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.

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

Steven Pinker

Malcolm Gladwell, Eclectic Detective
Steven Pinker

What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures
Malcolm Gladwell
410 pp. Little, Brown & Company. $27.99

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 quarter back’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.

Steven Pinker is Harvard College Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. His most recent book is The Stuff of Thought.

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If you wish to read the complete review, please visit http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/books/review/Pinker-t.html?ref=todayspaper&pagewanted=print.

On seeing Watchmen, a feminist writer, an anti-feminist cop, and a couple of books in between:

BiblioGuy and I are dipping out after work to see “Watchmen” and then I’m off to St. Louis tomorrow morning to celebrate my grandparent’s 50th wedding anniversary.  So I figure it’s best to get this week’s status update out of the way before it goes the way of last week’s (nonexistant) status update.

First things first, I’ve managed to finish two whole books. Wahoo!  Cue the confetti and the Rocky music.  The first one I finished last week: Katha Pollit’s Learning to Drive.  Remember when I wrote that I suspected it would be the perfect complement (antidote?) to Sloan Crosely’s funny but lacking in introspection I Was Told There’d Be Cake?  Well my suspicions were confirmed.

I’ve earmarked page after page of Learning to Drive.  I had no idea that Pollit is normally considered a feminist writer who was raised by Marxist parents.  When she didn’t have some very poignant things to say about aging as a woman (See: “I Let Myself Go”) and the exhilarating give and take between men and women (See: ” When All the Men Are Gone”), she wrote very entertainingly about her experiences in a Marxist book club and what she learned when she read her parent’s FBI file.

Speaking of feminism, let me digress for a just a bit to say that yesterday I read the most infuriating page and a half I’ve read in a very long time.  It was a page and half full of jokes about women as told by a misogynistic male cop in Roberto Bolano’s 2666.

Have you ever been so mad that you feel steam coming out of your ears?  Well then you know exactly how I felt.  I was unfortunate enough to read this when I was riding the bus home yesterday, and I’m sure the other riders were wondering why I was glaring at the page so furiously.

I’d provide a full excerpt, but really I don’t want to ruin your Friday.  Suffice it to say that all of the jokes were in the vein of, “How many parts does a woman’s brain have?”  Answer: “It depends on how hard you hit her.”

Yeah.

It’s been a while since I’ve despised a character as quickly and as violently as I did that unnamed cop.  Speaking of 2666, I may as well say that I’m almost finished with book 2, “The Part About the Murders.”  Honestly, I can’t wait, because the catalogue of the various young girls and women being murdered (ranging in ages from 9 -35 years old) is killing me.  It’s one heartbreak after another, compounded by the fact that few of the people in the novel who should care actually seem to.

On to that other book I finished: John Harwood’s The Seance.  This was an entertaining, quick Gothic read.  Still, there was something that I found vaguely disappointing about it.  I think I was hoping for a greater, more harrowing conclusion to the mystery than I received.  The ending, though it did tie up all of the loose ends, was kind of lackluster.  I was expecting a greater confrontation with the arch villain than the one I received.  But that’s all stuff for the review which I hope to do one day some time soon.

You already know from my last post that I’ve begun reading Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.  I’m still not very far along so I don’t really have a comment on it yet.  I’ve also started reading The Best American Travel Writing ed. by Anthony Bourdain.

This morning I read “Next Stop, Squalor” by John Lancaster, in which he examines the moral questions surrounding a tourism company that offers tours of the Dharavi slum of Mumbai.  Is this exploitation or education?  Of hand, I would have said the former and a part of me still does.  The thought of western tourists venturing to a slum in India to gawk at its dwellers like an expensive trip to the zoo… it sticks in my craw.

But the founder of the tourist organization says that the idea isn’t to exploit the slum dwellers, but to “dispel the myth that people there sit around doing nothing, that they’re criminals… We show it for what it is – a place where people are working hard, struggling to make a living, and doing it in an honest way.”

Even if that is a bunch of scam talk (what I’d call “game”), Lancaster rightly points out that the criticism coming from many of Mumbai’s city officials and journalists is also questionable:

Surely their ire could have been better targeted at the municipal authorities who had failed to provide the community with basic sanitation.  I wondered whether the critics weren’t simply embarrassed by the slum’s glaring poverty – an image at odd with the country’s efforts to rebrand itself as a big software park.

