Wednesday, December 19, 2007

A Mea Culpa - Pinker and his critics

I think in general that Steven Pinker goes way overboard on the nativist angle, and so recently approvingly passed on this Churchland review in the Nov. 1 issue of Nature critical of Pinker's new book, "The Language of Thought." - I hadn't actually read the book. These retorts by Marc Hauser and Pinker himself in the Dec. 6 issue make me realize that I should have. I have zapped my original post, and I'm now going to read the book......(one thing about doing a blog is that you read fewer good long books). I admit to a residual grumpyness about Pinker (a brilliant man) from his visit to Wisconsin a number of years ago as a featured speaker. He was dragged through the usual torture of serial 30 minute interviews with local "prominent persons" (I was the Zoology Chair at that time), and during our conversation I found him to be quite remote. At his talk he read from a typescript - word for word - a lecture that I had already heard twice before.
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2 comments:

  1. Derek12:14 PM

    Thanks for posting these (although the link to Pinker's response isn't quite working the way it should.

    I finished Pinker's book a couple of weeks ago (on audiobook), and found it very interesting. I like the analogy of Pinker to a jazz player, who riffs on many topics, rarely going into much depth, but sparking a lot of thought.

    And yeah, Churchland's "review" is awful. She barely mentions anything about the book. I personally found a lot to disagree with Pinker about (I'm pretty antagonistic towards strong innateness claims, and many of his conclusions in The Stuff of Thought are spurious), but I buy the general premise of the book, which is that the way in which we use language reveals insights into our underlying non-linguistic representations of the world, especially regarding our conceptions of things like space and time.

    Churchland's comments make me wonder if she even read the book.

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  2. Deric Bownds2:58 PM

    Sorry about the bad link to Pinker's review of Churchland's review... I fixed it.

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