Lloyd explains why Pinker and Gladwell don’t agree, which is partly based upon Gladwell’s new book, What the Dog Saw., a collection of essays that were published in the New Yorker.

FOR ONE WEEK ONLY

Gem of the Week at Lifetime Of Life

Eric Turkheimer’s “The Three Laws of Behaviour Genetics”, as examined by Steven Pinker in “The Blank Slate”.

Click here for Gem of the Week.

What we read while trying to get into Justin Bieber’s Twitter account….

• Here’s an interview with Jonathan Safran Foer, normally a great fiction writer, whose new book Eating Animals tries to get people to stop eating meat. Hasn’t he read Josh? In 100 years, this whole discussion will be moot.

• Last week, we linked to Steven Pinker’s negative review of Malcolm Gladwell’s What the Dog Saw, a collection of essays. This week, in the interest of equal time, here’s Gladwell’s three-part response–with all parts brief and in large print. Part I on Pinker, Part II on Quarterbacks, and Part III on Eigenvalues.

• It hasn’t even been a week since John S pointed out the double standard applied to Miley Cyrus. Well, in that time she’s been criticized for the death of her bus driver and for not liking Twilight. What a bitch!

• For all our Buffalo readers, why Perry Fewell isn’t the answer–and it has more to do with the sport than the team.

• This post, as are all others from NPI and the rest of worldwide blogs, is brought to you from our collective mothers’ basements.

• For the man who has everything this holiday season… DON DRAPER THE DOLL!

• The BCS has a Twitter; run amok.

• The BCS Twitter is citing some of the dumbest propaganda I’ve ever read; run amok.

Clash of the Bushy-Headed, Best-Selling Metaphorical Eponyms, as Harvard cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker

(The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, Words and Rules, The Blank Slate, The Stuff of Thought) assays tress-same-made* trendspotting journo Malcolm Gladwell’s

(The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers) new collection What the Dog Saw in the lead review of last Sunday’s NYTBR:

Readers have much to learn from Gladwell the journalist and essayist. But when it comes to Gladwell the social scientist [More]…

The Pinker-Gladwell brain strain is lighting up the blogs, including Gladwell’s own, with reviewer and reviewed in a rematch on the letters page of the November 29 NYTBR.

Meanwhile, in “Gladwell for Dummies“,  Maureen Tkacik finds herself saying, after many a Gladwellian doctrinal volte-face , “That’s not what you said six months ago.”

*The two ringleteers of their respective three-ring circi maximi have midwifed their twins in our forthcoming, fifth-pleading roman à clef du laboratoire, Tress of the Test-Tubervilles, or, The Pare of the Lock…

Es gibt einen Grad von Unterdrückung, der als Freiheit empfunden wird. - Heiner Müller, Quelle

In seinem an die Payback-Karte angelehnten Titel – in der Schweiz müsste das Buch »Cumulus« heißen und darf nicht mit dem brillanten Essay von Atwood über den Umgang mit Schuld und Schulden verwechselt werden – beklagt der konservative deutsche Denker Frank Schirrmacher, der (post)-moderne Mensch sei nicht mehr Herr, sondern Knecht der digitalen Arbeitsmethoden. Während er glaube, den Computer zu benutzen – benutzt der Computer eigentlich den Menschen, um es pointiert auszudrücken.

Schirrmacher führt mehrere Argumente ins Feld:

1. Die Benutzung von Computern verändert uns physisch. Neurologische Prozesse führen zu einer Anpassung unserer Kognition an die Vorgehensweise von Rechnern, insbesondere erwerben wir die Fähigkeit zum Multitasken. Schirrmacher beschreibt im Abschnitt »Mein Kopf kommt nicht mehr mit«, dass er sich unkonzentriert fühle und vergesslich geworden sei – und wertet diese Veränderung somit negativ.
2. Die ständige Nutzung von digitalen Medien führt zu einer Unterdrückung der Menschen, welche sie glücklich als Freiheit erleben. Wer im Internet etwas sucht, findet auch – und meint, gefunden zu haben, was gesucht worden ist. Freier Wille wird suggeriert – tatsächlich wird aber durch mächtige Instanzen gesteuert, was man findet. Auch die totale Individualität digitaler Welten (iTunes sucht das Musikprogramm, das mir als Individuum entspricht) ist nichts als die Kontrollübernahme durch diese digitalen Welten (iTunes bestimmt, was mir als Individuum zu entsprechen hat).
3. Die mangelnden Filter im Internet führen zu einem ständig ablaufenden Entscheidungsprozess, was wichtig/unwichtig oder relevant/irrelevant sei. Diese Entscheidungen überfordern den Menschen, Sie führen zu einer »Ich-Erschöpfung« (Roy Baumeister; Entscheidungen zu fällen ist für Menschen ein Kraftakt, siehe hier). Es sei zu fordern, dass Informationen dem Hirn unterzurodnen seien – und nicht die Hirnaktivität den Informationen.
4. Es gibt einen »digitalen Darwinismus«: »fittest« heißt heute, am besten an die Informationen angepasst, als bestinformiert, und zwar nicht im Sinne von »wichtigen«/»relevanten« Informationen, sondern den Informationen, welche nach dem »Mätthäus-Effekt« als wichtig erscheinen.

Nun wird Schirrmacher zwar als konservativer Vordenker sofort breit und grundsätzlich positiv rezensiert vom Feuilleton, erfährt aber sofort auch Kritik der »digital natives«, der Menschen, welche mit dem Internet groß geworden sind. Diese Kritik ist sehr aufschlussreich, zeigt sie doch, wie Recht Schirrmacher eigentlich hat: Tim Cole moniert, Schirrmacher sei ein »digitaler Xenophobe«, der deswegen nicht mehr mitkomme, weil er keine Ahnung von der digitalen Welt hat. Damit nimmt er ein Argument auf, das in Technologiedebatten, wie die Zeit-Rezension erhellend anmerkt, seit einigen Jahren zu einer »self-evident truth« geworden ist: Wer technische Innovationen kritisiert, versteht sie nicht, sonst würde er sie nicht kritisieren (sehr verbreitet in der Gamer-Community: Wer Killerspiele verbieten will, hat noch nie welche gespielt oder nicht richtig, denn sonst würde er Spiele nicht verbieten wollen). Weiter schreibt Cole, Schirrmacher habe ein falsches Menschenbild, weil sich Menschen nicht beeinflussen liessen und sehr gut zwischen relevanten und irrelevanten Informationen unterscheiden können; um dann ein interessanten Evolutionsargument anzufügen:

Und Schirrmacher hat zweitens keine Ahnung von Evolution. Er kann – oder will – nicht erkennen, dass Homo Sapiens sich in den vergangenen Jahrtausenden stets und immer wieder einer veränderten Kommunikations- und Informationsumgebung anpassen musste, und dass er es ganz gut gemacht hat.

