Steven Pinker calls language a window into human nature
Photo by eye2eye
Our use of language reveals who we are, according to Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker.
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.
Our thanks to:
Steven Pinker
Johnstone Family Professor
Department of Psychology
Harvard University
Cambridge, MA
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