In a Part I of this post, I summarized what I thought were the most interesting points in Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct. Now, I’d like to continue on to his, in some ways, more impressive book, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature (link on Amazon.com). Since they are both related to language, how might I characterize the relationship between these two books? Here’s what I […]
Okay, in a previous post summarizing the book ‘Nudge’, I described the concept of nudges, in which you can reap large benefits from very small, seemingly effortless changes. In my last post I described an example idea to help conserve napkins, which relied on a nudge to (hopefully) create enough motivation for people to undertake a small effort. Now I would like to offer an example of what I think […]
There has been a revolution in the field of linguistics over the past 50 years, initiated by the work of Noam Chomsky. Prior to him, social scientists thought, consistent with the dominant Behaviorist perspective of the day (and also with common sense), that children picked up language from those around them through simple exposure, imitation, and reinforcement. Chomsky was the first to question this, and raised as counter-evidence the rather […]
To Notice and to Learn 