THE DISCOVER INTERVIEW

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BY MARION LONG PHOTOGRAPH BY SAGE SOHIER

Fi-three-year-old Steven Pinker may

looklikea rockstar, but he is actually a linguistics explorer, hunting around the sentences
and syntax of human language for clues (he
calls them "rabbit holes") to the inner world
of the human brain. His favorite rabbit hole is
verbs-what they mean, how they are used
in sentences, and how, according to his latest book, The Stuff of Thought, kids "figure
it all out." Why so much attention to verbs?
Pinker confesses in part it's simply because
he finds them fascinating. As one of his colleagues remarked, "They really are your little
friends, aren't they?"
For more than a quarter century, Pinker
has been a driving force in linguisticstheory,
analyzing language in labs at MIT, Stanford
University, and Harvard University, where
he is currently the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology. At MIT he studied
colleague Noam Chomsky's theory of an
"innate grammar," testing to what extent
language is biologically programmed. His
research suggests that language is an instinct, an evolutionary adaptation that is
partly hardwired into our brains and partly
learned. This work led Pinker to develop
his theory of the evolution of the mind and
the source of language. He wrote about his
work in four popular books: The Language
Instinct (1994), How the Mind Works (1997,
Words and Rules (1999), and The Blank

Slate (2002). Although his books present

scientific research, they have twice been finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in part because
they're so much fun to read, with Pinker's
creative weaving of movie dialogue, snippets from novels, news headlines, Yiddishisms, even bits from comic strips.
In his books Pinker argues that the brain
at birth is not simply a blank slate to be
shaped by culture and experience. Rather,
it comes programmed with many behavioral
dispositions and talents. In other words, human nature is to some extent innate and
shaped by natural selection. Not surprisingly, Pinker's ideas have been at the center
of some heated debates, most notably a recent controversy at Harvard, in which former
university president Lawrence Summers
offered innate gender differences as a possible explanation for the dearth of women in
the sciences.
In many ways, Pinker's book The Stuff of
Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature, which will be published this
month, may be his most ambitious yet-an
attempt to show that the entire range of human thought is built on the "scaffolding" of
a few core concepts that shape our understanding of the physical and social worlds
and form the basis for the 'way we interpret
realitv. We saoke with the researcher from
his office in William James Hall at Harvard.

I think the reason that swearing is both so

and so attmtive is that it is a
way to push people's emotiond buttons, especially their negative buttons.
You've said that when you were growing up in the Jewish community in Montreal, you were surrounded by fervent devotees
of all kinds of political philosophies, by passionate wars of language and ideas. Does this influence your efforts now to describe the universal patterns of thought underlying language?
Certainly the argumentative intellectual community that I came from
got me interestedin these large issues of human nature, which Ireally
think made me interested in the human mind. But I definitely wanted to study it in a way that was more tractable than just arguments
around the dining room table. So Iwent into cognitive psychology.
In your best-selling book The Blank Slate, you argue that the
infant mind is not an empty vessel that society can fill with
whatever values and behaviors it chooses but rather that we
are born with predispositions that are gene$-cally determined.
Why do you think these ideas are so controv'ersial?
I think there are a number of reasons that looking at human beings
as biological organisms can be unsettling. One of them is the possibility of inequality. If human nature is a "blank slate," then by definition we're all the same. Whereas if nature endows us with anything,
then some people might be endowed with more of it than others are,
or with different stuff than others are. And people who are worried
about racial discrimination or class discrimination or sexism would
prefer that the mind be a blank slate, because then it's impossibleby
definition for, say, men to be significantly different from women. My
response is that we shouldn't confuse our politicaland moral position
that people should be treated as individuals rather than prejudging
them as a member of a category-a political policy that Ithink worth
upholding-with the empirical claim that all people are biologically
indistinguishableor that the mind at birth is a blank slate.
The second fear, I think, is that of dashing the dream of the
perfectibility of humankind. If we were all blank slates, we could
change what gets written on children's slates and mold them into
the kind of people we want. If people are born with certain drives, if
certain ignoble traits, such as violence and selfishness, are innate,
then that might make them unchangeable, and attempts at social
reform and human improvement might be proven to be a waste of
time. And there, too, my response is that what you find is that the
mind is a complicated system of many parts, and there is room for
social improvement in trying to get some parts of the mind to work
against the others. For example, the frontal lobes, with their ability
to empathize and to anticipate consequences of choices in the
future, can override whatever selfish or antisocial urges may also
be harbored in the brain.
A third fear is the fear of determinism, of a loss of personal responsibility. It's the fear that personal responsibility will vanish if free
will is shown to be an illusion. And here, too, these fearful reactions
are a kind of non sequitur. Because even if there's no such thing
as a soul that's separate from the brain and that somehow pushes
the buttons of behavior-even if we are nothing but our brains-it's
undoubtedlytrue that there are parts of the brain that are responsive
to the potential consequences of our actions, that are responsive to
social norms, to reward, punishment, credit, and blame.
In your latest book, The Stuff o f Thought, you discuss cursing
and note that, in America, "the seven words you can't say on

