The Stuff of Thought
Language as a Window into Human Nature
by Steven Pinker · first published 2007
63% recommend38% neutral
Why HN recommends it
Explores how language reflects and shapes thought, with a chapter taking on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. It suits anyone interested in the relationship between language and thinking.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
New York Times bestselling author Steven Pinker possesses that rare combination of scientific aptitude and verbal eloquence that enables him to provide lucid explanations of deep and powerful ideas. His previous books—including the Pulitzer Prize finalist The Blank Slate—have catapulted him into the limelight as one of today's most important and popular science writers.Now, in The Stuff of Thought, Pinker marries two of the subjects he knows best: language and human nature. The result is a fascinating look at how our words explain our nature. What does swearing reveal about our emotions? Why d
Affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
Related books
Eugene Onegin
Alexander Pushkin
Recommended by 4 · mentioned by 174 recommend · 17 mention4 recommend · 174 recommend
2007–2026The Language Instinct
Steven Pinker
Recommended by 44 · mentioned by 8344 recommend · 83 mention44 recommend · 8344 recommend
2009–2026Metaphors We Live By
George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, Lakoff
Recommended by 56 · mentioned by 8156 recommend · 81 mention56 recommend · 8156 recommend
2007–2026House of Leaves
Mark Z. Danielewski
Recommended by 59 · mentioned by 13959 recommend · 139 mention59 recommend · 13959 recommend
2007–2026Moby Dick
Herman Melville
Recommended by 116 · mentioned by 436116 recommend · 436 mention116 recommend · 436116 recommend
2007–2026The Soul of a New Machine
Tracy Kidder
Recommended by 260 · mentioned by 376260 recommend · 376 mention260 recommend · 376260 recommend
2007–2026Foundation
Isaac Asimov
Recommended by 143 · mentioned by 487143 recommend · 487 mention143 recommend · 487143 recommend
2007–2026Dune
Frank Herbert
Recommended by 193 · mentioned by 512193 recommend · 512 mention193 recommend · 512193 recommend
…length and typically there's even an almost one-to-one mapping between individual sentences. To anyone interested in the relations between the language and thinking, I recommend an excellent book "The Stuff of Thought" by Steven Pinker. One chapter is devoted to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, more specifically, to debunking it.
on “Ask HN: Do you think primarily in English?” ↗Language affects how you think, there is no question about that. Quite to the contrary, it is an old and tired notion which has been refuted and refuted and refuted (see, e.g., the third chapter of "The Stuff of Thought" by Steven Pinker) and yet it can't die because some people just find it too appealing to let go.
on “Why speaking English can make you poor when you retire” ↗Steven Pinker pretty convincingly demolished S-W (for me) in "The Stuff of Thought". He argues that there is an abstract linguistic framework upon which the concepts in a language are built, things like content-locatives, container-locatives, causatives, and much more. Recommended…
on “Ask HN: Do you think primarily in English?” ↗…Customers a question. *I ask a question to Cyberdyne Customers. Why is the last form incorrect? What rules apply here? If you're interested in questions like this, I can recommend Steven Pinker's "The Stuff of Thought" ( http://www.amazon.com/Stuff-Thought-Language-Window-Nature/d... )
on “Get Satisfaction: Help us review a new page design” ↗…interactions with the world such as light/dark, up/down, etc. That certainly seems part of it. I've read Lakoff, and second your recommendation to anyone interested in this stuff. I'd also recommend Pinker's "Stuff of Thought" (http://www.amazon.com/dp/0143114247/) for this topic. AI will never come from digital machines If you consider AI as limited to human cognition, sure. I don't think it's anyone's goal to clone human…
on “Transcendent Man Wows At Tribeca Film Festival Premier” ↗Steven Pinker discusses this topic in his books: - "The Language Instinct" covers it in detail - "The Stuff of Thought", in which he pretty much responds directly to this article. I definitely side with his views on this one, though it's too complicated to discuss here, and he does too good a job not to recommend the…
on “How does our language shape the way we think?” ↗Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan - Nassim Nicholas Taleb The (Mis)behavior of Markets - Benoit Mandelbrot The Stuff of Thought - Steven Pinker The Logic of Scientific Discovery - Karl Popper The Four Steps to Epiphany - Steven G. Blank
on “Ask HN: Please name two of your most favorite books.” ↗The apropos book is Steven Pinker's The Stuff of Thought. [0] (language <~~> culture) ~~> world-view ~~> intention ~~> behavior ~~> result. [0] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=The+Stuff+of+Thought
on “How Language Seems to Shape One's View of the World” ↗…the book that introduced the concept of "conceptual metaphor" to the world. They are referred to a lot and having read them helps you spot when McGilchrist might be misinterpreting their work. - "The Stuff of Thought" by Steven Pinker, who asides from writing a really fun book on language, also gives some good arguments tempering Lakoff & Johnson's overenthusiasm a bit without being dismissive of them (although in…
on “Why I Don't Love Gödel, Escher, Bach” ↗…comment, I decided to poke fun at the whole FCC bleeping regulation. Here, I will warmly recommend a book dedicated to bleeping over the seven "unspeakable words": the famous Steven Pinker's famous book "The Stuff of Thought". Now, about the number of asterisks: I really didn't think that much about this, I kind of think I counted the right number of letters, but then there is no caret overwrite mode in the bleeping browser,…
on “Cruise pauses driverless operations across all cities” ↗I've read a lot of Steven Pinker's books, and they were all enjoyable. The ones I've read include: The Language Instinct How the Mind Works The Blank Slate The Stuff of Thought
on “Roger Ebert's bleak assessment of the next 100 years” ↗…Examples: " It's hard to observe the DNS..." "Using the DNS is often compared to..." When should "the DNS" ("the domain name system") become "DNS"? Should it? I'm currently reading: Steven Pinker's "The Stuff of Thought". My apologies for unshouldering this heavy linguistic burden.
on “An Engineer's Guide to DNS” ↗…and comparisons with history. There isn't really a good way to analyze metaphor that I know of. Some of the better attempts include Lakoff and Johnson's _Metaphors We Live By_ and Steven Pinker's _The Stuff of Thought_. But, as far as I know, no one has a complete theory of why we think associatively and metaphorically. Good writers, however, will tend to exploit the tendency to view one thing in term of another. The…
on “A Brief Look At Paul Graham's Writing Habits (with Charts)” ↗After reading Steven Pinker's book The Stuff of Thought in which he describes verbs as the chassis of a sentence, I thought we would see various Natural Language Understanding algorithms that leveraged "verb classes". Beth Levin published a book called Verb…
on “Parsing city of origin and destination city from a string” ↗…to get rid of it altogether and use something one default style like elm-format[5]). And maybe we're also not looking outside of our own field enough. For example, I recently read Steven Pinker's "The Stuff of Thought". There was a chapter discussing all kinds of (human) language paradoxes and hidden rules based on how humans have different ways of thinking about aggregates, and how we use those subconsciously in our…
on “The design side of programming language design” ↗