So let's talk about Steven Pinker!
Dr. Pinker is a professor at Harvard, and the author of a number of books popularizing
cognitive science and linguistics, including The Language Instinct, The Stuff of Thought,
and most recently, The Sense of Style. He's spent his career researching and writing about
language, thought, and human behaviour. We got to interview him recently, and we were
really excited about it. And we're really excited to share it with you, too! Let's give it a look.
We're really happy to have you with us, thanks a lot for joining us today.
Oh, my pleasure.
So we wanted to start off by asking, you've committed a great deal of your career to helping
popularize the knowledge that we've gained about linguistics, and about cognition. And
we were wondering if you would share with us why you think it's so important to tell
the general public about what we know about linguistics and about psychology?
Foremost, it's just so fascinating. I've never met a person who isn't interested in language.
And starting in the '90s, I realized that there were popular science books on a wide
range of topics, on dinosaurs, on black holes, and on the human body. But there wasn't anything
on language, and there was enormous curiosity. So I thought, well, maybe I should write it.
Also, language touches on so much of the human condition, so that you never run out of material.
After writing the Language Instinct, which was an overview of everything that people
wanted to know about language, I wrote one on what language reveals about human nature,
what it reveals about our emotions and our social relationships and our ways of construing
the world. Then I wrote another one on writing style, because everyone has an opinion on
how terrible the state of writing is. Everyone always did have an opinion on the state of
writing, and you know, it was always terrible. And I thought that's yet another area that
the sciences of language could shed light on.
Yeah, it's a very interesting book, and we'll talk about it a bit more later, as well. For
now, I wanted to ask, so, we're an internet-based linguistics group, and we communicate with
people about linguistics a lot using various types of social media. And we thought we'd
ask you about what you think the role social media has to play in the popularizing and
broadening people's knowledge about linguistics, and about science.
Well, I may not be the right person to ask, because I'm probably too old. I feel like
I'm kind of like an ant on this huge tire that's moving, and I'm desperately trying
to figure out what is this movement that I'm sitting on top of. So on the urging of my
literary agent, I started a Twitter feed, particularly after I wrote an op-ed for the
New York Times saying that, no, I don't think that Google is making us stupid. I don't think
that social media will spell the demise of language. He said, okay, well, you've made
this argument, and now you're not going to have any involvement in social media? So since
that time, I've had a Twitter feed, where I don't, kind of, unburden my opinions on
the rest of the world, but they're mainly links to interesting articles that I've come
across. Sometimes a little commentary.
Well, I mean, I do mean that I think that you're using it right. I saw that you had
a picture of you with Kanye West, and that's definitely using Twitter in an appropriate
sort of way, I'd say.
Do you - I have to ask, because we have a YouTube channel - do you watch any YouTube
videos, any YouTube channels? Or is this not so much your kind of thing?
What would I do without YouTube to watch cats riding on Roombas?
Ah, well, that's definitely a good thing for YouTube. I think we watch those; everybody
watches cat videos. That's just sort of the point of YouTube, to a certain extent.
I, when-- I discovered YouTube quite by accident when I was asked, after I moved into an apartment
in downtown Boston, and I kept ordering these modular bookshelves, and they just kind of grew and
grew and grew. And I ordered so many that there was a guy at the company who had heard
of me, and asked if I would be willing to do a promotional interview for their product.
And you know, I'm an academic, I have lots of books, I think bookshelves are great. So
I appeared on a little segment on cable TV, and then before I knew it, people all over
the country were writing and saying, "oh, I see you're now a bookshelf salesman." There
was this new thing called YouTube, which I had not heard of at the time, but I was quickly
made aware of it.
- Yeah.
- And for a number of years, that would be the top hit if you searched for my name on
YouTube. I don't know how, I hope I've pushed it down in the hierarchy.
- I don't think it's there anymore, because we looked.
- Oh, I sure hope not, good.
- But after this, we'll search for "Steven Pinker bookshelf", and see if we can turn
it up, because I definitely need to see this for myself now.
So the focus of the different books that you've written about linguistics over time has actually
been very broad. So you've looked at stuff from acquisition and then morphology stuff,
to semantics and pragmatics. So, do you find it difficult to move between these different
topics in the field?
Oh, no, quite the contrary. That's where it gets, that's what allows me to write these
books. I know there are people who pretty much write the same book over and over and
over again, and there is some merit to that, because books have a shelf life, and people
get bored with them, and if you really have a message to get across, then you keep repackaging
it. But I can't write like that. When I take on a subject, I like to do it almost exhaustively,
trying to unify it in a coherent narrative, and when I'm done, I've told my story. It's
the world according to me, and it's time to devour another topic. And so, fortunately,
language provides many opportunities for that.
Of course, you've written books also on things outside of language, so there's other stuff
regarding psychology and then things like The Better Angels of Our Nature, on the decline
of violence. Do you find that there's any underlying theme that sort of unites all of
these books?
Absolutely, and it's an obsession with human nature, with what makes us tick. I was not
trained as a linguist, I came to linguistics via cognitive psychology, so I'm interested
in the human mind, and language is one of the amazing things that the human mind does,
namely, pack thoughts into noises. And language is one of the main ways in which we figure out what's
going on in other people's minds. So it is a window into human nature.
- Yeah. To go back, I think we have to talk about the Language Instinct a little bit.
So it was the first book that I actually read about linguistics. It's helped get me into
the field, and in the Language Instinct, you argue that you know that language is given
as part of our innate nature. But there's always been a lot of pushback on this, even
until this day. So I was wondering if you might say something about why you think there might
be so much resistance to this idea.