television" have to do with sex and excretion. In other parts

of the world, other types of words are more powerful, such as
ones drawn from religion.
Yes, it's particularly noticeableto someone like me who comes from
Quebec, where the worst thing that you can say to someone is
"Goddamn chalice." That really brings it home for me. We do have a
trace of that in swear words like "hell" and "damn" and "Goddamn,"
but they've really lost their sting, and it has to be related to the fact
that religion has lost its power over many people.
I think the reason that swearing is both so offensive and so attractive is that it is a way to push people's emotional buttons, and
especially their negative emotional buttons. Because words soak
up emotional connotations and are processed involuntarily by the
listener, you can't will yourself not to treat the word in terms of what
it means. You can't hear a word and just hear it as raw sound; it always evokes an associated meaning and emotion in the brain. So I
think that words give us a little probe into other people's brains. We
can press someone's emotional buttons anytime we want.
And there's an additional layer, which would account for the fact
that the content of swearing varies across history and from culture
to culture. The common denominator is some kind of negative emotion, but the culture and time will determine which negative emotion
is commonly provoked, whether it's disgust at bodily secretions,
or dread of deities, or repugnance at sexual perversions. The second, additional layer is that you recognize that the other person is
evoking-and is intentionally evoking-that negative emotion, and
you know that he knows that you know that he is trying to evoke it.
That's part of why it offends you. And that's why the choice of word
matters, as well as what the word refers to-why "the F word" is
obscene, but "copulate" is not, even though they refer to the same
thing. But you know when someone uses "copulate," they're referring to copulation, whereas when they use the F word, they are trying to get a rise out of you. So there again you get to the pragmatics
as well as the semantics.
You say that in studying certain aspects of how children acquire
language-specifically, how they learn t o use verbs-you fell,
like Alice, down a rabbit hole into a hidden world where you
viewed the deeper structures of cognition. What did you see in
that wonderland beneath the surface of our language?
One very crucial rabbit hole involved figuring out how children learn
to use simple verbs for putting things in places, verbs like fill, pour,
load, or splash-verbs involving movement of something to somewhere. The problem was, how do you account for how a little kid,
who has no prior knowledge of how a particular language works
and who isn't going to get explicit lessons about how to use which
words in which circumstances, figures out what words mean and
what sentences they can be used in? We adults, for example, will
say "Fill the glass with water" but not "Fill water into the glass," even
though it's perfectly clear what that means. We will say "Pour water
into the glass" but not "Pour the glass with water." And you know,
"Pour the glass with water" is perfectly sensible, but it just doesn't
sound quite right. But with a verb like load, we can say either "Load
hay into the wagon" or "Load the wagon with hay." So you've got
one verb that takes the container as the object, one that takes the
stuff as the object, and the third that can go both ways. How do kids

