Loaded sentences

Pinker broaches the knotty question of metaphor by quoting the opening sentence of the Declaration of Independence and then, in a deft unpacking, reveals how riddled with spatial metaphors our abstract thought is: "Some people are hanging beneath some other people, connected by cords. As stuff flows by, something forces the lower people to cut the cords and stand beside the upper people, which is what the rules require. They see some onlookers, and clear away the onlookers' view of what forced them to do the cutting." He cites cognitive scientist George Lakoff as the "messiah" of the extreme theory that metaphor is all we have. While he praises some of Lakoff's views, he faults him for refusing to accept the existence of true or false ideas and crediting only ideas with differing levels of usefulness and trendiness. He builds a convincing case, however, that even Lakoff firmly believes in truth and falsity and that Lakoff's theory is thus self-undermining. Pinker, by contrast, champions the mind's ability to make analogies and judge them for aptness or lack thereof. The centrality of metaphor in human thought does not inevitably lead to a flaccid relativism negating everything science and technology have brought us: "Our powers of analogy allow us to apply ancient neural structures to newfound subject matter, to discover hidden laws and systems in nature, and not least, to amplify the expressive power of language itself."

That expressive power is illustrated in a chapter on the relationship between objects and their names and, in particular, on where new words come from. Pinker shows pictures of a spiky shape and a cloudy shape and asks, "Which of these is the malooma, and which is the takata?"

This delightful question, first posed by psychologists Paolo Bozzi and Giovanni Flores d'Arcais in 1967, is almost universally answered by pairing the sound "takata" with the spiky sharpness and "malooma" with the fluffy roundness -- a lovely lesson showing that the connection between sound and meaning is not totally arbitrary.

Pinker's conclusion is an optimistic view of how words and language-based mechanisms of thinking, although prone to error, grant us at least a glimpse of the true nature of the real world, rather than just the shadowy, subjective perception afforded the prisoners in Plato's famous cave.

"The Stuff of Thought" is a complex meditation on language and thought by a scientist whose ideas come not only from extensive psychological experimentation and careful reading of the literature but also from a lifetime of detailed observations of language in the real world -- newspaper articles, TV programs, books, websites and so on.

Although I can't completely accept its arguments, they are invariably engaging and provocative, and the examples Pinker offers are filled with humor and fun. It's good to have a mind as lively and limpid as his bringing the ideas of cognitive science to the public while clarifying them for his scientific colleagues.