I’ve also read a bit more of Stephen Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought.  He’s getting into the nitty-gritty of linguistics, and the growing use of linguistic jargon is starting to cross my eyes a bit, but I’m making it.  Slowly but surely.

Lastly, I’m thinking of starting Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book. I know – as if I don’t have enough on my plate, but I have an opening for one more fiction book and if I’d done yesterday’s Booking Through Thursday this would’ve been at the top of my list. Either way, I won’t be able to make up my mind until Sunday, which is a ways off yet.

And that’s it guys and gals, excepting for the two magazines I also managed to finish which was like removing two M&Ms from a jar full – no effect whatsoever.  Eh, what can you do but keep reading, right?

Have a great weekend everyone!

Reading: Steven Pinker The Stuff of Thought 2007

p. 129
When an intermediate product is stored in a human mind rather than on a disk or on paper, psychologists call it working memory. The two most vivid forms of working memory are mental images, also called a visuospatial sketchpad, and snatches of inner speech, also called a phonological loop. People often use their phonological loop to keep a phone number in mind, to do mental arithmetic, and to keep track of left and right when following directions or remembering locations. The fact that language has a physical side- sound and pronunciation- makes it useful as a medium of working memory, because it allows information to be temporarily offloaded into the auditory and motor parts of the brain, freeing up the capacity in the central systems that traffic in more abstract information. If a language provides a label for a complex concept, that could make it easier to think about the concept, because the mind can handle it as a single package when juggling a set of ideas, rather than having to keep each of its components in the air separately. It can also give a concept an additional label in long-term memory, making it more easily retrievable than ineffable concepts or those with more roundabout verbal descriptions.

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a lot of times throughout the day i fill my phonological loop with great stuff. i always assume i will remember it later, but i never do. i forget it all.

this led me to start writing things down. i carry a notebook. sometimes i use scraps if i don’t have the notebook right there. but they usually don’t get incorporated. i don’t have a system where i am going back to them or re-reading them.

i think i have written parts of many larger projects. but only in my phonological loop. so now i need to write them down. work on them more. elaborate them. “extend” them in the Joseph Cornell sense. and allow them to get big and exist and not just evaporate.

so speaking of Joseph Cornell. tlc mentioned his diaries so i have been reading them. he made notes on everything and about everything. more on that later. guess what else he liked…

SAD DOLLS!

this is a piece called “Untitled (Bebe Marie)”. It is owned by the MOMA. I got this picture from IBiblio- hosted Web Museum, France.

On stuff I read or tried to read this first full week of February:

This week, I have three words for you: The. Amber. Spyglass.  Yup. I finished it!  And oh, what an amazing, amazing book.  You know when you read a book and you’re so dazzled by it that every time you think of it afterwords you see little sparkly stars of happiness before your eyes?  Yes, that’s how great Philip Pullman’s book was.

I won’t get too far into what I liked about it, otherwise this update will end up being a novel-long review.  Let’s just say I’ve got a whole lot to say about this book and the series, and virtually all of it is good.  I’m so thankful that I read Pullman’s His Dark Materials series.  It has so many wonderful elements – the philosophy, the action, the adventure, the creativity, the struggle, the happiness, and especially the love.

Whew! Ok,  I’m stopping otherwise I’ll never stop.  I’ll try to post my review of the series as a whole sometime next week, although I have to write my review for The Anglo Files by Sarah Lyall first.  I’m so slow about these things.

Anyways… so what else did I read this week?  Honestly, hardly anything besides The Amber Spyglass.  I tried to get a little further into Peter Straub’s Ghost Story, but I kept falling asleep on it.  All told, I think I got in all of two pages so nothing new to report there.

Last weekend, I made it to the third part of Roberto Bolano’s 2666 “The Part About Fate.”  I’d been really involved with the book until my attention got diverted by The Amber Spyglass on Monday.  Now that that’s finished, I’m actually looking forward to getting back to 2666.  Bolano is weaving an interesting spell with these parts.  It’s like a song that starts off quietly and unassuming, but beautifully so that you can’t help but wait to hear what comes next.  The denouement, I suspect, will be beautiful.

I’ve also started reading two nonfiction books: The Great Derangement by Matt Taibbi and The Stuff of Thought by Steven Pinker.  Taibbi’s book has proven to be especially useful this week.  The second chapter of The Great Derangement, “Congressional Interlude I, or Inside the Halls of Derangement,” gives the reader a peek at what really happens on the Hill.

