LexisNexis™ Academic
Copyright 2007 Toronto Star Newspapers, Ltd.
The Toronto Star
January 21, 2007 Sunday
SECTION: IDEAS; Pg. B03
LENGTH: 1359 words
HEADLINE: Pinker and the brain: thought and metaphor;
Deciphering the layered ways in which we communicate is his mission
BYLINE: Peter Calamai, Toronto Star
BODY:
Asking Steven Pinker, Harvard researcher and best-selling author, to pass the salt turns out to be very educational.
Not about sodium and high blood pressure, but about how we use language and what that reveals about human nature.
Pinker
specializes in the psychology of language and also in shaking up the
scientific establishment. Five years ago he ignited an academic
firestorm with the best-selling book The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial
of Human Nature, which argued that innate behavioural differences exist
among individuals and between men and women.
The
52-year-old cognitive scientist, born and raised in Montreal, is again
challenging conventional wisdom with The Stuff of Thought, a book about
language due out in September. He'll deliver a lecture in Toronto on
the topic Wednesday, as part of 15th anniversary celebrations for the
Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.
"We
have to do two things with language. We've got to convey a message and
we've got to negotiate what kind of social relationship we have with
someone," Pinker says in a telephone interview from his home in
Cambridge, Mass.
Even something as
seemingly straightforward as asking for the salt involves thinking and
communicating at two levels, which is why we utter such convoluted
requests as, "If you think you could pass the salt, that would be
great."
Says Pinker: "It's become so
common that we don't even notice that it is a philosophical rumination
rather than a direct imperative. It's a bit of a social dilemma. On the
one hand, you do want the salt. On the other hand, you don't want to
boss people around lightly.
"So you split
the difference by saying something that literally makes no sense while
also conveying the message that you're not treating them like some kind
of flunky."
The Harvard psychologist
classes the salt request as an example of indirect speech, a category
that also includes euphemisms and innuendo. Two other key themes for
Wednesday's talk are the ubiquity of metaphor in everyday language and
swearing and what it says about human emotion.
For
Pinker all three categories of language provide windows on human
nature, and analyzing them can reveal what people are thinking and
feeling. The approach builds upon his earlier thesis that human nature
has distinct and universal properties, some of which are innate -
determined at birth by genes rather than shaped primarily by
environment.
Known as evolutionary
psychology, this field of study looks at human behaviour through the
lens of natural selection, treating our mental faculties for things
like language as the result of an evolutionary adaptation, just like
the process that produces the human eye. This approach runs the risk of
being hijacked by advocates of biological determinism - our genes
dictate what we do - or even the proponents of eugenics - the breeding
of a master race.
Pinker is familiar with
such dangers, having navigated the determinist shoals in both The Blank
Slate and an earlier book, How the Mind Works. His current focus
reaches even further back, to his first book for the general public,
The Language Instinct, and to an even earlier academic tome about how
children acquire verbs.
"I have a chapter
on verbs in this book because verbs are how we talk about causation,
who did what to whom, who's responsible for someone's death. The answer
to that is very much like who gets to be the subject of a verb. I argue
that we have a sense of causal agency or responsibility that both
governs our language and governs our moral and legal reasoning."
While
verbs are undoubtedly pivotal, readers and listeners are more likely to
be drawn by Pinker's apparently exhaustive investigation of swearing,
which challenges even a classic work in this field, Shakespeare's Bawdy
by Eric Partridge.
"As it turns out, people swear in five different ways. That's why it took me a while to figure this out," he says.
A
family newspaper can't reproduce most of Pinker's instances of earthy
language, without resorting to a surfeit of - 's. Not to mention *s, !s
and even XXXXs. His analysis of the subject matter and the impact of
swearing, however, is a safer matter. Mostly.
"The
subject matter of swearing is something that people don't like to have
taken lightly. Sex is a big deal. An atmosphere in which you bring up
sex at the drop of a hat seems to many people to remove some of the
inhibitions about thinking about sex. Casual speech about sex occurs in
an atmosphere that would tolerate casual sex itself and there are a lot
of reasons why people get upset about casual sex."
Using sexual terms in swearing, something like motherf -er, evokes revulsion over the implied depravity.
In
addition to sex, Pinker lists four taboo subjects that dominate
swearing: religion, excretion, despised groups, and disease and
infirmity.
These change over time and differ from one society to another.
"There
were curses like 'a pox on you' in English, but we don't have much of
that anymore. In Yiddish, for example, the word for cholera, choleryeh,
means curse."
Then there's the difference
between Quebec and the rest of Canada. Pinker spent the first 22 years
of his life in Montreal graduating with a B.A. in psychology from
McGill, so he has no trouble in cursing in French.
Yet
he says that the root difference has more to do with Catholicism than
with language. Before the Reformation, English swearing was rich in
religious taboo words. It still is in nominally Catholic societies,
like Quebec.
Pinker cautions that his work
looks at what swearwords across languages have in common rather than
the swearwords of any one language.
The
most common denominator is taboo words that arouse strong negative
emotions. Hearing or reading these words triggers activity in the
amygdala, an almond-shaped part of the brain believed to invest our
thoughts with aggression, fear, threat recognition, and other negative
emotions.
But why does the amygdala light
up, why do we get upset when someone swears at us, and why do societies
pass laws against swearing on the airwaves?
"People
know there is a difference between what you do and what you accept.
There is a difference between me knowing that people swear, me hearing
people swear and me swearing, and everyone accepting that this is
something you can do as much as you like."
While
swearing may garner public attention, perhaps the more surprising
aspect of Pinker's work traces the pervasiveness of metaphor in
language. Not flowery poetic allusions or rhetorical similes but
concrete-to-abstract transitions so common in everyday speech and
writing that we often don't even recognize them as metaphorical.
Consider this sentence:
"He
attacked my position and I defended it." It uses the metaphor of
argument as war. Or how about "this program isn't going anywhere,"
which uses the metaphor of progress as motion.
Says
Pinker: "Look at almost any passage and you'll find that a paragraph
has five or six metaphors in it. It's not that the speaker is trying to
be poetic, it's just that that's the way language works.
"Rather
than occasionally reaching for a metaphor to communicate, to a very
large extent communication is the use of metaphor," he says.
"It could be that 95 per cent of our speech is metaphorical, if you go back far enough in language."
Why?
Here, the teacher part of researcher and author Steven Pinker comes to
the fore, offering a boring explanation and an interesting explanation,
both with an element of truth.
The boring
explanation is that using metaphor is a quick-and-dirty way of
expressing a new idea without the trouble of coining [notice the
metaphor] and propagating a new word.
"But
that presupposes that the mind itself works metaphorically, that we see
the abstract commonality between argument and war, between progress and
motion. And it presupposes that the mind, at some level, must reason
very concretely in order that these metaphors be understand and become
contagious.
"And that's the more interesting part of the story."
Except,
perhaps, for the revelation about asking for a salt shaker.'As it turns
out, people swear in five different ways. That's why it took me a while
to figure this out,' says Steven Pinker.
LOAD-DATE: January 21, 2007