Pinker is as much of a twit as his hair suggests: The Language Instinct is a miserable pile of unsupported and unsupportable conclusions, straw man attacks, hypocrisy leap-frogging into doublethink, shoddy reasoning, knee-jerk contrarianism, indeliberate obtusity, and gut-feeling argumentation. Pinker tries to synthesize the ideas of people smarter than he is (Chomsky, mostly), and many of these are perfectly fine the way they were originally formulated; they no longer are after Pinker is throug...

Steven Pinker and I should be natural enemies. He's a representative of what I consider to be the smarmy, science-precludes-all-else school of hung-up modernist reductionists, while I fly the flag of what he considers to be the wishy-washy, Nietzsche-damaged academic Left. And yet it's difficult for me not to have some respect for his project.When he's not making potshots at relativism(s), he is generally quite lucid and charming, and throughout writes with a clear, approachable logic. By cogita...

There were some parts of this that were interesting and worth reading for, but overall it was a waffly and long winded book that I struggled to get through at some boring points.

In my bookshop are lots of books like, 'First 100 Words' and "ABC with pictures", you know those sort of books. We talk to our babies in 'motherese' and we point to things and name them, but we do not teach our babies grammar. We say things like 'look at those puppies there, they are much smaller than these ones here'. We don't explain when to use words like 'those' or 'these' or 'there' and 'here' and where we put them in a sentence. We don't need to, Pinker says, Chomsky said, that grammar is

A highly interesting book about how language came about in the human mind. It gets quite technical at times, but that's an added bonus for anyone who is truly interested in the subject.

I had The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language out of the library for the entire summer. I finally finished it by actively reading it on the train for a couple of weeks. It's interesting, don't get me wrong, it's just LONG and has enough dull/confusing stretches that I couldn't bring myself to read it in my free time - it was pretty much a train-only book.The book's underlying claim is that all human beings are born with something Pinker calls a Universal Grammar, which causes us to

First of all, I am not a big fan of Steven Pinker. I found How the mind works erroneous on many accounts. That said, The Language Instinct is despite its uncompromising MIT cognitivist stance a fun and interesting read. To me, even the title reveals a general error; i.e. How the Mind Creates Language. The mind does not create language; human beings create language in an inter-subjective way. (Compare: brains do not think (except as metaphorical speech, not suitable for scientific writing) people...

In The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin wrote, “Man has an instinctive tendency to speak, as we see in the babble of our young children; while no child has an instinctive tendency to bake, brew, or write.” The experimental psychologist, Steven Pinker, took this quote as the inspiration for his book on – what he considers – the idea that there exists an innate language instinct to be found across all cultures. Elaborating on the canonical linguistic ideas of Noam Chomsky, particularly in regard to

When it comes to something I don't know much about, I'm pretty easily swayed by other people's arguments. Like, I finished this book feeling it was pretty intelligent and interesting, and then I read some criticisms and reviews and heck, I don't know what to think. Still, I did find it interesting, and while the book looks deceptively slim for how long it took me to get through it, Pinker expresses his arguments clearly, with examples and sourcing, etc. His basic argument is that we're hardwired...

*Read for school*2.5/3 starsThis was an okay read - very technical at some points, so those parts nearly lulled me to sleep. Honestly, I wouldn't have picked it up had it not been for my linguistics class - but i did learn about how languages formed, so in a way, it was pretty interesting. Nothing remarkable, though.

I have this incredible mental block about reviewing nonfiction. My formal linguistics experience is limited to exactly one History of the English Language class as a college junior (and it remains one of the most fascinating, satisfying and illuminating classroom experiences I've ever had, university-level or otherwise), which was about when I realized that the study of language was up there with the school paper and my creative-writing courses in terms of the all-over fulfillment I found in it....

Given the current divide in linguistics between the Functional/Cognitive theoretical approach to language and the formalist, generative approach which Pinker supports and has largely popularized with this book, The Language Instinct is an intellectually irresponsible endeavor. He frames linguistic nativism as a non-negotiable fact when actually, there is a fierce debate within linguistics which is moving away from ideas of those like Steven Pinker and Noam Chomsky. The opposing school of thought...

A friend, a diplomat’s daughter, when asked how she had managed to master Dutch when she went to a school in Suriname, shrugged.“I don’t know. I remember being so confused during the first day, not understanding a single word. But not so long after that, I was able to speak in Dutch. I just spoke, I don’t know how.”That had happened years ago, when she was still very young. We have always wondered how come children are able to learn language easily, while many, if not most adults, find the task

A good portion of this book can be summed up in the relatively simple graph that was making the rounds on Twitter a while back: https://twitter.com/robdrummond/statu.... However, Pinker is a good enough writer that reading about the issue in book-length format rarely feels boring, as he throws about a plethora of interesting examples and anecdotes to illustrate the point. What’s more, the book skips around quite a bit, covering just about every aspect of general linguistics I could think of that...

Interesting for its discussion of language and language acquisition. But: too many people take Pinker's word as gospel, when in fact his theories are quite controversial. This book also bears a lot of responsibility for the rise of pop EvPsych. Evolutionary psychology is a field that has a few worthwhile observations mixed with an awful lot of BS used to justify all sorts of learned behavior. So, read this book with a very large grain of salt.

I have great respect for Noam Chomsky's Theory of Universal Grammar, to the popularization of which Steven Pinker dedicates this work. The idea of a built-in mechanism of instinctive comprehension of language at the genetic level is a powerful incentive for those who want to study.It is sad that the time for activation is given only up to twelve years, but maybe it is somehow possible to activate after this period? Many literary translators, I know, came to serious studies at a much more mature

There's a joke in this book that linguists really like. An English woman has just got off the plane at Boston's Logan airport. She takes a cab, and starts questioning the driver about where to obtain various local delicacies."Oh yes," she says in her posh English accent. "Could you tell me where you can get scrod here?"And the driver replies, "You know, you don't often hear that in the pluperfect subjunctive!"__________________________________________Another linguist joke, for people who haven't...

I had always supposed that linguists could not write clearly. Rather like psychiatrists who were mad, sociologists who couldn’t get on with people, and social anthropologists who were permanent outsiders, linguists, I supposed, devoted their adulthood overcoming their childhood difficulties with language. Here, however, I discover my prejudices overturned. Considering the inherent complexity of his topic, Steven Pinker’s book on language is witty, lucid and intelligible. Pinker’s theme is that p...

Previously, I had read Steven Pinker's "The Stuff of Thought", which is also an excellent book. I enjoyed that book, so I next read this one--and I'm glad I did. "The Language Instinct" is an absolutely fascinating book! The author presents some very convincing arguments, that the acquisition of language is an instinct that has evolved over many generations, through natural selection. Steven Pinker is right on the money, when it comes to his analysis of evolution. Every chapter is compelling, an...

Very interesting. Too long and technical for me. Most of the stuff I didn't care about. Not a criticism of the book but just a mismatch of interest.Middle was boring. Writing was good. Sharp style. Insults fools and posers. Funny. Charming. The perfect example is the beginning of chapter 11 pg 340. This is the way to argue. Funny, ridiculing, forceful and gets the message across.His metaphors are really good. Aspire to this.Language is built into the mind. It evolved by natural selection. It is