The Language Instinct

Steven Pinker, “The Language Instinct: How The Mind Creates Language” HarperPerennial, (updated) 2007, 448 pps (Paperback) Originally published in 1994.


Another Pinker book, hard to read but again well worth the effort. This book discusses the fact that language is an instinct and although languages are mutually unintelligible, beneath this superficial variation lies the single computational design of Universal grammar, with its nouns and verbs, phrase structures and word structures, cases and auxiliaries, and so on (p. 427).

My Notes:

Pg. 3: In 1959 cognitive science was born. It combines tools from psychology, computer science, linguistics, philosophy, and neurobiology to explain the workings of human intelligence. The science of language, in particular, has seen spectacular advances in the years since. It is these discoveries as well as explaining that language is not a cultural artifact that we learn the way we learn to tell time. Instead, it is a distinct piece of the biological makeup of our brains. Language is a complex, specialized skill, which develops in the child spontaneously, without conscious effort or formal instruction, is deployed without awareness of its underlying logic, is qualitatively the same in every individual, and is distinct from more general abilities to process information or behave intelligently. It is an instinct more or less the same as how spiders know how to spin webs. The most famous argument that language is like an instinct comes from Noam Chomsky, the linguist who first unmasked the intricacy of the system and perhaps the person most responsible for the modern revolution in language and cognitive science.

Pg. 47: The idea that one cannot think without a language is not correct. It was one of those other incorrect facts we have heard all our lives such as the fact that we use only five percent of our brains or that we can be coerced into buying by subliminal messages. Think about it. We have all had the experience of uttering or writing a sentence, then stopping and realizing that it wasn’t exactly what we meant to say. Sometimes it is not easy to find any words that properly convey a thought.
Also, contrary to popular belief, the Eskimos do not have more words for snow than do speakers of English. Some experts have come up with about a dozen, but by such standards English would not be far behind, with snow, sleet, slush, blizzard, avalanche, hail, hardpack, powder, flurry, and dusting and, of course, the ever popular *??!!%*.

Pg. 97: In school your grammar teacher may have taught you: A noun’s the name of any thing: As school or garden, hoop or swing. Verbs tell of something being done: To read, count, sing, laugh, jump, or run. But your teacher did not get it quite right. It is true that most names for persons, places, and things are nouns, but it is not true that most nouns are names for persons, places, or things. There are nouns with all kinds of meanings.
• the destruction of the city (an action)
• the way to San Jose (a path)
• whiteness moves downward (a quality)
• three miles along the path (a measurement in space)
• It takes three hours to solve the problem. (a measurement in time)
• Tell me the answer. (“what the answer is,” a question)
• She is a fool. (a category or kind)
• a meeting (an event)
• the square root of minus two (an abstract concept)
• He finally kicked the bucket. (no meaning at all)

Likewise, though words for things being done, such as count and jump, are usually verbs, verbs can be other things, like mental states (know, like), possession (own, have), and abstract relations among ideas (falsify, prove). Conversely, a single concept, like “being interested,” can be expressed by different parts of speech:
• her interest in fungi (noun)
• Fungi are starting to interest her more and more. (verb)
• She seems interested in fungi. Fungi seem interesting to her. (adjective)
• Interestingly
• the fungi grew an inch in an hour. (adverb)

Pg. 336: Quantitative research corroborates that not only are very general traits like IQ, extroversion, and neuroticism partly heritable, but so are specific ones like degree of religious feeling, vocational interests, and opinions about the death penalty, disarmament, and computer music.

Pg. 341: Chomsky and some of his fiercest opponents agree on one thing: that a uniquely human language instinct seems to be incompatible with the modern Darwinian theory of evolution, in which complex biological systems arise by the gradual accumulation over generations of random genetic mutations that enhance reproduction success. However, you do not have to make a choice between believing Darwin or believing that language is an instinct. Though we know few details about how the language instinct evolved, there is no reason to doubt that the principal explanation is the same as for any other complex instinct or organ, Darwin’s theory of natural selection.

Pg. 353: Evolution did not make a ladder; it made a bush. We did not evolve from chimpanzees. We and chimpanzees evolved from a common ancestor, now extinct. Modern Homo sapiens, which is thought to have appeared about 200,000 years ago and to have spread out of Africa 100,000 years ago probably had language. It is hard to believe that they lacked language, given that biologically they were us, and all biologically modern humans have language.