Eclectic Curiosity

The Stuff of Thought


Posted on December 7th, 2008, by Steve Hardy in Archives, Miscellany. No Comments

I just finished reading Steven Pinker’s bestselling The Stuff of Thought, the Harvard experimental psychologist’s latest book about how the mind works. For some reason I wasn’t expecting much from it but by the end it left me wanting more.

This is a great book for curious people. (That last sentence could even be open to analysis.) Pinker eloquently goes through case after case and example after example of how and why we use language to convey ideas, and likewise how ideas shape our language. Grammar, semantics, pragmatics, inferences, naming trends, cursing – so many things that we take for granted are dissected with the goal of presenting human nature back to ourselves. Good stuff.





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