Die Informationsumgebung wird also eine natürliche Umgebung gesehen, an die sich der Mensch anzupassen hat – und nicht mehr als eine kulturell erschaffene Umwelt, welche auch verändert werden könnte (im Rahmen einer Anpassung, vielleicht). Die digitale Welt ersetzt also eine selektive Natur: Was nichts anderes als eines von Schirrmachers Argumenten ist, dass sich der Mensch der Technik untergeordnet hat und weiter unterordnen wird.

Soviel zur Kritik der Kritik, die mir im Moment noch sehr dünn erscheint. Nun aber zur Kritik an Schirrmacher noch meine Begegnung mit seinem neuen Buch:

1. Ich lese meine Tweets (nicht Tweeds, ein offenbar peinlicher Schreibfehler in Schirrmachers Buch) und stosse auf diesen von @Zeitonline_all:
2. Ich lese auf meinem iPhone unterwegs die Zeit-Rezension.
3. Ich lese auf meinem Laptop auf dem Weg zur Arbeit (nächster Tag) die Renzension in der Süddeutschen Zeitung sowie Blogeinträge zu Payback.
4. Ich drucke wichtige Texte aus und bearbeite sie mit dem Bleistift, ich lese sie also linear, wie Schirrmacher eine seiner Meinung nach gefähredete Tätigkeit bezeichnet:
5. Ich schreibe den Blogpost, ohne auch nur in dem Buch gelesen zu haben.

Das mag nun problematisch erscheinen, hat aber auch Vorteile, es ist ein modernes Vorgehen. Es scheint mir ausgewogen, mehrperspektivisch zu sein, es ist eine effiziente Art zu Arbeiten, welche nicht obeflächlich ist, aber oberflächlich sein könnte. Und nebenbei habe ich Tweets gelesen, welche völlig sinnlos und irrelevant waren und auch solche Blogeinträge; ich verfüge aber über eine relativ gute Filterkompetenz.

Fazit: Das Diktat der Technik ist eine realistische Gefahr. Die Technik kann aber auch gegen sich selbst gewendet werden oder dazu benutzt werden, die drohende Gefahr zu mildern oder abzuwenden, weniger, aber wichtigere Entscheidungen von uns zu verlangen. Und die Technik hat uns nicht zur Konsumenten und Rezipienten gemacht, sondern auch zu Produzenten (wie ich hier). Steven Pinker, der amerikanische Populärpsychologe, hat gesagt, man solle, wenn man das Internet (Facebook etc.) kritisiere, mal darüber nachdenken, worüber man denn bei einem Abendessen am Familientisch so rede:

I mention this because so many discussions of the effects of new information technologies take the status quo as self-evidently good and bemoan how intellectual standards are being corroded (the ‘google-makes-us-stoopid’ mindset). They fall into the tradition of other technologically driven moral panics of the past two centuries, like the fears that the telephone, the telegraph, the typewriter, the postcard, radio, and so on, would spell the end of civilized society.

[Originally posted March 9, 2008. This re-post has been lightly copy-edited]

“Language of thought” theory (LOT), originally developed by Jerry Fodor in the 1970s, and now championed most famously by Steven Pinker in The Language Instinct and The Stuff of Thought, presumes a pre-literate conceptual language, sometimes called mentalese, upon which our conscious, tangible symbolic language is based. This language of thought is imagined to be innate, and thus a universal substrate for all human language from Algonquin to Finno-Ugric to Brooklynese.

The LOT hypothesis is an outgrowth of Noam Chomsky’s nativist theory of a “universal grammar,” which in its turn was a response to the reigning behaviorist paradigm of the day. Behaviorism never fully rebounded from Chomsky’s critique (though it’s found new expression in the speculative protoscience of memetics) , and we’re all better off for this. But beyond this, nativism has not proved to be very fruitful in our understanding of cognition, serving mostly (through no fault of Chomsky’s) to fortify the sociobiological argument that our cultural norms reflect hard-wired biological determinants, which emerged to help us manage the challenges of our paleolithic beginnings.

There are a number of logical problems with the LOT hypothesis, with perhaps the most obvious being that words, unlike numbers, are not static and precise through time, as they would need to be if they were subject to unconscious translation into and out of mentalese. The number represented by the numeral 2, for example, can be counted on to always be the same. But what is indicated by the modern English words love, doctor, faith, fish, holiday, circus, atom, fairy, wealth and savage, just to name a few, has wildly varied just in the few hundred years we’ve been using this form of the language. If there was some kind of inborn uber-language which determined the meanings expressed in our own spoken languages, it’s difficult to see how it could permit this kind of semantic drift.

The LOT model is built on the metaphor of computer processing, so it is instructive to ask how well a computer would function if different things were intended by the same terms during successive installs of a piece of software. It seems plausible to many of us living now to imagine that human language rests on a logical foundation just like a computer program: after all, we can perform logical calculations, just as a computer can, and most of our expressions appear to be logically grounded. But the question to ask is not what we can do now, but what humans or humanoids could and did do at the dawn of language, at least 50,000 years ago, perhaps much earlier. The rudiments of formal logic didn’t appear on the scene until less than 3,000 years ago, with the Greeks, and weren’t developed into a complex system until the 20th century. This would be a strange course of events if formal logic were built into the structure of our cognition from the start, which is what LOT proposes.

As best we can tell, for the first several thousand years of our existence human cognition took the form of what we now derisively call “magical thinking,” or myth. This is the environment into which language was originally born and given to develop. There is little in the linguistic and ethnographic data to presuppose a rational thought process underlying pre-modern language, and a great deal to suggest something very different.

Ernst Cassirer notes that the primacy of mythological thinking presents a significant problem for the “realist” view. The common line is that myths were erroneous explanations of objects and phenomena, given the lack of adequate tools and resources to understand these objects and phenomena for what they really were. But this description is based on a misunderstanding of mythical thinking; it presumes that from the very first, humans were concerned with explanations. The problem is that to formulate the questions that these explanations are supposed to answer, one must already have a language, and a fairly well-developed one. As Cassirer writes, in Language and Myth (1946):

It seems only natural to us that the world presents itself to our and inspection and observation as a pattern of definite forms, each with its own perfectly determinate spatial limits that give it its specific individuality.

But it becomes difficult to see how these forms might have been experienced before there was a language to conceive them in. It would seem that ideation and language require each other. But then we are faced with the problem of winnowing. Cassirer continues:

What is it that leads or constrains language to collect [classes of objects] into a single whole and denote them by a word? … As soon as we cast the problem in this mold, traditional logic offers no support … for its explanation of the origin of generic concepts presupposes the very thing we are seeking to understand and derive, the formulation of linguistic notions.

Cassirer was writing 40 years before Pinker’s first books on language, but provides an apt preemptive critique of the LOT thesis. How would this putatively inborn, genetically determined linguistic structure have supported a conceptual schema so radically different from our own, and so different from what its own nature would predict, for so many thousands of years?

