''The Stuff of Thought: Language As a Window Into Human Nature'' is a 2007 book by

experimental psychologist Experimental psychology refers to work done by those who apply experimental methods to psychological study and the underlying processes. Experimental psychologists employ human participants and animal subjects to study a great many topics, in ...

Steven Pinker Steven Arthur Pinker (born September 18, 1954) is a Canadian-American cognitive psychologist, psycholinguist, popular science author, and public intellectual. He is an advocate of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind. P ...

. In the book Pinker "analyzes how our words relate to thoughts and to the world around us and reveals what this tells us about ourselves." Put another way, Pinker "probes the mystery of human nature by examining how we use words". The book became a ''New York Times'' best seller.

Summary

Pinker argues that language provides a window into human nature, and that "analyzing language can reveal what people are thinking and feeling." He asserts that language must do two things: # convey a message to an audience, and # negotiate the social relationship between the speaker and the audience. Therefore, language functions at these two levels at all times. For example, a common-place statement such as "If you could pass the salt, that would be great" functions both as a request (though formally not a request) and as a means of being polite or non-offensive (through not directing the audience to overt demands). Pinker says of this example: Through this lens, Pinker asks questions such as "What does the peculiar syntax of swearing tell us about ourselves?" Or put another way, "Just what does the 'fuck' in 'fuck you' actually mean?", - as discussed in the chapter ''The Seven Words You Can't Say on Television''. The arguments contained within ride on the backs of his previous works, which paint

human nature Human nature is a concept that denotes the fundamental dispositions and characteristics—including ways of thinking, feeling, and acting—that humans are said to have naturally. The term is often used to denote the essence of humankind, or ...

as having "distinct and universal properties, some of which are innate – determined at birth by genes rather than shaped primarily by environment."

References

External links

Steven Pinker's Harvard Department of Psychology website
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Douglas Hofstadter Douglas Richard Hofstadter (born February 15, 1945) is an American scholar of cognitive science, physics, and comparative literature whose research includes concepts such as the sense of self in relation to the external world, consciousness, an ...

's review for ''The

Los Angeles Times The ''Los Angeles Times'' (abbreviated as ''LA Times'') is a daily newspaper that started publishing in Los Angeles in 1881. Based in the LA-adjacent suburb of El Segundo since 2018, it is the sixth-largest newspaper by circulation in the Un ...

''

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William Saletan William Saletan is an American writer for '' The Bulwark''. Background and education Saletan, a Jewish native of La Porte, Texas, graduated from Swarthmore College in 1987. Journalism Abortion and contraception Saletan has written extensively ...

's review for ''

The New York Times Book Review ''The New York Times Book Review'' (''NYTBR'') is a weekly paper-magazine supplement to the Sunday edition of ''The New York Times'' in which current non-fiction and fiction books are reviewed. It is one of the most influential and widely rea ...

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Seth Lerer Seth Lerer (born 1955) is an American scholar who specializes in historical analyses of the English language, in addition to critical analyses of the works of several authors, particularly Geoffrey Chaucer. He is a Distinguished Professor of Liter ...

's review for ''The

New York Sun ''The New York Sun'' is an American online newspaper published in Manhattan; from 2002 to 2008 it was a daily newspaper distributed in New York City. It debuted on April 16, 2002, adopting the name, motto, and masthead of the earlier New York ...

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{{DEFAULTSORT:Stuff of Thought, The 2007 non-fiction books Books about cognition Linguistics books Cognitive science literature Works by Steven Pinker English-language books

Summary

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References

External links