David K. (d-avid) reviewed The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature on + 6 more book reviews
Wonderfully informative and readable throughout. More than readable, it's witty and fun. Pinker manages to share not just a lot of useful insights and a clear sense of how they cohere, but also his own excitement about how they were arrived at and what they reveal and suggest. The book is strongest in the sections that deal with conceptual semantics, roughly the first half of the book. Beyond that, it reads more like a `survey', but still, an excellent one. The book is intellectually sophisticated, yet manages to avoid undue complexity. I would strongly recommend the book to anyone with a sense of wonder about the workings of the human mind.
One quibble, though: The chapter "The Metaphor Metaphor" presents what strikes me as a straw-man version of conceptual metaphor theory; it doesn't do justice to what George Lakoff and Mark Johnson have actually written. In so doing, Pinker arrives at a solid and convincing position, but it's not really as far from their own position as he makes it seem.
One quibble, though: The chapter "The Metaphor Metaphor" presents what strikes me as a straw-man version of conceptual metaphor theory; it doesn't do justice to what George Lakoff and Mark Johnson have actually written. In so doing, Pinker arrives at a solid and convincing position, but it's not really as far from their own position as he makes it seem.