figure that out? Do they get it right to start with? The answer is no,
not a hundred percent of the time. They do make some errors; they
very occasionally say "Can I fill some salt into the shaker?" or "Stop
pouring me with water." But the errors are fairly rare, and most of the
time they use them correctly, and they grow up to be us, who use
them correctly. What are they latching onto?
It turns out that they're latching onto different ways of framing
the same situation. So if I go over to the sink and the faucet and
the glass ends up full, I can think of that one activity either as doing
something to the water (namely, causing it to go into the glass) or
doing something to the glass (namely, causing it to change state
from empty to full). That was the key insight to figure out why "fill"
and "pour" behave differently.
If the simplest action, lik2putting some water into a glass, can
be mentally framed in these two ways, with different consequences
in terms of how we use words, that suggests that one of the key
talents of the mind is framing a given situation in multiple ways and
that a lot of insight into human thought, debate, disagreement, can
come from thinking about the ways in which two different peopleor one person at different times-can frame the same event. "Pouring water" versus "filling a glass" is a pretty mundane difference, but
to speak of "invading Iraq" versus "liberating Iraq" or "confiscating
earnings" versus "redistributing assets" would be more consequential. Ithink it illuminatesthe same aspect of our minds. This is a
pervasive power of the mind; it's seen in battles over perspective on
all kinds of issues. It makes us capable of flip-flopping on a course
of action, depending on how the action is described. It suggests
limitations on our rationality-that we might, for example, be vulnerable to fallacies in reasoning or to corruption in our institutions.
Huey Newton, the cofounder of the Black Panther Party in the
1960s, once said, "Power is the ability to define phenomena."
Isn't that right in line with many of your observations?
Yes, exactly. Although I would add that it doesn't mean that these
debates are just about words. The words are means for trying to
change people's minds, but there is something that you're trying
to change their minds about. We're not just trapped in a world of
language. Take "invading Iraq" versus "liberating Iraqn-those are
dierent ways of framing the same military action, but there is a fact
involved here as to which it is, and that depends on whether the majority of the population resented the former regime and welcomes
the new one, or vice versa. So although you may choose one frame
rather than the other in orderto persuade peopleto believe the one
thing rather than the other, that doesn't necessarily mean that one
frame is as true or as good as the other. This continues my general
theme: It's important to understand the great power of language,
but one shouldn't overestimate it. One shouldn't think that we just
live in a fantasy world of our own linguistic creations.
You say that language exposes our limitations, but you also insist that it can show us a way out of them. In fact, you have a
linguistic superhero, don't you, in the reality of the metaphor?
Yes, I have two superheroes, actually. One of them is metaphor, the
other mmbinatorics. Metaphorwould be the way in which we transfer and transform ways of thinking that came from the realm of very
concrete actions like pouring water or throwing rocks or closing a