To do that, Taibbi follows a bill written just after Hurricane Katrina as it travels through Congress.  What it, the bill and its passage, reveals about the cynicism and cronyism of some of our elected officials is nothing less than depressing.  All I have to say is: this is why Obama is in office.  An excerpt:

The nonresponsive government may have seen the people scurrying toward magical or conspiratorial explanations for their betrayal, but when I went to Washington – in the fall of 2005, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina – what I found was a much less exotic, but frankly harder to accept, explanation for why things are falling apart.  The best cover our corrupt politicians have for their behavior is the very banality of their crimes; to quote Tolstoy, their corruption is the “most ordinary and therefore the most horrible.”  To be robbed and betrayed by a fiendish underground conspiracy, or by the earthly agents of Satan, is at least a romantic sort of plight – it suggests at least a grand Hollywood-ready confrontation between good and evil – but to be coldly ripped off over and over again by a bunch of bloodless, second-rate schmoes, schmoes you choose, you elected, is not something anyone will take much pleasure in bragging about.

I haven’t gotten that far in The Stuff of Thought either.  At the moment Pinker and I are in a discussion on how children acquire language.  I have a two year old sister so this is especially relevant for me.  Isn’t the way children acquire language so quickly amazing?  The way Pinker describes it, it’s almost a miracle.  To make his point, Pinker quotes Crazy English by Richard Lederer.  Lederer writes:

If adults commit adultery, do infants commit infantry?  If olive oil is made from olives, what do they make baby oil from?  If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian consume? A writer is someone who writes, and a stinger is something that stings.  But fingers don’t fing, grocers dong groce, hamers don’t ham, humdingers don’t humding, ushers don’t ush, and haberdashers do not haberdash…

…If the plural for tooth is teeth, shouldn’t the plural for booth be beeth?  One goose, two geese – so one moose, two meese?  If people ring a bell today and rang a bell yesterday, why don’t we say they flang a ball?  If they wrote a letter, perhaps they bote their tongue.

Our language is maaaaad!  If this is truly the stuff of thought, it’s no wonder some politicians behave the way do. 

Well, that’s it for another (late, late – I know) Status Update.  I hope you all have gotten your weekend off to a great start!  Happy reading!!

Gene Kincaid has told our integrated management class that we can’t wait for all the information before we make a decision, but that hasn’t stopped me from seeking knowledge.

This curiousity has led me to study philosopy, but it has also led me to spend a LOT of money.

Today I bought about $100 in books at Intellectual Property. This place is my weakness.

• The World Without Us by Alan Weisman
• Freedom & Neurobiology by John R. Searle
• Made to Stick by Chip Heath & Dan Heath
• Business Writing and Communication by Kenneth W. Davis
• The Stuff of Thought by Steven Pinker

I have a few other titles I need to read. I just wish I could hold all the knowledge from multiple books while reading them simultaneously.

Aside from reading I would am interested developing skills in photography, social media, digital media and web design. I also want to take yoga. And learn to play more musical instruments.

Needless to say, my interests will bankrupt me and I don’t even have any money!

The plan yesterday was to (finally) start reading Sherry Thomas’s Delicious. I adored Private Arrangements and made a point of getting Delicious at the at the RWA booksigning in San Francisco in July. (It’s entirely normal for me to buy books that I don’t read for months or even years.)

But plans are what you make to keep yourself busy until you finally act. Which means I planned one thing and did another. A quote on Newsweek.com sent me to the library’s online catalog to see if Steven Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought was on the shelf; a happy  answer there sent me to the library itself; poking in the stacks gave me the book I wanted as well as a few I hadn’t planned on.

One of the surprises was Pinker’s The Language Instinct, which is what I am now reading with a great deal of delight. It’s crammed with ideas and information, offered up in lively, witty, zestful prose that is a pure pleasure to read. For me, it’s pages and pages of messing about with the architecture of language itself, playing with my favorite toy in a way that doesn’t smother the fun while also staying true to the science. If you love language, if you love grammar (actual grammar, not formal grammar, which is “the etiquette of written prose”; the grammar “that can build an unlimited set of sentences out of a finite list of words”; both quotes from The Language Instinct), you will love Pinsky. You will love him because he shares your love.

Or maybe that’s just why I love him.

