Cosmoetica 2008-10-16
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Take One: Steven Pinker is the premier purveyor of the parsed poesy of plain prose.
No, that won't do. No matter how accurate that statement is, its excessive alliteration is bound to sound too cutesy for such an engaging read as his latest foray into the way mankind thinks and speaks.
Take Two: In his previous bestselling books, such as The Blank Slate, How The Mind Works, and The Language Instinct (to name just the most influential), Pinker- a Harvard cognitive psychologist, has emerged as the premier science researcher and writer on the human mind and language. Yes, there are people who would point to philosopher Daniel Dennett as being a greater expert in the way the mind arose and works, and linguists and cognitive psychologists would likely point to Noam Chomsky as the granddaddy of all language theory, but as well theorized and as influential as the ideas of the other two men have been (not to mention the controversial natures of their ideas and personae) it is Pinker who has emerged as the public's foremost educator in the field. He is to language and the mind what Carl Sagan and Stephen Jay Gould were to astronomy and evolutionary science, respectively.
His latest book is The Stuff Of Thought: Language As A Window Into Human Nature, although a more accurate title might be The Stuff Of Language, since the book focuses far more on language, and parsing it down into its constituent elements. Yes, language represents thoughts we communicate, but when one views the word thought one is led to think that Pinker might be writing of the biochemical firings of neurons, and how one that zigs left results in memories of the smell of Aunt Bea's cherry pies when a child, and when one zigs right a memory of losing your first fistfight is dredged up.
Nonetheless, at 439 pages, with over 40 pages of footnotes, the book is not a difficult read, and this is because Pinker, aside from being a gifted thinker, possesses an even rarer quality- he is a gifted writer. No, his gift is not in the creative field. I cannot speculate on how he would guide a fictive narrative nor end a poem. But, he has an elemental grasp of how to use words to sell ideas. First, he will elucidate the terms of what he is attacking or explaining, by using a lucid metaphor or analogy, and that is further heightened by his very apt use of pop cultural detritus- from the obscure to the profane, and back again, and then he will usually contrast this to a pre-formed idea. That notion can be one that is put forth by another thinker, or rival, or may just be common knowledge, or even mythos....The Stuff Of Thought is an excellent book, and while it may not be as groundbreaking and controversial as some of his earlier works, it is easily his most accessible and fun book to read, as it is so suffused in pop culturata. Yet, on a scientific level, the book does something quite amazing: it bridges the chasm that many Academics have over language itself. Postmodernists believe language is a circular self-referential trap, while pragmatists believe it lends insight into what reality is. Pinker's book seems to posit that that is a false dichotomy, not because both claims are false, but because both are fundamentally true. And in the gullies created by the force of this remarkable fact lie the careers of men like Pinker, ever the Lokis of language to the obtuse, but the Prometheuses of polysemy to those in the know.
Now, about that beginning: Steven Pinker is the premier purveyor of the parsed poesy of plain prose....fire from strange gods, indeed!
