of mind-bogglingly complex mental tasks that are difficult to learn as adults.
Take vision, for example- we often take our ability to see and gauge angles and depth as a given, but rather than being genetic, its actually a complex mental process that we learn after birth. There are cases of blind people that receive their sight in adulthood through breakthrough surgery. But rather than simply gazing at their wife for the first time, they often don't know how to comprehend what they're seeing. They have to conciously learn that objects that enlarge in their field of vision are actually getting closer. And they often have to re-learn, for examples, what their dog looks like from several angles. At first, it appears to be shrinking on either side when it turns to face them. In the book An Anthropologist on Mars, Oliver Sacks reported that one such patient simply gave up on trying to understand what his eyes were telling him and went back to being blind.
By the same token, language could be something we acquire during a critical period in childhood. As amazingly complex as it is mentally, so is learning to see, and the balancing act of walking on two legs. With time these processes look so natural it looks genetic. Of course, our DNA dictates that we have a larnyx to speak with, and we seem instinctively wired to pick out and learn speech (barring a disorder such as autism). But still, there's an acquisition period after birth where our minds hashed out the details. It's called an acquisition period because it's acquired, not because its handed down letter-by-letter and rule-by-rule in the DNA. That's why language differs so drastically in grammar and phonology from language to language, because so much of it -not so little of it- is worked out in the environment beyond the womb.
As far as giving a well-written, entertaining and easy-to-understand breakdown of Chomsky's theories, this book is great. If you want to understand the nativist approach, give it a chance. But take it with a grain of salt. As entertaining as it is, it's basically the infomercial view of how language works, and it's hard for me to give it a good rating when it's beginning to look more and more like this theory is wrong about language.
To learn about the competing theory, check out Rethinking Innateness: A Connectionist Perspective on Development, by Jeffrey Elman et al. It's heavier going than this book, but much more convincing and worth the read.
Elegantly Expressed Claptrap
Steven Pinker lost me as a buyer of his thesis with the very second sentence of his book:
"For you and I belong to a species with a remarkable ability: we can shape events in other's brains with exquisite precision".
It you take that for granted, Pinker's book will seem compelling and not especially controversial. Steven Pinker clearly takes it for granted, perhaps because he can't conceive of how we could possibly communicate effectively and coherently if it were not true.
Consider the following, which I think perfectly encapsulates the world view Pinker can't conceive of, by Ogden Nash:
Caught in a mesh of living veins,
In cell of padded bone,
He loneliest is when he pretends
That he is not alone.
We'd free the incarcerate race of man
That such a doom endures
Could only you unlock my skull,
Or I creep into yours.
To my way of thinking, it is the very fact that we *can't* "shape events in other's brains with exquisite precision" - or with any reliable certainty at all, that describes the human condition. The frisson created by precisely that ambiguity underpins all communication; it is the source of irony, tragedy, comedy, invention and imagination. Any theory of language which denies that fundamental contingency of human communication (as this one does) is going to have to prove it, and displacing that onus is a heavy task indeed.
Pinker's psycho-linguistics makes precisely that denial, by holding that all human communication - every language - shares an inate, evolutionary programmed Universal Grammar, precisely because Pinker can't conceive how else human communication could be possible.
I'm no academic, and certainly I have no background in linguistics. Given that this theory - which is from the same tradition as Noam Chomsky's - has been the ascendancy amongst academic linguistics for the best part of the last thirty years, Steven Pinker being one of the leading "normal scientists" within the paradigm (if I should be so bold as to use that word), and that The Language Instinct is considered fairly widely to be his magnum opus, I was expecting to have my naive relativistic assumptions carefully and systematically dissected, then annihilated, one by one.
So imagine my surprise to find that in the place of carefully drawn arguments and compelling statistical data, one finds a tissue of anecdotal arguments carefully selected to fit the theory, arguments from authority ("Chomsky is one of the ten most cited writers in all of the humanities"), dubious suppositions in place of statistical data (the "it is difficult to imagine the following grammatical construction being used" sort of thing), begged questions, non sequiturs, and Roger Penrose-style irrelevant scientific waffle - especially as regards evolution - and a decided absence of any consideration of competing theories of linguistics - and straw men versions of those which do rate a mentioned.
