Earthsky Interviews
Private: Steven Pinker calls language a window into human nature
11-07-2007 - Health
Steven Pinker: _The meanings of words and how they’re used can expose our thoughts and feeling and social relationships. As we understand the semantics of tense, for example, we get a window into the human concept of time._
Pinker said that verbs, for example – to cause, to make, to go – can be seen as an alphabet of the basic concepts with which we’re born. He said we comprehend more complexity through metaphor – or simple comparisons.
Steven Pinker: _We weren’t born with ideas about physics, chess and love affairs, but probably with a smaller stock of ideas like cause and go and make and goal, and metaphor allows us to co-opt simple concrete thoughts to deal with complex abstract situations._
We might say, for example, “the economy rose and fell.†That’s using a simple concept – rising and falling – to express an abstract concept.
Steven Pinker: _Metaphor reveals some of the ways in which a mind evolved for reasoning about rocks and social alliances and so on could reach for such abstract concepts as we use in science and math and government and philosophy._
Steven Pinker’s new book on language is called “The Stuff of Thought”:http://www.amazon.com/Stuff-Thought-Language-Window-Nature/dp/0670063274.
*Our thanks to:*
“Steven Pinker”:http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/about/index.html
Johnstone Family Professor
Department of Psychology
Harvard University
Cambridge, MA