Cassirer provides numerous examples of the slow progression of mythological ideation from the earliest and simplest myths to the appearance of logical reasoning, and we could turn to any prominent cultural anthropologist for additional demonstrations. But there is interesting evidence of a more recent provenance as well, in the autobiography of Helen Keller, who very explicitly asserts that she had close to no inner life at all before she was taught sign language:

Before my teacher came to me, I did not know that I am. I lived in a world that was a no-world. I cannot hope to describe adequately that unconscious, yet conscious time of nothingness. I did not know that I knew aught, or that I lived or acted or desired. I had neither will nor intellect.I was carried along to objects and acts by a certain blind impetus… [N]ever in a start of the body or a heart-beat did I feel that I loved or cared for anything. My inner life, then, was a blank without past, present, or future, without hope or anticipation.

We shouldn’t read too much into one self-reported anecdote, of course. Keller was a special case, born with sight and hearing only to lose it at nineteen months, so she was exposed to spoken language for a not insignificant period of time. But it is intriguing to note how non-conceptual her cognition was before she learned to use language.

In the March 10 issue of The New Yorker, John Lancaster writes of a similar, though more everyday, predicament when it comes to the most precisely descriptive regions of experience, as in the appreciation of wine, or perfume. He begins with a story about his “discovery,” after long resistance, of what oenophiles call “graininess” in red wine. Before the experience, he had rejected the term as rhetorical overkill–something that many people with less refined palates (myself included) are quick to presume when encountering such seemingly fantastical language. But when he finally noticed graininess (after many failed attempts), he conceded it was the perfect word, and not nearly as figurative as he had imagined. Here’s the interesting part, which I was not expecting to find in a New Yorker article on olfactory perception:

What’s more, in tasting it I realized I’d encountered versions of it–milder, more restrained–before. Now I knew what grainy tannins were. Most taste experiences work like that. A taste or smell can pass you by, unremarked or nearly so, in large part because you don’t have a word for it; then you see the thing and grasp the meaning of a word at the same time, and both your palate and your vocabulary have expanded.

This is exactly the opposite of the common sense view, that objects and phenomena precede their names (though to be fair, someone had to be the first person to call a wine “grainy.”) Is it possible that our understanding of the world expands and develops not before we describe it, and not because we describe it, but as we describe it? This seems much more plausible than the Darwinian explanation, in which we are in constant stenographic response to a world of given stimuli; and because the latter has us spinning our wheels, culturally, over alleged biological imperatives from a world long past, the possibility that we participate in our description of the world also seems much more likely to allow some actual evolution of thought, philosophical, scientific, and moral.

Jonathan Swift showed just how silly an “enlightened” stance can be in Gulliver’s visit to the land of the Houyhnhnms. The Houyhnhnms, huge horses full of alot of horse sense, spoke beautifully and convincingly of themselves and their brilliance and intellectual superiority; but they, in their reason and rationality, enslaved Yahoos. These superior beings also believed that Gulliver could not have come from some island across the ocean because they believed, rationally and reasonably, that such an island did not exist and, therefore, it did not. Despite having no experience upon which to make such a judgment. Yet, experience is a state of consciousness. Karl Popper maintains, in Unended Quest (p. 218), that “it is silly or at least high-handed to deny the existence of mental experiences or mental states or states of consciousness; or to deny that mental states are as rule closely related to states of the body, especially physiological states.” Which would seem to confirm the Houyhnhnms in their intellectual behavior for, after all, they are basing their judgment on the experience of themselves and their superior knowledge and intellectual ability. They never met any others their superiors.
So, it stands to reason, that they believe as they believe.

So it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut writes in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. And other novels of absurdity. Novels of people with individual mental states of consciousness.

On and off throughout history, science has had a bad name because of such thinkers, men (in most cases) who have a particular mental experience. More often than not via the same lingual pyrotechnics as Jonathan Swift used to elucidate such foolishness. With this in mind, it would be good if critical appraisers could be a tad more discriminating in their choice of scientists to congratulate and hold up as shining examples of their art discipline. Steven Pinker is considered to be such an enlightened one by popular publishers and science journalists. Steven Pinker is considered the leading figure in language and linguistics studies in the US, especially via neurological investigations. Dr. Pinker is a psychologist, which of course means he knows better via an understanding of the deeper reaches of motivation to behavior. And Dr. Pinker is a Houyhnhnm thinker, a man who runs in the face of David Hackett Fischer’s Historian’s Fallacies and Stephen Toulmin’s The Uses of Argument and any of Karl Popper’s assumption-questioning writings–even though he cites Popper in The Stuff of Thought–because he hasn’t the experience of them. A few examples will, I think, suffice to elucidate the priceless thinking and intellectual cerebration science writers hail as Dr. Pinker ’s ground-breaking theories.

To begin at the end, as Edgar Alan Poe suggests writers do:
“[N]ear death experiences are not the eyewitness reports of a soul parting company from the body but symptoms of oxygen starvation in the eyes and brain” (The Mystery of Consciousness). This presupposes that there is a separation of the body and the soul. But it is just a tautological dismissal that, in reality, proves nothing because death/near-death is a time of low oxygen in the brain. This happens when people smoke and drink, too, but they report no similar experience. Occasionally, those who ingest LSD or magic mushrooms relate such experiences, without oxygen starvation. Dr. Pinker is saying is that these people did not experience what they experienced. There is no scientific evidence to verify this dismissive judgment, yet it cannot be dismissed as it comes from Dr. Pinker’s Houyhnhnm thinking, as supported by Dr. Popper. It is, then, of no import that such a statement as his is an opinion of science; for, as a Houyhnhnm there is no reason not accept his say so.
Indeed, he’s from Harvard, a university that consistently produces the superiorest of the superior. Dr. Pinker engages in characteristic Houyhnhnm tautological perseveration to prove his point that alternative states of consciousness are not real. He believes they can be explained by some kind of physical state: they are the result of oxygen deprivation to the brain because, well, oxygen deprivation is part of the experience. Like smoking or drinking. This is Houyhnhnm science.

Earlier in the same essay, published in Time (19 Jan. 2007), Dr. Pinker states, “Consciousness surely does not depend on language.” How unfortunate that, in fact, it does depend on language, for without language no one would know of anyone’s consciousness, no one would be able to admit of it, nor would one be able to talk about one’s own consciousness of one’s self, outside of consciousness of the world around one. We are languaging animals: our world is described and built and adapted by our language (Cf. Humberto Maturana generally). Without talking about it (expressing it), how is one to communicate that one is conscious? And, indeed, which state of consciousness one is in, for there is more than one consciousness. Well, perhaps being an experience and experience, as we’ve already noted, is a Houyhnhnm characteristic, it is not out of order that Dr. Pinker, can maintain that it doesn’t exist just because someone says so.
Yet, in this essay (The Mystery of Consciousness), Dr. Pinker makes the most amazing and contradictory statement: there is a seat of consciousness and it is in the “higher” part of the brain. He supports himself by citing Crick, the other half of the DNA discoverer duo. However, earlier on, he maintains that consciousness consists “of a maelstrom of events distributed across the brain.” He even notes that Bernard Baars “likens consciousness to a global blackboard.” Perhaps it is premature and somewhat arrogant to ask: Which is it Dr. Pinker? Is there a seat of consciousness, like the seat of language in Wernicke’s or Broca’s areas? Or is it a brain-wide phenomenon? But let’s not talk about that.