It’s sometimes harder to describe what comes naturally than it is what comes artificially. We learn to speak by virtue of being around adults who speak, and yet analyzing the languages humans have developed and what those languages represent is harder than it is for a toddler to intuitively learn them. Speaking develops with no schooling aside from the “school” of other humans—and yet its manifold distinctions are the subject of Steven Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought, a complex book that gives some answers leading toward still more questions as he tries to explain the paradoxical mysteries of consciousness and perception.

The subtext of The Stuff of Thought seems to be that language affects us more than we consciously realize and that our uses of language tends to occur in previously unexamined patterns that, once perceived, can be better used to our advantage. Such bold statements take some explaining: language reveals a great deal about us, Pinker argues, including theories of causation embedded inflectionally in some languages and syntactically in English. Some examples are simple: “John threw the ball” indicates who acted on what, and in that model it is difficult to misinterpret what is being said and who is doing what to what. Throw in prepositions and other spatial features encoded in language, however, and it becomes steadily harder to grasp precisely why “A sad movie makes you sad, but a sad person is already sad,” even if we understand the difference without being told the rule. The Stuff of Thought is a guided tour through what we didn’t know that we know. “I am exploring my sexuality; you are promiscuous; she is a slut,” and while all three phrases or words might describe the same fundamental behavior, and yet each has very different and apparent shades of meaning, from positive to pejorative.

This is an example of how we “flip frames,” or understand an event in multiple ways depending on its context. In Newsweek, Lynne Spears—the mother of children famous for celebrity and fecundity, in that order—said of one who recently gave birth at 17, “But [despite] a situation that has fallen in her lap, she’s doing exceptionally well[...]” Notice the phrase, “a situation that has fallen in her lap,” as if the person involved had no agency and was struck by a meteor on her way to school. Then again, maybe the girl in question didn’t have as much agency as classical economists would believe; in Dan Ariely’s excellent Predictably Irrational, he discusses an experiment in which students who were aroused admitted to considerably risk taking in an inventory of potential sexual behaviors than those who were not.* The frame Lynne Spears uses betrays at least some idea of her “frame,” but if we’re not paying attention to her statement, we’re likely to miss it. Furthermore, to be fair, Lynne Spears might refer to her daughter’s choice long after conception, at which point it’s too late to remake the past and one must deal with the options at hand. Temporal ambiguity—a subject Pinker discusses in Chapter 4, “Cleaving the Air”—becomes essential, and nothing about what Lynne Spears said indicates the precise time period she meant. It turns out that such relativity is inherent in language, which applies imprecise spatial metaphors to time, leaving us with the uncertainty much celebrated by Deconstructionists.

Other chapters in The Stuff of Thought deal with metaphors, naming, and game theory, but to go into each would expand this post into a weak shadow of the book, rather than a pointer in its direction. Some extra discussion is warranted, though, and Pinker also discusses swearing and how it changes over time in Chapter 7, “The Seven Words You Can’t Say on Television,” and especially why so much revolves around excretion, sex, and religion. The power of the latter has declined in much of the West along with belief in a literal manifestation of God, and Pinker speculates that phrases like “go to hell,” or “damnit,” that are sufficiently innocuous to be broadcast on television, might have been more threatening when people believed they were Sinners in the Hand of an Angry God (sample: “The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some detestable insect, over the fire, detests you, and is dreadfully provoked”). Those around excretion and sex, however, still hold more power because they’re both vectors for disease, literally, and the latter can also be a vector for emotional disease, as many pop songs and novels about jilted love attest.

The sense of Pinker giving only a small taste of his book was reflected in the question and answer period: someone would ask a question, Pinker would begin to elaborate, and then refer the questioner to the relevant chapter. Materials as complex as his can’t easily be summarized and grokked, particularly because one of his book’s major virtues is the wealth of examples and metaphors he uses to describe the general principles he and others have derived from language itself. It’s also a drawback of this post: I’ve tried to give a general overview of Pinker’s ideas, but my own writings are at such a surface level that they can do no more than point to the book. Call it the difference between something like Lily Koppel’s The Red Leather Diary, which would’ve been better left a newspaper article and The Stuff of Thought, a book whose teachings are easier to describe than to apply. Pinker has accomplished a difficult task in synthesizing so much research, but its readers have the harder work of deciding what to do with what we’ve learned.

That is the name of a book on what language structure and useage reveals about our thinking processes. Cerebrate contemplates and reviews.

He finds it satisfying yet meaty. He also disses zombies.

The End of Theory?