jammed drawer, and so on. But we can leach the content from them
and use them as abstract structures to reason about other domains.
We can talk about the economy rising and falling, as if it were a domain. We can use graphs to convey mathematical relationships as
though they were lines and shapes drawn in space.
An enormous amount of scientific language is metaphorical. We
talk about a genetic code, where code originally meant a cipher;
we talk about the solar system model of the atom as though the
atom were like a sun and moon and planets. And although we
use these metaphors of concrete things to stand for abstract concepts, that doesn't keep us from putting a different twist on those
same metaphors of the concrete and using them to describe other
and quite different abstract concepts. When we put together the
power of metaphor with the combinatorial nature of language and
thought, we become able to create a virtually infinite number of
ideas, even though we are equipped with a finite inventory of concepts and relations. I believe it is the mechanism that the mind
uses to understand otherwise inaccessible abstract concepts. It
may be how the mind evolved the ability to reason about abstract
concepts such as chess or politics, which are not really concrete
or physical and have no obvious relevance to reproduction and
physical survival. It can also enable us-when we lose ourselves
in the words of a skilled writer, for instance-to inhabit the consciousness of another person.
You argue that metaphor and combinatorics should be keys
to our education, that we should be taught to think and to use
language in a way that will promote our development and productivity. Why?
We must tap the mind's ability to grasp things in familiar ways and
then to stretch them to apply to new ideas and areas of thought.
But we also have to be mindful of the fact that there are ways in
which any metaphor may or may not correspond accurately to the
thing you're using it to explain. So just using or pointing out the
metaphor isn't enough. To make it true and useful, one then has to
add all these qualifications, like, well, yes, it's like this in one regard
but not in another. So, for example, the mind is like a computer in
that it depends on information storage, but it's not like a computer in
that its accuracy isn't highly reliable and it doesn't work serially but
rather in parallel. Or that natural selection is like a design engineer in
the sense that parts of animals become engineered to accomplish
certain things, but it is not like a design engineer in that it doesn't
have long-term foresight. So the analogies in a metaphor can give
with one hand but take with another. That is, it can give you insight
but also lead to a lot of bogus conclusions if it's used carelessly. But
surely metaphoric insights, the seeing of resemblances and connections, can give rise, and have given rise, to countless innovations in
science, the arts, and many other fields of endeavor.
Yet don't you think that most education, and what most people
believe education should be, is just the opposite of what you
describe? Don't many people think it should be a kind of indoctrination in our society's conventional ideas?
Am important key to doing that is to tap the rile kernel of motivation
continued on page 71

THE DISCOVER INTERVIEW

STEVEN PINKER
continued from page 52
that I think we all have, which is to figure out how things work,
to know the truth and not allow ourselves to be fooled or
misled. That's there in everybody, somewhere. You don't like
to be lied to, by your friends or in your business dealings. So
why would you want to be lied to when it comes to the origin
of life or the fate of the planet?
There's a part of all of us that doesn't want to be duped,
and we have to be persuaded that in certain realms-like
politics, like ethics, like science-the whole point of the activity is to get at the truth, to discover and reveal how the
world really is. I think, in large part, truth-seeking institutions,
like science and history and journalism, aim to strengthen
that reality muscle. We need that all the more because there
are other parts of the mind that militate against it, that want
to be walled off from reality, such as the part of the mind
in each of us that concerns itself with how we look to ourselves and to others, the self-deceptiveness that makes
us want to project the most positive image to the world,
whether it's the truest image or not.
This built-in bias is something that has been established
by social psychology, called a self-serving bias or what you
might call the "Lake Wobegon effect" (you know, that's the
place "where all the children are above average"). Well, a
majority of people believe that they're above average in any
positive trait, or if not themselves, then certainly the group
that they belong to.
Is there a particular kind of scientific or intellectual
inquiry that you're especially drawn to?
Yes. I get drawn in when I feel there is something deep and
mysterious going on beneath the'surface of something. I
spent 20 years doing research on regular and irregular verbs,
not because I'm an obsessive language lover but because it
seemed to me that they tapped into a fundamental distinction in language processing, indeed in cognitive processing,
between memory lookup and rule-driven computation.
It's intuition that tells me that, although I don't understand
the thing yet, and even though I don't know what the answer is going to turn out to be, there's something big theresomething important-that I won't be able to answer unless I
understand a lot about the mind at a very deep level.
So my concentrationon the choices of regular and irregular
verbs was driven by my sense that it would reveal something
about mental computation. The years that I spent studying
verbs and what they mean involved a leap of intuition that
this would be a way of tapping into human concepts and
cognitive framing-in other words, the stuff of thought. That
if you could really understand why the verb "fill" differs from
the verb "pour," and both of them differ from the verb "load,"
you'd penetrate deeply into human thought patterns.
It's a rabbit hole phenomenon-namely, there's just a little
opening, but there's something very rich and deep and important and mysterious, something big, going on down there,
beneath the surface. And that lure has always governed
which phenomenon I chose to explore..