Let’s talk, rather about how consciousness can be only “neural computation” while conveniently excluding soft matter physics. If consciousness is a physical seat in the grey matter of the brain, it stands to reason, I think, that there may be external stressors that affect a cell’s functioning on the cellular level as well as the macroscopic level: swelling in the brain effects behavioral aberrations which, I think, have something to do with “neural computation.” If a change happens on such a large scale, a change must have happened on the cellular level since the cells themselves are not static entities–or perhaps there is some other reason for the brain to pulsate. That is, the environment in which nerve cells operate affects their operation and this tee-tiny alteration creates, in the aggregate as cells do not operate in isolation from other cells, a greatly enhanced alteration in the behavior these cells cause to happen, as an expression of themselves. Even the pulsation affects, macro- and microscopically, of “neural computation” of the cells in the body react to contiguous and non-contiguous cells’ “neural computation.” Dr. Pinker’s thinking seems to be quite linear and rather simplistic and very, very concrete and does. Indeed, his thesis that you cannot talk about consciousness because he can’t talk about it. Dr. Pinker is a genius Houyhnhnm.

His dismissive Houyhnhnm attitude runs throughout his writing, that is, “I don’t believe it, so it’s all pish-posh.” At the same time, Dr. Pinker is attempting, via classical science (physics), to explicate consciousness/perception/emotion when in fact classical science divides the world into two–body and spirit–and cannot explain what happens in the mind via the physical brain because the mind is not a physical reality. (Show me the mind, Dr. Pinker.) Classical science has trouble seeing that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts; that is, the brain and all that goes to make it up creates something greater than itself. As if to thwart the thinking of the Houyhnhnm, Karl Popper says the mind is the producer of human language, it is “the producer of theories, of critical arguments, and many other things such as mistakes, myths, stories, witticisms, tools, and works of art” (Unended Quest, p. 221). Dr. Pinker could not get his mind around Bertrand Russell’s grandmother’s plague upon him: “What is mind? No matter! What is matter? Never mind!” What Popper seems to be saying is that the mind is what allows Pinker to say and do whatever it is he says and does, albeit this is a decidedly un-Houyhnhnm thing to believe.

Dr. Pinker also says, “everyone agrees that the hard problem (if it is a problem) remains a mystery.”

Who is “everyone”? (Perhaps a rather un-Houyhnhnm-like query because everyone knows who everyone is.)

The hard problem is “explaining how subjective experience arises from neural computation.” That is, consciousness is a mysterious physical anomaly in classical physical bio-chemistry. There is a kind of tyranny of the to biological, to the physical, here in that Dr. Pinker purports to be able to explain the non-physical by the physical, which is, in and of itself, a mystery. Not to mention the apparent opposition to what he’s already said. If consciousness is physical, Dr. Pinker, show me it because I’m only a Yahoo. Simply saying it is so doesn’t make it so, unless one is a Houyhnhnm or a religious leader.

There are some people, notably I.N. Marshal, who do not believe consciousness is a mystery or, rather, that it is a mystery by way of being a problem for which there is an explanation. Marshal, Zohar and others approach consciousness from a quantum mechanical viewpoint. (Dr. Pinker’s flippant speaks to this science later.) Dr. Pinker sees the brain as a computational entity; it doesn’t do anything else but computer neurologically. David Deutsch, on the other hand, believes that to call the brain a computational thing is not only limiting but wrong (Cf. The Fabric of Reality). Truly an anti-Houyhnhnm proposition that seems to point to Dr. Pinker’s confusing brain with mind or, rather, considers there to be no difference: brain is mind and mind is brain (The Stuff of Thought, p. 259). Everything is rational and reasonable and solely to be found in the neural functioning of the physical brain. Everything for Dr. Pinker resides in the physical brain. The brain’s functioning is the answer to everything. The brain rules! The brain also leaves us no choice. We are at its mercy. But it’s a mystery as to how this happens and what this mercy is. Even Pinker admits it’s a mystery when he says we have an innate language instinct. Why? Because instinct is a mystery in and of itself. And so it is that Dr. Pinker is talking in circles. This is Houyhnhnm science.

What happened to environment and heredity in Dr. Pinker’s theories is also a mystery.

Dr. Pinker even talks of language as if it were bits and pieces that are put together according to certain rules–like the brain is bits and pieces put together according to certain rules–implying that to not follow the rules results in non-language and–perhaps I stretch the point here–stupidity. (Where does that leave James Joyce, Antonin Artaud or the Absurdists?) Stupidity is Dr. Pinker’s forte: all his argumentation is reducing ideas he does not agree with, including Lakoff and Johnson’s, to the ridiculous, using bits and pieces of their writings in order to lambaste the entirety of their theories and impart to them ideas or beliefs that are, in reality, his conclusions based on conscious misinterpretation such that the argument to ridicule is itself ridiculous and therefore his ridiculous statements don’t sound so ridiculous, that is, they sound sensible (Cf. The Stuff of Thought in its entirety). Houyhnhnm scientific thinking.

Dr. Pinker never bothers to prove his opinion; corroboration by his own testing is not scientific proof, according to Popper; it is more in the way of a laboratory simulation. Laboratory simulation always produces what you want to prove so it proves nothing, in fact. Except that it is Houyhnhnm science.

Dr. Pinker, in “Words Don’t Mean What They Mean” (another Time Inc. article, of 6 Sept. 2007, an excerpt from The Stuff of Thought), lays lines on his listeners, role plays, sidesteps, shilly-shallies and engages in “all manner of vagueness and innuendo.” We also do as he tells us we do, without apparent thought: assume “that the speaker is rational.” Dr. Pinker’s rationality is of the Houyhnhnm variety. So Dr. Pinker is seen to be eminently intellectually gifted and full of astounding insight, as gullible Gulliver saw the Houyhnhnms.

The most insidious Houyhnhnm argument Pinker makes results in his debunking quantum mechanics. To wit:- “Some mavericks, like the mathematician Roger Penrose, suggest the answer might someday be found in quantum mechanics. But to my ear, this amounts to the feeling that quantum mechanics sure is weird, and consciousness sure is weird, so maybe quantum mechanics can explain consciousness.” Well, Einstein thought quantum mechanics was weird, too. It’s of no consequence that Einstein’s been proven wrong on this point. Of course, the logic that uses one extremist to debunk the entirety of a science and Richard Feynman is Houyhnhnm logic. Isn’t it? Gulliver was a maverick.

