To Notice and to Learn

Observations on ideas, human mind, and the world around us

Tag Archive for ‘Steven Pinker’

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Summary: The Stuff of Thought, by Steven Pinker

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 […]

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Summary: The Language Instinct, by Steven Pinker

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 […]

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