In short, Steven Pinker employs just about every illegitimate arguing technique in the book. His theory completely fails to account for metaphor (metaphor is barely mentioned in the book), nor the incremental development of language, the evolution of different languages with different grammars and vocabularies. At times Pinker is forced to argue that the grammar of our language is sometimes different from the words we actually speak and write, containing unspoken "inaudible symbols" representing a word or phrase which has been moved elsewhere in the sentence, so the sentence "The car was put in the garage", according to Pinker's Universal Grammar should technically be rendered as: "was put the car in the garage", and the construction we use can only be explained by movement of "The car" and the insertion in its place of an inaudible "trace":
"[The car] was put [trace] in the garage".
Now, again I am no technical linguist, but this has all the hallmarks of pure bull manure to me.
Finally, Pinker is at pains to point out that Universal Grammar is only ever applicable to oral language: written language didn't arise for centuries after oral grammar "evolved" as a phenotype.
But this hardly helps Pinker, since (as he himself points out, with reference to a transcript of the Watergate Tapes) when people talk in ordinary conversation they almost *never* use complete grammatical sentences: they interrupt themselves, they rely on physical gestures, they break off in mid stream and start a new thought, they don't punctuate (there's no unequivocal punctuation in spoken English), all the time.
As is fashionable amongst the "reductivist" and "evolutionary" set these days (a set I would otherwise, in general terms, consider myself in agreement with), relativist arguments are scorned. But Pinker's paradigm implies that, provided we are competent in constructing our own sentences, we should all understand each other perfectly, all the time: there should be no ambiguity; no room for miscontrual; no possibility for evolution in ideas or language. It is difficult to see how anyone could believe such a thing. But neither the structure of language and grammar nor its practical use needs to be perfect for effective communication *at some level* to be possible, and surely that is all that is needed. The beauty of the contingent view of language, which Pinker seems unable to appreciate, is how it can account for the missed margin of communication which might explain the everyday cultural and interpretative problems we all face, and the figurative and metaphorical power we all find at our disposal. Ogden Nash's dilemma is our dilemma, however much Steven Pinker might wish it were otherwise.
An earlier reviewer has mentioned Geoffrey Sampson's "the Language Instinct Debate" as a compelling antidote to Pinker's world view. Having recently read it (on the strength of that recommendation), I would firmly agree. In perhaps an ill-advisedly grumpy tone, Sampson - whose position at the University of Sussex inevitably means his academic profile is lower than Pinker's or Chomsky's - systematically and convincingly annihilates many of the arguments (such as they are) in Pinker's work.
Olly Buxton
Chomsky Meets Gladwell
I stumbled upon this title last summer while searching Amazon for something interesting to read. Skipping over it at that point for one reason or another, however, I was again recommended this text as a supplement for a Linguistics course in which I am enrolled this fall. This is certainly no textbook in Linguistics, but it does serve as an interesting, easy-to-read work that makes contemporary, Chomsky-driven Linguistics (especially with regard to Universal Grammar and Cognitive Science) highly accessible. Pinker's writing, while sometimes manic and even unclear, still manages to captivate and seize attention easily in the same manner as other recent nonfiction texts (Malcolm Gladwell's are two such examples). With an intended audience of linguistic-laymen readers, Pinker has certainly succeeded in making boring textbook linguistics interesting, in furnishing his text with pertinent examples, and in bringing contemporary linguistics to the masses. As other reviewers have noted, one should remain skeptical and critical of Pinker's proposed theories (as is necessary with all such writing), but I would certainly recommend this text to anyone even slightly interested in the subject.
Left-Brainers Lack Empathy.
The language instinct is a set of interrelated capacities and functions in the brain and body that produce speech (and also writing and signing). Pinker calls this unity of parts and potentialities "modules." This book is his effort to make the case for his theory of how our language module operates.
Pinker seems to overstate the novelty of the notion that structures and functions in the brain form modules. The theory that natural selection has produced a brain with particular structures that perform specialized functions has its roots in Nineteenth Century neurology, when Broca's Area and Wernicke's Area were named. Hence, there is nothing new in the idea that the brain has "modules," which are neuro-pathways connecting parts within the brain, and connecting certain parts of the brain to specific parts in the body.