Dr. Pinker wishes to take the mystery out of language via scientific examination and neural explanation and, to do so, he posits that language is an instinct. . .a very mysterious thing indeed is instinct. Instinct is, I think, something that cannot be explained: it just is. And as it is, it is mysterious in its being. In his infinitely regressive method of analysis, Dr. Pinker ever reaches the point where he can explain nothing and it’s at this point that language becomes instinct (Cf. The Stuff of Thought). So, in truth, Dr. Pinker explains nothing and keeps language in the realm of the mysterious. But it sounds good. Wow! Language is built in. We’re different. The Houyhnhnm cerebration is that if I say it is thus, it is thus. And therefore it’s science.

A fool (Yahoo) might ask, “How?” and show his stupidity in thinking that debunking the mysteriousness of language by attributing it to the mysteriousness of instinct is ridiculous. . .if not mysterious. Even so, Dr. Pinker cannot explain the languaging of deaf people or Koko the gorilla–unless his definition of language is in its speaking; that language is not language unless it’s spoken. Which makes writing not language, maybe?

Again in “Can’t find the words? Make ‘em up,” Dr. Pinker resorts to Houyhnhnm-specious thinking in his Chinese example of onomatopoeia and sound symbolism via the Chinese for light in weight (qīng 轻) and heavy (zhòng 重). However, qīng has many meanings in Chinese, such as light green, clear and innocent. So does zhòng; middle, hit, numerous. In Chinese, mostly, the sound of the word is just the sound, but the pitch changes the meaning. For instance, qīng 青 (light green), qǐng 请 (please), qīng 清 (clear, usually referring to river, stream, lake), qíng 情 (passion). All “qing.” All have the sound “qing,” But their meanings have nothing to do with each other. The implication Pinker is making is that there is a parallel between sound and meaning that holds across the language and therefore all languages (even though he debunks this in The Stuff of Thought). It doesn’t. Especially as Chinese is a tonal language. Dr. Pinker is not aware, apparently, that there are at least nine characters in Chinese with the pronunciation of qīng (first tone); some do not have opposites.

If a Yahoo looks at large (dà 大) and small (xiăo 小) he might find that, yes, da is the strong fourth downward tone but xiao is the sing-song third tone. Not only this but da changes its tone with usage, that is, in context. And what are we to make of inside (nèi 内) and outside (wài 外) or up (shàng 上) and down (xià 下)? These opposites are the same tone. Using Pinker’s Houyhnhnm mind, we can easily take gāoxìng (高兴happy) as, at best, so-so and bēishāng (悲伤sad) as good feeling. This is ridiculous. Gāo 高 (high) and dī 低 (low) are both high tones but, according to Dr. Pinker’s Houyhnhnm theorizing, mean differently, that is, dī cannot be low because its tone is high. What is worse, we can take bái 白 (white) as the same as hēi 黑 (black), that is, as white, because black is dark and the tone is not: if we follow Pinker’s statement, then we confound black and white. It’s a terrible Yahoo argument, of course, for how could a top Houyhnhnm psychologist lead his readers to confuse black and white, right and wrong?

There are only four tones in Chinese (five if you count the neutral tone), so onomatopoeia and sound symbolism via tones is extremely limited and apparently has little to do with sound meaning, according to the Yahoo Chinese who developed their language. Further, all these also challenge “families of words share a teeny snatch of sound and a teeny shred of meaning.” In Chinese, word families share a shape, not necessarily a sound or meaning. For instance, the shape family of kŏu口 (mouth) yields gē哥 (song), dīng叮 (mosquito bite), jiā加 (add), nà呐 (no meaning by itself), xuān喧 (noisy), zào噪 (chirp, as with insects or birds)–just a few of the 300+ kŏu口family characters.

This association of sound with meaning is the kind of thing we used to do as children and laugh about. Dr. Pinker, here, is making a Houyhnhnm-specious argument. He also does not speak or read Chinese–nor does his audience, which is why he can get away with such a Houyhnhnm statement. Further, generalizing from one instance to the entire corpus is intellectually indefensible. Factual errors on the part of an academician and scientist are not acceptable. Though, perhaps, the superior mentation of Houyhnhnms can be forgiven.

Except that in the early part of the 20th century, the onomatopoetic theory of language had already been disproven by linguists and philosophers, though, of course, for many modern doctorate holders, that’s ancient history: it is often the case that, in scholarly writing–especially dissertations–references more than 5-10 years old are verboten. Not only history is lost in this way but knowledge. Yet, Dr. Pinker is a follower of X’s universal grammar theory and that was put forth in the early part of the 20th century. A conundrum, to be sure. Indeed, “the names which occur in human speech cannot be interpreted in any such invariable manner. They are not designed to refer to substantial things, independent entities which exist by themselves. They are determined rather by human interests and human purposes. But these interests are ot fixed and invariable. Nor are the classifications to be found in human speech made at random; they are based on certain constant and recurring elements in our sense experience” (Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man, p. 134). It seems, then, that Dr. Pinker is taking words not only out of context but isolating them as individual units and attempting to build a theory of language from these bits and pieces that have no relationship to each other and no relationship to use or culture. There is no juxtaposition. For Dr. Pinker, words are, well, just words. They don’t appear with other words and they don’t change their meaning in association with other words, of course. Writers, those picayune Muse-inspired applied linguists par excellence, who are never taken into account by linguists as knowing anything at all about language (and therefore never consulted or, heaven forbid, studied), know this to be untrue.
Indeed, for Natalie Goldberg, this is a major aspect of writing: words rub up against each other and change their meaning or connotation (Cf. Wild Mind). And Gendlin’s theories are based on contextual usage (Cf. X). Dr. Pinker seems to be measuring language–and he seems to be confounding la langue with la parole–as if it were a scientific thing, a state of being and this is not possible. He is trying to deduce the characteristics of an electron solely by figuring out where it is and how big it is. It and its action, its behavior when moving in context, are different things. But, then, that’s quantum mechanics and that’s already been displaced into File 13 by Dr. Pinker.

Thus, as the name of an object has little to do with the truth of the object but, rather, emphasizes particular aspects of the object, we come across the many words for “snow” in certain Eskimo languages and “hit” in some Amerindian languages and the various counters in Japanese for different entities: long and thin (x), round (x), flat (x), people (x). Or, if we look at the moon, as Washington Irving did in his History of New York, we find that the Greek word mēn emphasizes its measure of time while the Latin word luna, luc-na refers its brightness. How many “heavies” are there in Chinese?

But even more to the point, Chinese words are made of two characters, for the most part. In fact, in Chinese, a single character does not often have meaning. So, what does he make of bō 玻 and lí 璃, which have no meaning when in isolation but when used together, as in bōlí 玻璃, mean “glass.” There are many similar examples, such as pútáo 葡萄 (grape), yīngsù罂桃 (opium), luòtuó 骆驼 (camel), pángxiè 螃蟹 (crab), to name a few words in which the individual characters (the first ones in this instance) are meaningless by themselves.

