The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language
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- ISBN13: 9780061336461
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
In this classic, the world’s practiced on language and mind lucidly clarifies everything you permanently wanted to know about language: how it works, how children learn it, how it changes, how the brain computes it, and how it evolved. With deft use of examples of humor and wordplay, Steven Pinker weaves our vast knowledge of language into a compelling tale: language is a human instinct, wired into our brains by evolution. The Language Instinct received the William James Book Prize from the American Psychological Association and the Public Interest Award from the Linguistics Society of America. This edition includes an update on advances in the science of language since The Language Instinct was first published.
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Verbal Behavior by B.F. Skinner is the only book on this theme that matters. To see us going backwards from science to superstition is pathetic. Steven Pinker is an embarrassment to science and understanding. If you want understanding read Verbal Behavior by B.F. Skinner. Don’t read this psuedo-science.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
How’d you like that grammar, Mr. Pinker? Perhaps you’d like to analyze it for me. If you did, I still don’t reflect you’d know what I meant. That’s the problem – the brain doesn’t make language, it processes language. You don’t know the sun by studying the things it shines its light on.
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5
I take it I’m allowed to comment lacking having read more than a quarter of it. I establish it utterly dull. I couldn’t read it. The leader works at a “Center for Cognitive Neuroscience”, but this is in no way neuroscience, nor any science. It’s a load of dusty ancient linguistics. It chats into additional material at times, but that’s the core. It has some cursory reports on psychological experiments, but it doesn’t argue systematically with them. Looks like the chapters I didn’t read are riddled with speculations about evolution.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
As a “descriptive-linguist-observer-scientist,” Pinker makes a number of observations about human development and language that are of interest but few that seem all that penetrating or edifying. (Tell me things, Stephen, that I didn’t already know or couldn’t easily have figured out for myself.) Moreover, he never, to my mind, establishes a clear honor between thought and language (assuming there is one), so that in effect he seems to be adage small more than all human beings are born with the capacity to “reflect,” to interpret their own experience. Finally, one wishes he could complement his scientific curiosity with a “theological” or critical one as well. The Gospel of John asserts that in the beginning was the “Word,” which became human. If language, then, can be claimed as a “gift,” as our spiritual inheritance, then it follows that language is capable of being “abused,” possibly even wasted. What counts equally as much as the phenomenon of language is the way it is organized, codified, and reinvented by humans. If all cultures and civilizations have had the same access to “language,” not all have exhibited the same responsiveness (as Shakespeare’s, for example) to “speechifying” and its potential to the fullest realization of the world of self. I marvel why this is–but I doubt that Pinker, for all his enthusiastic descriptivism, gives the question much thought.
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
People who read this book have to have excellent education in philosophy (Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein) to see through it. Pinker starts with “proving” that mental grammar is innate and ends up with adage that there should be a common human scenery that will make us all brothers. Why weren’t we brothers long ago then? This book is filled with similar silly thinking. I am so astonished that I nearly fell off the chair that this man can be considered an intellectual. It can only take place in the US!
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5