Pinker's main project is to show how the love of his life can be used to explain the workings of language. He loves the idea that what ordinary folks think of as the mind, is actually a highly sophisticated computational device. For him, the mind is like a hand-held computer, but with two exceptions. First, it is more convenient to carry it in one's head, which is why nature put it there. Second, it is far more sophisticated than any computer yet devised (although the artificial intelligence fans are catching up). Mind, then, is the computational brain in operation. Language is an instance of these operations.
I see at least two huge problems with Pinker's starting point. Since he never addresses these problems, he does not overcome them. Therefore, in my opinion, he has failed at his aim of explaining how language works.
First, to make the points that Pinker sets out to make, he must go to extremes in his presentation, which result in an awkward scientific theory rather than an elegant one. He must engage in a little intellectual hedging, if not dishonesty, and use such mentalistic terms as "meaning," "intention," "intuition," and "mind," to make his case for language use as a function of computations. He uses these terms throughout the book. Yet, there are no entries for these terms in either his glossary or his index. Small wonder, these terms are inconsistent with his beloved mechanical model of mind (as being a computational brain). This tactic is reminiscent of FDR hiding his crutches from public view. It requires quite a bit of charity from the reader.
His bias also leads him to devise explanations that first function to preserve his interpretive framework, and only secondly to describe and explain the operations of his chosen subject matter, language. Consider the mechanistic metaphors he uses, so that he can twist the subject matter to fit his general theory of mind as machine. He mentions, for example, that the brain is "wired," for speech, and various communication "programs." Of course, the brain has neither wires nor programs in it. It is a glob of gelatin-like tissue with trillions of nerves forming axons, dendrites, and synapses. The brain is in fact an organism, not a machine. It functions as organisms function, not as machines function.
To describe and explain how organisms operate requires a theoretical framework that is appropriate to organisms. Hence, the machine framework just will not do. Using it is like trying to pound a square peg into a round hole. The computer framework is a great fit for explaining computer operations, but its inapt for human operations. Thus, Pinker's approach reveals a great lack of empathy insofar as it disregards the intuitively apparent existence of such mental qualities as mind, meaning, intention, etc. In this, Pinker's theories are no more than an extension of the widely discredited and out of date behaviorism.
Pinker has a long discussion about the "parser" in our brains. It is a device that computes which words or phrases constitute the head, or main subject, of a communication. But he makes no mention of the fact that communication begins with the intent of one person to convey some meaning to another person. Hence, the main subject of a communication derives its existence not from its place in a computational diagram (Pinker loves diagrams), but from the intention of the speaker. The listener gets it using his own knowledge of the language plus a little human empathy. The computational model assumes an extreme left-brain bias, which cannot account for the understanding of poetry or music lyrics, or the symbolic meaning conveyed by art.
My second big objection to Pinker's thesis is that it contains a poison pill, which is definitely toxic to anyone who swallows his theory. What is implied about a person's opinion of humanity when he insists that the language module and our minds are but computational machines? A machine is a thing, and worthy of value primarily to the extent that it is useful. Thus, to say that humans are machines, even though far more complex than the other kind of machines, is to impute use value to humans. But very few self-respecting humans would accept being valued solely for their use. Human dignity demands that people be valued for their uniqueness, and that this be a different category of value than their usefulness. Pinker does not see the difference.
Incredibly, this value blindness leads him to conclude his book with a preposterous political claim. He proclaims that his discovery that all human language is based on an inherited set of universal computational devices and rules will, once widely taught and understood, foster "human unity and brotherhood." But what kind of "unity and brotherhood" can be based on mutual denigration? There is a contradiction of value logic in the new Pinker social contract that says you value me as a machine, and I'll value you as a machine, and on the basis of this equality we will live in unity and brotherhood.
One more point: the jokes are great! If there is a "cognitive instinct" for humor, then Pinker's got it. A psychologist with a great sense of humor, but who is devoid of empathy, should stick to writing humor, and forget about psychology.
For my critique of Pinker's Blank Slate see the Empathic Science Institute website.