This fact also challenges Dr. Pinker’s statement that “long words may be used for things that are big or coarse, staccato words for things that are sharp or quick.” “Staccato” and “ratatatat” are long words–and staccato–yet are for sharp or quick sounds. There is nothing short here, which is the implication in Dr. Pinker’s thesis above. The problem is that almost all Chinese words are short, which means, according to Dr. Pinker, that Chinese cannot talk about big and coarse things. Actually, Chinese can: let’s see. . .zhéxué 哲学 (philosophy) and zhū 猪 (pig)–that’s big; xīnguì 新贵 (parvenu) and cūsù 粗俗 (vulgar)–that’s coarse. Taking into account all these factors, we can safely come to the conclusion that Dr. Pinker’s theory is as right as he thinks because it is appropriate Houyhnhnm thinking.

Dr. Pinker’s definition of onomatopoeia is that it is solely sound-based; but in Japanese there are two major types: giseigo and gitaigo, the latter referring to actions. A third group, of which gotcha-gotcha is a good example, refers to states of being (upset stomach or being mixed up). In Chinese, onomatopoeia is used, mainly, for giving strong impressions, expressing things realistically and representing the rhythms of various activities. Dr. Pinker is a follower of Chomsky’s Universal Grammar, yet he cannot uphold this thesis in Chinese or Japanese. But Dr. Pinker is a cutting edge Houyhnhnmist!

Dr. Pinker also notes that most “sn~” words refer to the snout (nose). This kind of assertion plays because: 1) he’s an authority; and 2) no one’s going to actually count all those words. . .except for a second language learner who counted and found 60% of the “sn~” words had nothing to do with the nose. Not a very worthwhile observation, of course, as students are your penultimate Yahoos.

In his Language Acquisition, Dr. Pinker engages in the most egregious Houyhnhnm analysis of how children gain an understanding of how to use language given that they are not open to hearing constant repetitions of patterns: he shows us how they, children, use higher intellectual functioning to come to a conclusion, his conclusion. In truth, children are incapable of even the simplest of arithmetic computations. Not only do children not have this ability to logically analyze backwards from a given until they are much older, Pinker is going about his explanation backwards, as if the end product is the cause when it is more probably the effect of the learning (Cf. Terrence Deacon, The Symbolic Species, for a different take on this).

Dr. Pinker first slides around issues by using ifs, shoulds, coulds–suppositions that assume much but prove nothing. “[C]hildren should start off assuming that their language requires the largest possible governing category, and then to shrink the possibilities inward as they hear the telltale sentences” resulting in “this subtle pattern of predictions.” But they already don’t hear constant repetition. Children are also supposed to “assume, by default, that languages have a fixed constituent order. They would back off from that prediction if and only if they hear alternative word orders, which indicate that the language does permit constituent order freedom. The alternative is that the child could assume that the default case was constituent order freedom.” Eh? “Constituent order freedom”? What kind of children does he know? Children who can classify at age 2 or 3?

Dr. Pinker is thinking, it seems, that children have the same mental agility as he, an adult Houyhnhnm, and can engage in axiom-making and assumption-getting that go with higher inductive and deductive reasoning. He is having children reason as an adult Houyhnhnm might. This is fallacious reasoning. One that, perhaps, Jonathan Swift perhaps might could have used in Gulliver’s Travels or any of his other satires. Children can’t add one and one, Dr. Pinker. Children can’t tell that 10 cc of liquid in a short, round glass is the same as 10 cc of liquid in a tall, thin glass. Unless, perhaps, of course, there were Houyhnhnm children, little people full of horse sense. Again that ancient philosopher of language, Ernst Cassirer: “If a child when learning to talk had simply to learn a certain vocabulary, if he only had to impress on his mind and memory a great mass of artificial and arbitrary sounds, this would be a purely mechanical process.” But, of course, Dr. Pinker does believe that the brain is only involved in mechanical processing. However,

It would be very laborious and tiresome, and would require too great conscious effort for the child to make without a certain reluctance since what he is expected to do would be entirely disconnected from actual biological needs. The ‘hunger for names’. . .reminds us that we are here confronted with a quite different problem. By learning to name things a child does not simply add a list of artificial signs to his previous knowledge of ready-made empirical objects. He learns rather to form the concepts of those objects, to come to terms with the objective world. . . . And language, taken as a whole, becomes the gateway to a new world. All progress here opens a new perspective and widens and enriches our concrete experience (Essay on Man, p. 132).

So it would seem that learning all of these words is learning an objective world. As Suzanne Langer posits in many of her writings, especially Mind, the brain’s job is to find meaning.
The brain we humans have took millions of years to evolve but the language we use evolved (evolves) in hundreds or thousands of years. So, language cannot be an evolution-dependent item, as Dr. Pinker posits. But it could be, as Dr. Deacon notes, a co-evolutionary item, à la Baldwinian evolution/selection (Cf. The Symbolic Species). But Dr. Terrence Deacon is not among the media’s edge-defying Houyhnhnm scientists. Who knows why. Perhaps because he’s not colorful enough. Or maybe he’s too fond of gorillas, especially gorillas that symbolize (Koko). And gorillas are a lower life form. They are not Houyhnhnms. And–horror upon horror!–Dr. Deacon consults with Koko.

Dr. Pinker does not like Dr. Deacon. Actually, Dr. Pinker doesn’t seem to like anyone who doesn’t think as he does. This becomes obvious in The Stuff of Thought, especially as he cites himself 20 times, twice as often as any other writer/theorist–and Terrence Deacon not at all. His weight in the corpus of linguists around the world is evident via their not citing him at all in their work.
But Steven Pinker is colorful and animated and popular and that’s what’s needed in selling a Houyhnhnm science. As long as it sounds great, it’s good. As long as it’s making fame and fortune for a previously unknown psychologist, it’s cutting edge.
It is of no account that the Yahoos in the Old West called these kinds of people con-men or snake oil salesmen and Medievalists charlatans. They are not, of course, Houyhnhnms and, therefore, jealous in their jibes.
_______________

Bibliography
Brockman, John. Edge. http://www.edge.org/
Cassirer, Ernst. An Essay on Man. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944.
Deacon, Terrence W. The Symbolic Species: the co-evolution of language and the brain. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1997.
Deutsch, David. The Fabric of Reality. New York; Penguin Brooks, 1997.
Fischer, David Hackett. Historians’ Fallacies. New York: Harper & Row, Pubs., 1970.
Goldberg, Natalie. Wild Mind. New York: xx, 200x.
Langer, Suzanne. Mind. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 19xx.
Pinker, Steven. Can’t find the words? Make ‘em up at http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/book_extracts/article2474562.ece
__________. The Mystery of Consciousness at http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1580394,00.html
__________. The Stuff of Thought. London: Allen Lane, 2007.
__________. Words Don’t Mean What They Mean at http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1659772,00.html
Popper, Karl. Conjectures and Refutations. London: Routledge Classics, 1969.
__________. Unended Quest. London: Routledge Classics, 1994.
Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver’s Travels. London: xx, 16xx.
Toulman, Stephen. The Uses of Argument. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964.
Vonnegut, Kurt. God Bless You Mr. Rosewater. New York: xx, 19xx.