Chris Anderson’s Wired cover story The End of Theory has many in the blogosphere up in arms.  But rather than wade into this epistemological brouhaha, I will instead make the argument that Chris Anderson should have made — that artificial intelligence (AI) is here today.  If you haven’t read The End of Theory, you should read it and check out Kevin Kelly’s The Google Way of Science while you are at it.  

Artificial intelligence has negative connotations because previous attempts pursued an overly ambitious top-down approach — reverse-engineer the human brain and then build a model in silicon.  Top-down approaches to solving problems of the complex systems variety usually don’t work.  There are a number of factors that have enabled the bottoms-up approach that we have today:  massive volumes of publicly available data thanks to the web, cheap compute cycles thanks to commodity hardware and open source software, and improved programming models for the processing large data sets like MapReduce and advances in machine learning algorithms. 

In addition to these enablers, there is a point that is often overlooked which I believe is of critical import — that the web is the greatest empirical testing platform in the history of the world.  Most authors have focused on the value of HISTORIC data sets for the identification of correlated objects.  If the story ended there, we would have Jorge Borges’ Library of Babel — the story of a library with every pair of letters and, consequently, the explanation for why the library exists and how to use it.  Correlation without an empirical feedback loop is worth as much as a Zimbabwe dollar.

Fortunately, it doesn’t end there — those correlated data sets are put in front of hundreds of millions of users.  Let’s examine a snippet from Kelly’s post:

For instance, take Google’s spell checker. When you misspell a word when googling, Google suggests the proper spelling. How does it know this? How does it predict the correctly spelled word? It is not because it has a theory of good spelling, or has mastered spelling rules. In fact Google knows nothing about spelling rules at all.

Instead Google operates a very large dataset of observations which show that for any given spelling of a word, x number of people say “yes” when asked if they meant to spell word “y.” Google’s spelling engine consists entirely of these datapoints, rather than any notion of what correct English spelling is. That is why the same system can correct spelling in any language.

Kelly touches on what I believe is the key point — that “x number of people say ‘yes’ when asked if they meant to spell word ‘y.’”  Every time a user clicks the suggested spelling the system learns.  Every time the user DOESN’T click the suggested spelling the system learns.  Machine learning is a bit of a misnomer – humans are programming the machines and many more humans are providing continuous feedback to probabilistically accept or reject atomic-level hypotheses (in this case, the spelling of a word).  

This isn’t a battle between machines with data and the scientific method, but rather a bottoms-up approach to AI that mimics the way most humans learn most of what we know.  In The Stuff of Thought, Steven Pinker examines language to gain insight into the workings of the human brain.  

Put yourself in the booties of a child who is in the midst of figuring out how to speak the language as it is spoken by parents, friends, and siblings… As you continue to hoover up verbs over the months and years…they appear in two synonymous constructions but differ in whether it is the content or the container that shows up as the direct object…

Smear grease on the axle.

Smear the axle with grease.

…When the locative rule is applied willy-nilly, it cranks out many errors…

Pour water into the glass.

Pour the glass with water.

What’s the difference… think about the physics.  In the first list, the agent applies force to the substance and the surface simultaneously, by pushing one against the other.  In the second, the agent allows gravity to do the work.  It’s the difference between causing and letting, between acting on something directly and acting on it via an intermediary force, between expecting something to change as one is doing something in real time and expecting it to change shortly after one has done something….

When I read Pinker’s argument, I was fascinated.  Brilliant!  Yet I have managed to get through my first 37 years without understanding the role physics plays in the use of verbs in the English language.  As a child I learned a few words by association.  I then learned verbs and how to construct sentences.  As I experimented with various constructions, my parents and teachers rewarded my experiments with “well done” or helped me to identify my failed experiments by correcting me.  And I am fairly certain that they based their corrections on “what sounded right” rather than a deep appreciation for the role of the physical sciences in verb use.

So what’s the opportunity?  

As Pinker tells us, language acquisition is an example of the problem of induction — making generalizations about the future from historic data.  Both humans and increasingly “machines” run continuous experiments in order to adjust their internal models.  

A good place to start would be to look for systems which have evolved over long periods of time where most people learn through some type of induction plus real-world feedback.  Spelling and translation are the most frequently cited examples of Google “science,” and they both fit the bill.  

