From the choice of a child's name to the
widespread difficulty in understanding the laws of physics, human
beings are governed, Steven Pinker says, by innate and often
fallacious conceptual frameworks. Time, he tells Matthew Reisz, for
us all to start 'reprogramming'. For Stephen Pinker, we humans are
"verbivores, a species that lives on words". By putting our verbal
habits under the microscope, he argues in his new book, The
Stuff of Thought, we can learn a lot about human nature and the
innate conceptual frameworks whose "design quirks give rise to
fallacies, follies and foibles in the way that people reason about
the conundrums of modern life".
Such an analysis, he claims, "underscores the place of education
in a scientifically literate democracy and even suggests a statement
of purpose for it (a surprisingly elusive principle in higher
education today). The goal of education is to make up for the
shortcomings in our instinctive ways of thinking about the physical
and social world."
Pinker has always gone for the big subject, in his celebrated
accounts of The Language Instinct (1994) and How the
Mind Works (1997) and his powerful contribution to the nature
side of the nature-nurture debate, The Blank Slate (2002).
He remains a staunch defender of the broad overview as the best way
of tackling fundamental issues.
"I hope to bring clarification to areas that tend to be discussed
piecemeal," he told me in London this week. "A typical paper in my
field will devote 80 per cent of the space to describing the
experiment, there will be a literature review - and only a couple of
paragraphs about what it means at the end. Those couple of
paragraphs are not enough to clarify what the experiment shows. In a
book like this I have the luxury of going on for more than a couple
of paragraphs - being rigorous enough to satisfy my academic peers
without boring the general reader." His general books are now cited
far more often than his scholarly papers.
Canadian-born Pinker, now Johnstone Family professor in the
department of psychology at Harvard University, is one of those
people who seems to know about everything, but he is extremely
charming and approachable in person, only too happy to engage with
my lame arguments that (contra The Blank Slate) parental
behaviour might have a significant impact on the way children turn
out. The Stuff of Thought, Pinker explains, continues his
"attempt to get at the underlying concepts and motives out of which
the complexity of human behaviour comes. What are the underlying
rules, the underlying elements, the building blocks, the alphabet,
that bring us closer to human nature?"
Although Pinker has had some fierce disputes with Noam Chomsky,
the model of Chomsky's Universal Grammar is still at the heart of
his thinking. "While particular culture, particular skills,
particular bits of knowledge cannot possibly be innate any more than
a particular language is, there is an abstract underlying system
that could plausibly be innate - not an inventory of behaviours but
rather a set of generative rules for combinatorial mechanisms. You
can apply that general mindset to things other than language. What
are the underlying emotions that give rise to the full palette of
human emotional expression? What are the underlying social
relationships that in different combinations give rise to the
complexity of social life? And so on."
Pinker's book starts with some unpromising-looking linguistic
minutiae - why does it sound natural to splash a wall with paint but
not to coil a pole with a rope? - as a means of opening an
unexpected window on human nature. Certain ways of thinking about
space, time and causation, it soon emerges, seem to be built into
the way we talk and think, for example the notion that "events can
be explained by the world's very nature, rather than being just one
damn thing after another".
The Stuff of Thought combines Pinker's commitment to
overarching theories with an infectious passion for the details of
language. He delights in competitive black street insults ("Your
mama's so dumb she thinks Moby Dick is a venereal disease"). He
reflects on why people got so upset when Pluto was declassified as a
planet and why the word "celanthropist" - for celebrity
philanthropist - never caught on.
He considers the naming of children, whose fashions do not
require the influence of multinationals, governments or a National
Rebecca Association. He uncovers the issues of "face" and status
hidden in transparent "indirect speech" such as "Would you like to
come up for a coffee?" or "Nice store you got there. Would be a real
shame if something happened to it."