*Huang Jia’ning is a tri-lingual interpreter: Chinese-English-Japanese. It is thanks to his input that I was able to discuss the problems with interlanguage onomatopoeia, despite my years in both China and Japan.

I always felt the New York Times was kind of the jack-of-all-trades paper more than the paper of record: somewhere approaching fair in its coverage of every subject, but not a standout in any subject.  Their book reviews would be the exception: They are far and away the best articles in the paper.

Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker provides an excellent and fair review of Malcolm Gladwell’s newest book, What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures, and in effect provides a review on the author himself.

I very strongly agree with Prof. Pinker in his praise of Gladwell as an essayist in prose, style, and his ability to provoke thought.  I am equally concerned with Gladwell’s somewhat lackadaisical approach to science (his writings tend to be in the realm of pop psychology, and the scientific rigour of his assertions seem to match that field).

The boldness — and counter-intuitive — nature of Gladwell’s assertions make the claims interesting and provoke further thought, perhaps the primary objectives of a writer or essayist, but tend to fall apart within the theses of his collected works (such as Blink, The Tipping Point, and Outliers).  As a result, I have always preferred Gladwell in the smaller units apportioned by The New Yorker over the lengthier helpings of his books.

Steven Pinker’s reasoned criticism is much needed considering the scope of Gladwell’s influence (I can hardly enter a bus or train without seeing one rider reading one of his books.  Which isn’t a bad thing considering the alternative would be Dan Brown or Harry Potter) and, as should be clear from my comments above, I agree strongly with Pinker’s review.

Simply put, enjoy Prof. Pinker’s review and keep it in mind the next time you read Gladwell’s excellent articles or somewhat unconvincing books.  Gladwell is a fantastic essayist, an extremely interesting and inquisitive author, but his writings are perhaps more properly viewed as very constructive than well-constructed.

[Nonetheless, I am always happy to see a new article of his appear at The New Yorker]

… and the cow goes moo

I’ve spent the past few mights replaying Mass Effect on various difficulties. The one thing I’ve always loved about that game was that fact that even after 5 playthroughs, there was still more to be found. I’m itching for Mass Effect 2, started after I preordered it from Amazon.com. The bioware forums do a good job of keeping it at bay. There are enough tidbits there to keep me complacent.

Anyway, it’s gotten me thinking about Bioware in general. Here you have a company that pumps out amazing games, that actually listens to it’s customers and fans and even some of the “haters”. They genuinely seem to care about the games they make, and the people that buy them. It’s a refreshing change from the usual “we hear you, but we don’t give a flying fuck” nature of a lot of companies. Bioware: Thank you. You make me proud.

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On the advice of a good friend of mine, I’m going to read Steven Pinker’s “The Blank Slate”. Amazon.com has been cooperative, so now all I have to do is wait for it to arrive. If there was ever a time I was rooting for UPS, this is it (although I admit the arrival of Mass Effect 2 next January will be the greatest UPS delivery I’ve ever gotten). Also re-watching Taxi Driver.

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It’s still pretty warm out, for the moment. I’ve had my windows open for the past few days. I’ve also been eaten alive by mosquitoes. My damn neighbors have a massive pool which they have never drained for the winter, OR covered properly. So the stagnant water breeds the little bastards, and I suffer for it. Seriously considering going to a payphone and lodging an anonymous complaint with 311.

Chances are I’ll make a post later, but in case I don’t, have a good night, internet.

An eye-opening review of Malcolm Gladwell’s book “What the dog saw” by Steven Pinker –  I will be much more careful of accepting Gladwell’s conclusions from here on.  From the New York Times:

Malcolm Gladwell, Eclectic Detective

By STEVEN PINKER

Have you ever wondered why there are so many kinds of mustard but only one kind of ketchup? Or what Cézanne did before painting his first significant works in his 50s? Have you hungered for the story behind the Veg-O-Matic, star of the frenetic late-night TV ads? Or wanted to know where Led Zeppelin got the riff in “Whole Lotta Love”?

Neither had I, until I began this collection by the indefatigably curious journalist Malcolm Gladwell. The familiar jacket design, with its tiny graphic on a spare background, reminds us that Gladwell has become a brand. He is the author of the mega-best sellers “The Tipping Point,” “Blink” and “Out­liers”; a popular speaker on the Dilbert circuit; and a prolific contributor to The New Yorker, where the 19 articles in “What the Dog Saw” were originally published. This volume includes prequels to those books and other examples of Gladwell’s stock in trade: counterintuitive findings from little-known experts.

A third of the essays are portraits of “minor geniuses” — impassioned oddballs loosely connected to cultural trends. We meet the feuding clan of speed-talking pitchmen who gave us the Pocket Fisherman, Hair in a Can, and other it-slices!-it-dices! contraptions. There is the woman who came up with the slogan “Does she or doesn’t she?” and made hair coloring (and, Gladwell suggests, self-invention) respectable to millions of American women. The investor Nassim Taleb explains how markets can be blindsided by improbable but consequential events. A gourmet ketchup entrepreneur provides Gladwell the opportunity to explain the psychology of taste and to recount the history of condiments.

Another third are on the hazards of statistical prediction, especially when it comes to spectacular failures like Enron, 9/11, the fatal flight of John F. Kennedy Jr., the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, the persistence of homelessness and the unsuccessful targeting of Scud missile launchers during the Persian Gulf war of 1991. For each debacle, Gladwell tries to single out a fallacy of reasoning behind it, such as that more information is always better, that pictures offer certainty, that events are distributed in a bell curve around typical cases, that clues available in hindsight should have been obvious before the fact and that the risk of failure in a complex system can be reduced to zero.

The final third are also about augury, this time about individuals rather than events. Why, he asks, is it so hard to prognosticate the performance of artists, teachers, quarterbacks, executives, serial killers and breeds of dogs?

The themes of the collection are a good way to characterize Gladwell himself: a minor genius who unwittingly demonstrates the hazards of statistical reasoning and who occasionally blunders into spectacular failures.

Gladwell is a writer of many gifts. His nose for the untold back story will have readers repeatedly muttering, “Gee, that’s interesting!” He avoids shopworn topics, easy moralization and conventional wisdom, encouraging his readers to think again and think different. His prose is transparent, with lucid explanations and a sense that we are chatting with the experts ourselves. Some chapters are master­pieces in the art of the essay. I particularly liked “Something Borrowed,” a moving examination of the elusive line between artistic influence and plagiarism, and “Dangerous Minds,” a suspenseful tale of criminal profiling that shows how self-anointed experts can delude their clients and themselves with elastic predictions.