Another good candidate is medicine – most physicians rely heavily on identifying patterns from previous cases and applying them to the current case.  ”The last 100 times I saw symptoms x and y it was disease z.”  Doctors proceed with caution, as they are aware of the limitation of their heuristic approach.  They propose various treatments or medications as small experiments in the hope that they can confirm their [inferred] hunch.   

Surely we can create a better system for some set of medical problems?  What are some other areas where induction is the primary form of human learning?

Lorie Graham and Stephen McJohn, have posted their essay, “Cognition, Law, Stories” (forthcoming Minnesota Journal of Law (2009)) on SSRN. Here is the abstract.

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This essay reviews Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought (Penguin 2007), which offers insights from cognitive science just where it overlaps the most with law – how we use basic cognitive categories like intent, space, time, events and causation. The Stuff of Thought might offer insights into a broad range of issues in legal theory. Legal theory could make more use of such cognitive science concepts as chunking, recursion, and the primary qualities of an object. Other topics likewise resonate in thinking about the law: The book suggests that metaphor is an important cognitive tool, but less constraining than might be thought. Linguistic analysis of verb classes and polysemy suggests that words have surprisingly determinate meaning. Our apparent innate sense of causation (drawn from an analysis of language) sheds light on the legal treatment of causation. Lastly, The Stuff of Thought describes the role of indirect speech, whereby people convey information without revealing their state of mind – which often allows social interaction to proceed smoothly. Default rules in the law, we suggest, often play an analogous role.

The essay then explores the cognitive aspects of stories (following literary theorists like Mark Turner who have linked cognitive science with narrative theory), suggesting a recursive definition of story, and another angle to the trolley problem. Looking at the cognitive role of stories permits a fuller view of legal reasoning, learning, and remembering. This fits well with recent scholarship, such as work on origin stories, and law and genre theory.

Have you ever thought to yourself Why do they call junk mail ”spam”? Today, in reading what is shaping up to be an outstanding book – Steven Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature – I learned the etymology of this funny word. Pinker is quoted below.

Pinker writes:

Spam is not, as some people believe, an acronym for Short, Pointless, and Annoying Messages. The word is related to the name of the luncheon meat sold by Hormel since 1937, a portmanteau from SPiced hAM. But how did it come to refer to e-mailed invitations to enlarge the male member and share the ill-gotten gains of deposed African despots? Many people assume that the route was metaphor. Like the luncheon meat, the e-mail is cheap, plentiful, and unwanted, and in one variant of this folk etymology, spamming is what happens when you dump Spam in a fan. Thought these intuitions may have helped make the word contagious, its origin is very different. It was inspired by a sketch from Monty Python’s Flying Circus in which a couple enter a cafe and ask the waitress (a Python in drag) what’s available. She answers:

Well, there’s egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam; spam bacon sausage and spam; spam egg spam spam bacon and spam; spam sausage spam spam bacon spam tomato and spam; spam spam egg and spam; spam spam spam spam spam spam baked beans spam spam spam, or Lobster Thermidor: a Crevette with a mornay sauce served in a Provencale manner with shallots and aubergines garnished with truffle pate, brandy and with a fried egg on top and spam.

… The mindless repetition of the word spam inspired late-1980s hackers to use it as a verb for flooding newsgroups with identical messages, and a decade later it spread from their subculture to the populace at large.

For more on the lexical contributions of the computer nerd/hacker subculture, click here.

scroll to 20:30 for proof:

Steven Pinker on TED…

In an exclusive preview of his new book, The Stuff of Thought, Steven Pinker looks at language, and the way it expresses the workings of our minds. By analyzing common sentences and words, he shows us how, in what we say and how we say it, we’re communicating much more than we realize.

Here’s an excerpt from one of the reviews of his book, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature, on Amazon by Robert L. Moore.

Is there a difference between the meanings of these two sentences?

(1) Hal loaded hay into the wagon, and,

(2) Hal loaded the wagon with hay.

Well, Steven Pinker claims there is a difference and it’s a difference that reveals something about the way the mind conceptualizes experience. That is “the stuff of thought” with which Pinker’s latest book is concerned, and this “stuff,” as he convincingly demonstrates, can be made accessible through a careful analysis of “the stuff of language,” i.e., word categories and their syntactic habitats.

In the case of the two sentences above, we can see the human capacity to frame events in alternate ways through the dual function of verbs like “load.” This verb draws attention to the hay and its movement in the first sentence, but to the transformation (a kind of metaphorical “movement”) of the wagon in the second.