Even more exuberant and entertaining is the chapter on swearing,
a style of speech that links areas of life ranging "from mammaries
to messiahs to maladies to minorities". Today's abuse, Pinker notes,
can never be as vicious as a simple "Go to hell!" was at a time when
"people actually feared they might be sentenced for ever to searing
flames, agonising thirst, terrifying ghouls and blood-curdling
shrieks and groans". "The lexical libertines" of the 1960s who
believed that more openness about sex would lead to less
illegitimacy and fewer sexually transmitted diseases have been
proved utterly wrong. And the distinctions between words such as
"hump" and "bonk" (and their even ruder equivalents), on the one
hand, and phrases such as "sleep together" or "have relations", on
the other, reflect "two very different mental models of sexuality".
Yet if language opens a window on the rich variety of human
thought processes, it also reveals some inbuilt limitations. "Our
words and constructions," writes Pinker, "disclose conceptions of
physical reality and human social life that are similar in all
cultures but different from the products of our science and
scholarship". Much that science reveals to us, in other words, will
always feel profoundly "unnatural" - and that has major implications
for how it should be taught.
We have an innate tendency, for example, to make a sharp
distinction between animals and inanimate objects: "Our natural
mindset in biology is essentialist. We think organisms have some
natural elixir or essence that gives them their form and empowers
their movement."
The only way around this is to get people "to set aside their
essentialist thinking and apply the kind of intuitive engineering
you might use in putting up a couch, cooking or repairing a sewing
machine. Now apply that to organisms. It doesn't come naturally,
thinking of limbs as levers or the heart as a pump. We think of them
as soft squishy stuff with magic gel inside them. But if you're
already capable of dismantling things and figuring out how they work
as machines, you can take that approach and apply it to a rabbit."
As this example suggests, the best technique is often to drive
out an unhelpful metaphor with a more illuminating one. One of the
most powerful chapters in The Stuff of Thought makes the
case that metaphors are not just decorative or optional extras but
can be "a way of adapting language to reality, not the other way
round, and (of) capturing genuine laws in the world".
Human beings also seem to have some fundamental problems with
statistics: "We don't have a natural sense of two overlapping
distributions." That means that statements about average differences
between men and women, for example, are often interpreted as
applying to all individuals unless they refer to something easily
visualised, such as height.
Physics presents an even more fundamental challenge. Relativity
theory and quantum physics are famously mind-bending, but Pinker
stresses that "there is nothing intuitive about Newtonian physics
either. The mental model of causation behind language is more like
the mediaeval theory of impetus - objects are imparted with a kind
of oomph, which pushes them along but gradually dissipates. A lot of
the errors that students, including physics students, make come from
consulting that folk theory and not realising that Newtonian physics
is at odds with it."
As well as the content of much significant science, Pinker calls
attention to the social structures it requires. "Authority is to be
recognised and discounted," he tells me, "so that if a pipsqueak
student challenges me as a big-shot professor, I can't stare them
down because I have credentials and they don't. Though that is
probably the default way in which humans interact, it is a way we
turn off in science. If someone challenges me, I can't say: 'That's
not very nice, it's rather rude of you to imply that all my work is
in vain.' Such a response would be perfectly appropriate in a family
or among friends - but it can lead to the polite consensus of
traditional societies, as opposed to the open debate we depend on in
a democracy or the scientific community. That is another example of
suppressing the instinctive way of behaving."
As this comment suggests, Pinker believes that the qualities
science requires are much more widely valuable and "ought to be a
goal of education, particularly higher education. The definition of
an educated person includes scepticism towards dogma, authority and
'common sense', the openness to investigation and fact that should
also impel journalism and governance - it's about reprogramming
yourself, to the extent that it's possible, and goes with
functioning in a democracy. It is unnatural - you need that in
science but not only in science." When I raise my eyebrows at the
sinister associations of the word "reprogramming", he suggests
"debugging" instead.
Such "debugging" might involve the kind of general course in
probabilistic and critical thinking that Pinker proposed at Harvard
when he was on the general education committee, a course he hoped
could "supply a set of cognitive tools that can be applied in many
domains and are so cognitively unnatural that they deserve attention
at university".
But it also requires that teachers and academics take far more
direct account of the ways in which we naturally think and find ways
of bypassing it: "A lot of education would be more effective if it
singled out the misconceptions that students bring into the class
from the way we evolved or grew up or both, and highlighted the
differences between that and what we have to learn."
The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human
Nature is published by Allen Lane/Penguin, £25.
|