An eclectic essayist is necessarily a dilettante, which is not in itself a bad thing. But Gladwell frequently holds forth about statistics and psychology, and his lack of technical grounding in these subjects can be jarring. He provides misleading definitions of “homology,” “sagittal plane” and “power law” and quotes an expert speaking about an “igon value” (that’s eigenvalue, a basic concept in linear algebra). In the spirit of Gladwell, who likes to give portentous names to his aperçus, I will call this the Igon Value Problem: when a writer’s education on a topic consists in interviewing an expert, he is apt to offer generalizations that are banal, obtuse or flat wrong.

The banalities come from a gimmick that can be called the Straw We. First Gladwell disarmingly includes himself and the reader in a dubious consensus — for example, that “we” believe that jailing an executive will end corporate malfeasance, or that geniuses are invariably self-made prodigies or that eliminating a risk can make a system 100 percent safe. He then knocks it down with an ambiguous observation, such as that “risks are not easily manageable, accidents are not easily preventable.” As a generic statement, this is true but trite: of course many things can go wrong in a complex system, and of course people sometimes trade off safety for cost and convenience (we don’t drive to work wearing crash helmets in Mack trucks at 10 miles per hour). But as a more substantive claim that accident investigations are meaningless “rituals of reassurance” with no effect on safety, or that people have a “fundamental tendency to compensate for lower risks in one area by taking greater risks in another,” it is demonstrably false.

The problem with Gladwell’s generalizations about prediction is that he never zeroes in on the essence of a statistical problem and instead overinterprets some of its trappings. For example, in many cases of uncertainty, a decision maker has to act on an observation that may be either a signal from a target or noise from a distractor (a blip on a screen may be a missile or static; a blob on an X-ray may be a tumor or a harmless thickening). Improving the ability of your detection technology to discriminate signals from noise is always a good thing, because it lowers the chance you’ll mistake a target for a distractor or vice versa. But given the technology you have, there is an optimal threshold for a decision, which depends on the relative costs of missing a target and issuing a false alarm. By failing to identify this trade-off, Gladwell bamboozles his readers with pseudoparadoxes about the limitations of pictures and the downside of precise information.

Another example of an inherent trade-off in decision-making is the one that pits the accuracy of predictive information against the cost and complexity of acquiring it. Gladwell notes that I.Q. scores, teaching certificates and performance in college athletics are imperfect predictors of professional success. This sets up a “we” who is “used to dealing with prediction problems by going back and looking for better predictors.” Instead, Gladwell argues, “teaching should be open to anyone with a pulse and a college degree — and teachers should be judged after they have started their jobs, not before.”

But this “solution” misses the whole point of assessment, which is not clairvoyance but cost-effectiveness. To hire teachers indiscriminately and judge them on the job is an example of “going back and looking for better predictors”: the first year of a career is being used to predict the remainder. It’s simply the predictor that’s most expensive (in dollars and poorly taught students) along the accuracy-­cost trade-off. Nor does the absurdity of this solution for professional athletics (should every college quarterback play in the N.F.L.?) give Gladwell doubts about his misleading analogy between hiring teachers (where the goal is to weed out the bottom 15 percent) and drafting quarterbacks (where the goal is to discover the sliver of a percentage point at the top).

The common thread in Gladwell’s writing is a kind of populism, which seeks to undermine the ideals of talent, intelligence and analytical prowess in favor of luck, opportunity, experience and intuition. For an apolitical writer like Gladwell, this has the advantage of appealing both to the Horatio Alger right and to the egalitarian left. Unfortunately he wildly overstates his empirical case. It is simply not true that a quarter­back’s rank in the draft is uncorrelated with his success in the pros, that cognitive skills don’t predict a teacher’s effectiveness, that intelligence scores are poorly related to job performance or (the major claim in “Outliers”) that above a minimum I.Q. of 120, higher intelligence does not bring greater intellectual achievements.

The reasoning in “Outliers,” which consists of cherry-picked anecdotes, post-hoc sophistry and false dichotomies, had me gnawing on my Kindle. Fortunately for “What the Dog Saw,” the essay format is a better showcase for Gladwell’s talents, because the constraints of length and editors yield a higher ratio of fact to fancy. Readers have much to learn from Gladwell the journalist and essayist. But when it comes to Gladwell the social scientist, they should watch out for those igon values.

Jnah Lehrer

On Steven Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought

In The Stuff of Thought, Pinker pitches himself as the broker of a scientific compromise between “linguistic determinism” and “extreme nativism.” The linguistic determinists argue that language is a prison for thought. The words we know define our knowledge of the world. Because Eskimos have more nouns for snow, they are able to perceive distinctions in snow that English speakers cannot. While Pinker deftly discredits extreme versions of this hypothesis, he admits that “boring versions” of linguistic determinism are probably accurate. It shouldn’t be too surprising that our choice of words can frame events, or that our vocabulary reflects the kinds of things we encounter in our daily life. (Why do Eskimos have so many words for snow? Because they are always surrounded by snow.) The language we learn as children might not determine our thoughts, but it certainly influences them.

Extreme nativism, on the other hand, argues that all of our mental concepts — the 50,000 or so words in the typical vocabulary — are innate. We are born knowing about carburetors and doorknobs and iPods. This bizarre theory, most closely identified with the philosopher Jerry Fodor, begins with the assumption that the meaning of words cannot be dissected into more basic parts. A doorknob is a doorknob is a doorknob. It only takes Pinker a few pages to prove the obvious, which is that each word is not an indivisible unit. The mind isn’t a blank slate, but it isn’t an overstuffed filing cabinet either.

So what is Pinker’s solution? He advocates the middle ground of “conceptual semantics,” in which the meaning of our words depends on an underlying framework of basic cognitive concepts. (As Pinker admits, he owes a big debt to Kant.) The tenses of verbs, for example, are shaped by our innate sense of time. Nouns are constrained by our intuitive notions about matter, so that we naturally parcel things into two different categories, objects and substances (pebbles versus applesauce, for example, or, as Pinker puts it, “hunks and goo”). Each material category comes with a slightly different set of grammatical rules. By looking at language from the perspective of our thoughts, Pinker demonstrates that many seemingly arbitrary aspects of speech, like that hunk and goo distinction, aren’t arbitrary at all: They are byproducts of our evolved mental machinery.

Pinker tries hard to make this tour of linguistic theory as readable as possible. He uses the f-word to explore the topic of transitive and intransitive verbs. He clarifies indirect speech by examining a scene from Tootsie, and Lenny Bruce makes so many appearances that he should be granted a posthumous linguistic degree. But profanity from Lenny Bruce can’t always compensate for the cryptic vocabulary and long list of competing ‘isms. Sometimes, the payoff can be disappointing. After a long chapter on curse words — this book deserves an “explicit content” warning — Pinker ends with the banal conclusion that swearing is “connected with negative emotion.” I don’t need conceptual semantics to tell me that.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Lehrer is editor at large for See magazine and the author of Proust Was a Neuroscientist and more recently, How We Decide. He is a graduate of Columbia University, a Rhodes Scholar, and author of several articles for The New Yorker, the Washington Post, and the Boston Globe.

* * *

If you wish to read the entire review, please visit http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/21/AR2007122100139.html.