In his fascinating new book, Harvard professor of psychology Steven Pinker examines why humans play verbal games and how the words we use reveal much about us, writes Shane Hegarty.
Human language, admits Steven Pinker, is so complicated, so multilayered, so littered with pitfalls and opportunities for social disasters that it's a wonder we can talk to each other at all. And yet we get by, if not always easily, says the Harvard professor of psychology.
Organisms, he says, deal in three modes of communication - dominance, mutualism and exchange. "The thing about humans is that we can switch between these three modes, depending on the context. "The verbal rituals we use to guard against making a faux pas are the price we pay for having these three modes - for having the advantages and disadvantages of them rather than being rigidly programmed to do each one."
We play games with one another, couch our language in metaphors, in strategy, in excessive politeness. It can vary depending on the culture, such as the convoluted way in which the Irish accept a cup of tea - "No, no. Well, if you're having one yourself . . . " - is a version of that. But, Pinker argues, the underlying factors are universal across all languages.
In his latest book, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature, he examines how the words we say give away much about us, and the variety of ways in which our language has adapted to our needs. At its centre is the idea that we communicate in the way we do because we are born to do so. And he argues that by looking at our language we can learn a lot more about who we are.
It's a natural progression from previous books, including The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Languageand The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. Having previously written about the way in which the brain remembers and stores language, and how we arrive into the world with a certain amount of pre-programming, his latest book is interested in the meaning. As ever, it is a cracking read.
Soft-spoken in person, he nonetheless peppers his conversation with a range of examples from popular culture, just as he does in his writing. In The Stuff of Thought, Dilbert, Seinfeldand When Harry Met Sallyserve as reference points for someone who admits to reading his newspaper while wielding a pair of scissors in anticipation of noteworthy examples. "As long as its not just an attempt to pad out with a gag. It has to fit," he says. "Of course, any kind of verbal humour has to exploit language."
In the book, he hunts toddler-speak for clues of our ability to see in language in three dimensions; he revels in the ubiquity of curse words ("I find it to be a juicy intellectual puzzle"); and he looks at the power of semantics.
He looks, for example, at the ability of politicians to speak in vague ways that actually please the voters, perhaps because they understand that the mind prefers to be protected from poisonous thoughts and that language often offers such protection.
"It is an important skill of a politician," he says. "If you want to have broad appeal you want to state things so vaguely that no one is offended."
In a particulalrly fascinating chapter, Pinker looks at the value of metaphor in language. He sees it not just as a fundamental communication tool but as a means for humans to understand counter-intuitive ideas.
"This is why they're interesting to a cognitive psychologist, and also to a philosopher of science, who tries to figure out why scientific analogies are so fruitful. Not just in pedagogy and not just in vocabulary, but actually in reasoning through a problem. The critical proviso being that in a scientific analogy you have to be conscious of what aspects of the analogy ought to be taken seriously and what ought to be discarded," he says.
"In literary metaphor, the more ways you think of applying it the better it is as a piece of art - but the worse it is as a scientific analogy."
Are metaphors not simply learned behaviour? "If you had a concrete mind that simply recorded events as they occur in all their detail then you couldn't learn to think in metaphor. There has to be something in the hardware that gives you the very talent of ignoring concrete details while preserving abstract structure."
His insistence that the brain is not just "a blank slate" (as a previous title suggested) has led him into controversial territory. Two years ago, he defended then Harvard president Lawrence Summers, who remarked that innate differences between men and women might be the reason why so few females studied maths and sciences.
Pinker sees it as a taboo among "academic culture, politics and probably left-of-centre journalism", but says that the idea that nature is as influential as nurture is scientifically sound. "I think there is an enormous amount of data - there's no shortage. Which is why it's so outrageous that he was thought to have expressed a heresy. It did violate a taboo. It also tapped into a bad habit of human cognition, namely our habit towards holistic thinking, that if we compare something to something else, we treat it as a homogenous blob. So if we say men and women differ, it is misinterpreted as saying that all men are better than all women."
The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature , Allen Lane, £25