All You Direct - Book Reviews

By Stephen Pinker

In one of Plato’s dialogues, the Cratylus, Socrates propounds a number of theories about language, all of which have enjoyed popularity at one time or another ever since. One of the theories is about the importance of language, which is especially important in “distinguishing the nature of things.” Naturally, a property so important has a divine air, and Socrates plays with the idea that the names of things encode secret messages, instilled in them by the gods, which the philosopher, by using etymology, can uncover.

Science long ago discarded what has been called Cratylism. However, in the 20th century, philosophers and then social scientists made the so-called linguistic turn, taking language and its structure as a special product of the mind. Stephen Pinker, a Harvard psycholinguist who has written several best-sellers on this theme, is an intellectual heir of this movement, taking it into some strange places — notably, into the neo-Darwinian framework of evolutionary psychology.

The linguistic turn first occurred in the 1950s, when the leading psychological school was behavioralism. In retrospect, the more radical claims of behaviorism, notably that nothing happens, so to speak, inside the head, but that everything that counts are the observables, was bound to fall, brought down by the weight of its own counter-intuitiveness. Behaviorism received its coup de grace from linguist Noam Chomsky, whose late ’50s review of a book by B.F. Skinner, the most prominent behaviorist, demystified the whole enterprise. Chomsky’s theory of mind, derived from his work on the syntax of language, is that the mind contains innate concepts. We are not born with a tabula rasa, as John Locke claimed, but rather we build upon an innate capacity.

“Tabula rasa” is Latin for “blank slate,” which was the title of Pinker’s 2002 book. Pinker attacked the idea that we are determined by culture, a variant of the idea that we are determined by experience, with enough vigor that “The Blank Slate” could be seen as another of the post-Sept. 11, 2001, rage books that spiked to the top of the charts a few years ago.

Not only did Pinker attack the cultural determinists, but he attacked those who disagreed with his neo-Darwinian take on psychology. Pinker’s contribution to psychology is to have synthesized Chomsky’s conceptual semantics with a gene-centric Darwinism associated with Richard Dawkins. For Pinker, the mind serves the organism in the struggle for survival, and further serves to give the genes an advantage in spreading. The late Stephen J. Gould and his sometimes-collaborator Richard Lewontin are the most prominent opponents of this idea; for them, the stories of optimal adaptation are too good to be true. In reality, they claim, accidents, previous organic templates and the necessity for tradeoffs between the optimal engineering of features and the systematic functioning of the organism provide constraints on the adaptationist story, such as Pinker and others have told it. Pinker’s theory, according to Gould and other critics, ignores the one macrofeature of the human brain that makes it unique — it has adapted to being highly adaptable. Far from being limited by a set program of evolved features, we have learned from neurology how highly plastic the brain really is. It is, in a sense, an organism that requires other humans, since its neural architecture changes with feedback from others.

Pinker’s new book can be seen as a Chomskyian companion to “The Blank Slate.” It will most likely be bought by those who bought the former book, but those readers, expecting more guff about hot-button issues like the innate differences between men and women, might be in for a shock as they plow through the second chapter, aptly titled “Down the Rabbit Hole,” which elaborates a rather complex theory of the semantics of verb use, and takes on the rarified polemics of the third chapter, which defends the classical cognitivist school against the attacks of the connectionists and the linguistic determinists. In other words, Pinker’s book might end up in that category of brainy best-sellers such as “A Brief History of Time” — a book more bought than read.

Pinker organizes the book as a brief for conceptual semantics. This means front-loading the book with the more gnarly philosophical arguments, and attaching the applications of the argument later on. Hence, the last four chapters — on metaphors, proper names, swearing, and manners — are a kind of dessert.

The main course is revealed in a comment Pinker makes about examining the way languages use verbs to “lay bare our ability to flip from one conceptual frame to the other, our habit of using some ideas as metaphors of others and the inventory of fundamental ideas that structure the meanings of sentences and perhaps thought itself.” The stakes here are the same as they are for Plato: language will direct us to the nature of things, or at least the nature of the mind. If Pinker is right, there is a programming language of the mind, upon which all expressive structures are built.

Pinker goes on both to draw the larger inferences of his theory for our experience of the world of time and space and to show how our conceptual menu underlies our cultural practices. His explanation of the two fundamental philosophical theories of names — names as descriptions versus names as references — is a model of lucidity. His debunking of Cratylism, and in general folk etymologies, is funny but sort of sad — some of the colorful stories that are supposedly at the root of words should be true, even if they aren’t. And he has entertaining things to say about Lenny Bruce, censorship, and our predilection for mixing revulsion with icky fluids into our insults and exclamations.

In a critical review of “The Blank Slate,” biologist H. Allan Orr wrote that Pinker “has a habit of making things seem simpler than they are and of doing so in a way that just happens to make his claims more secure and his conclusions more inescapable than they really are.” He seems to have taken that criticism seriously because there is less unfair argument here, and more intellectual generosity, extended even to his “bête noir,” linguistic determinists. He even tells us, while ruminating about the commonness of his first name, that he is a member of a group of scientists with similar first names who have joined an organization to defend Darwinism, with the intention of proving that there are more scientists merely with the name Steve who adhere to the theory of natural selection than there are intelligent design academics. The group was formed partly as a joke, and partly as a memorial to … Stephen Jay Gould. Nice words for Gould? Pinker does seem to have mellowed.