Loaded sentences

Pinker exploits his wonderfully keen faculty for linguistic observation to pry open the human head and discover its secrets. Sometimes this technique works terrifically, other times not so well. Consider his claim that "the causative construction subscribes to a theory of free will." That is, we cannot say "Bill laughed Debbie" as a substitute for "Bill made Debbie laugh," whereas we can say "Bill bent the hanger" instead of "Bill made the hanger bend." The idea is that because Debbie has free will, Bill's antics can contribute to her laughing but can't be its total cause, whereas the will-less hanger is totally coerced by Bill's action.

Pinker offers similar examples, and his idea of microclasses seems applicable, but I managed to come up with a fair number of counterexamples, such as "Bill cheered Mary up" (so Mary cheered up), or even "Stengel pitched Ford in Game 6" (so Ford pitched in Game 6). There's an echo of the notion of free will in the reluctance of verbs like "laugh" and "cry" to enter into causative constructions, but it's hardly a universal feature of the intransitive verbs that apply to people.

Pinker would like language to be as precise a guide to the mind's machinery as the behavior of particles in force fields is a guide to the laws of physics. He sees linguistic regularities abounding, and he tries using them to penetrate the hidden "language of thought," whose most critical ingredients are "ethereal notions of space, time, causation, possession, and goals." Although I'm less sanguine than Pinker about language's regularity -- and, indeed, about the existence of a "language of thought" -- I find his thesis well worth contemplating.

In pursuit of it, Pinker spells out three competing theories about the relationship between words and thinking and then attempts to demolish them. One is the truly bizarre theory of philosopher Jerry Fodor that Pinker calls "Extreme Nativism." According to this theory, every last one of our concepts is innate (including "doorknob," "dishwasher," "trombone" and "photosynthesis"). Wisely, Pinker devotes little effort to dismantling such profound silliness. He next takes on "Radical Pragmatics," the idea that words have such fluid meanings that any theory of fixed word meanings is impossible. An example he cites is "The ham sandwich wants his check." Here, of course, "ham sandwich" refers to the customer rather than the edible. The cognitive scientist Gilles Fauconnier has explored such usages and many other related mysteries of language and thought in great detail in a marvelous series of books, beginning in 1994 with "Mental Spaces" and most recently in "The Way We Think," co-written with Mark Turner. I find it odd that the author of "How the Mind Works" never cites the authors of "The Way We Think."