The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature BY Steven Pinker

New York Times bestselling author Steven Pinker possesses that rare combination of scientific aptitude and verbal eloquence that enables him to provide lucid explanations of deep and powerful ideas. His previous books—including the Pulitzer Prize finalist The Blank Slate—have catapulted him into the limelight as one of today’s most important and popular science writers.

Now, in The Stuff of Thought, Pinker marries two of the subjects he knows best: language and human nature. The result is a fascinating look at how our words explain our nature. What does swearing reveal about our emotions? Why does innuendo disclose something about relationships? Pinker reveals how our use of prepositions and tenses taps into peculiarly human concepts of space and time, and how our nouns and verbs speak to our notions of matter.

Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language by Steven Pinker

Irregular verbs! The very thought is enough to give anyone who has struggled with them a headache. In Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language, MIT professor and evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker has taken that scourge of language students and used them ingeniously to throw light on how our minds work and languages evolve.

Pinker, a Montreal native whose wit and good looks have made him something of a scientific superstar, has written two other books for the intelligent layperson: The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (1994) and How the Mind Works (1998). The first explained current scientific thinking on why and how we speak. It argued that humans who could speak had an advantage in the evolutionary sweepstakes. The second explored other characteristics that appear to have been shaped by natural selection: falling in love, smiling, and liking sweet things, to name only a few.

How The Mind Works by Steven Pinker

 Theories of mind have always been shaped around images, metaphors, and analogies. The dominant picture of mind since the Renaissance--it is common to classical empiricism, which embraced consciousness, and modern behaviorism, which eschewed it--is the tabula rasa: the blank ledger upon which the environment leaves its trace as the mind is given whatever structure and content it finally possesses. Originally, the mind is conceived to be neutral, void, unbiased, plastic, undifferentiated--a mere vacuum awaiting the rush of sensory experience. The mind is able to copy experience, to detect its regularities, to order its deliverances into categories; but innately it is just a formless sponge soaking up the environmental contingencies. Behavior, in consequence, is under no innate constraint or predisposition; it simply reflects the experience of the organism, whatever that may be. Everything mental is up for grabs. There is no human nature. Our essence is nothingness.

The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature is a best-selling 2002 book by Steven Pinker arguing against tabula rasa models of the social sciences. Pinker argues that human behavior is substantially shaped by evolutionary psychological adaptations. The book was nominated for the 2003 Aventis Prizes and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Pinker argues that modern science has challenged three "linked dogmas" that constitute the dominant view of human nature in intellectual life:

• the blank slate (the mind has no innate traits) - empiricism
• the noble savage (people are born good and corrupted by society) - romanticism
• the ghost in the machine (each of us has a soul that makes choices free from biology)^[1] - mind/body dualism
  

The Language Instinct: The New Science of Language and Mind by Steven Pinker

As the title suggests, Pinker's The Language Instinct supports the theory that language is innate and that humans have a common "universal grammar". This is a major theme of his book. Another is the correction of common misconceptions about language and the refutation of popular "factoids" with no basis in reality. (A whole chapter is devoted to refuting the arguments of language "mavens", pedants who worry more about normative grammatical rules than clear writing or the realities of human language.) ButThe Language Instinct is actually a fairly comprehensive introduction to linguistics.

Pinker begins with a quick survey of the most obvious evidence for the innateness of language — the growth of creoles from pidgins, the existence of sign languages, the even distribution of