Well, partly, there is a resistance to the very idea of human nature. And I wrote a book
on that, called the Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature.
- We have that one, too. Not here, but...
- But, through much of the 20th century, and spilling over to the 21st century, human nature's
been seen as a suspect concept. That if we are endowed by evolution with a lot of traits
that might include some ones that we wish we didn't have, like revenge and dominance,
if some people are innately different from other people, would that have unpleasant consequences
for our politics and our morality? Would it mean that we shouldn't try to make the world
a better place, because human nature is full of these ugly motives and bad people will
just screw it up no matter what you do? Does it license discrimination, if some people
are innately different from others? Should we treat people differently, and would that
open the door to sexism and acceptance of inequality? I don't think it does, and that's
why I wrote the Blank Slate, but I do think there is some political and moral resistance
to attributing anything to human nature.
But then like all scientific problems, especially when it comes to the human mind, it's not
so easy to figure out what is innate. And ordinary scientific skepticism and debate
means that it's inevitable that there'll be pushback on any particular proposal. And a
lot of proposals, there should be pushback. I myself argued against the notorious hypothesis
from my former colleague, Jerry Fodor, that we're endowed with 50,000 innate concepts,
including trombone and doorknob. So, that's an example of a hypothesis that takes it way
too far, but you can evaluate it. I think the arguments that were put forward in favour
of that hypothesis are not good arguments, and so it may be for the arguments that I
put forward for other aspects of our endowment for language.
- Right.
- The way I think of it is really not, and this is the main way in which I think my own writings
have been misunderstood, it's not that there's a hypothesis that language is innate, because
we know certainly particular languages couldn't possibly be innate. And it's really an open
empirical question what is innate. My point only is that something's got to be innate,
in order to make any kind of learning possible, including the learning of language. And the
scientific puzzle is what is innate. Now, among the possibilities are that there's nothing
specific to language, that it's just, we're an intelligent species, and among the smart
things we do is figuring out the rules of language. I tend to think that there is some
specialization, but in either case, there's something that is innate. The only question is what.
- Right.
- My favourite way of capturing this, and I have it in the Blank Slate, is that when
Locke wrote that "there's nothing in the intellect that was not first in the senses", Leibniz
replied, "Except for the intellect itself".
This is your most recent book, so this is the Sense of Style, and it presents an empirical
take, I think, on writing advice, and marshalling stuff from linguistics in order to explain
what makes good writing good. And what that sort of raised in our mind was sort of like,
we were wondering if you could tell us what you think your biggest, the greatest myth
or misconception about language and linguistics is that you felt you were coming up against
when you were dealing with this book.
Two main misconceptions are that language is deteriorating; the modern version of that is
that it's deteriorating because of social media, because of YouTube and Twitter and Facebook and texting,
- It's not our fault!
- It's not your fault, yeah. And of course, at any point in history, you can go back and
see old people complaining about what young people are doing to the language. So that's
a perennial. That's a big misconception. If it were true, we'd be grunting like Tarzan
at this point. The other is that bad writing is a deliberate choice; that is, that the
reason there's so much wretched prose out there is that people are trying to bamboozle
their audiences with high-falutin' gobbledygook, they're disguising the fact that they have
nothing to say, they're trying to exclude people who aren't part of the tribe. I think
there's some of that, but I think that even when people think they're communicating, even when
they want to communicate, they fail at communicating, because communicating, especially in print,
is hard. It's harder than we think, and even with the purest heart in the world, even with
no reason to impress, nothing to hide, no desire to put on airs, you can still be an awful writer.
Yeah. I mean, I think for my own academic writing, overall, like, even when I'm, yes,
I should be very formal, but even when I'm being very formal and I think, okay, I'm doing a
good job here, it's still the case that the people that I show it to are often like, I
don't get it. What were you actually trying to say here?
That's, I mean, we all do. And I think there's some systematic reasons for that that have
been illuminated by cognitive science, and by linguistics. One of them is a phenomenon
that goes by many names, but my favourite is the Curse of Knowledge, the fact that when
you know something, it is extraordinarily hard to imagine what it's like not to know
it. So, writers instinctively overestimate the degree to which their readers are familiar
with what they're familiar with. We tend to think that our parochial jargon is common
knowledge, we tend to think that if something is clear in our mind's eye, then our readers
can visualize it. And so writers tend to skip the steps in an argument, they tend to omit
visual details that they themselves can imagine, but their audiences can't. So that's a big
contributor to bad writing.
Another is a lack of attention to discourse coherence: how one sentence motivates the
next, whether it's an elaboration, whether it's a contrast, whether it is another example
of the same kind, whether it's the effect of a cause, whether it's the explanation.
And we have - language has evolved to have little devices that signal the coherence relations,
like moreover, nevertheless, in contrast, and a skilled writer has to know when and
where to use them, so that even if each sentence is perfectly well formed, that the discourse
as a whole is coherent.
A third area where I think linguistics can contribute is just the overall style that
you adopt, in the sense of, what is the relationship that you imagine having with your reader,
and what are you trying to accomplish in the discourse? English scholar Mark Turner, who
is a big consumer of linguistics, together with Francis-Noel Thomas, wrote a wonderful
book called Clear and Simple as the Truth, influenced by linguistics, that argues that
writers, whether they realize it or not, are taking on a particular set of assumptions
about the virtual writing scenario. The quality of the writing very much depends on which
of those scenarios they adopt. And one of the main explanations for the sins of academic
writing is that academic writing tends to be self-conscious or post-modern, where the
goal of the writer is to prove that he or she is not guilty of naïveté about how difficult
it is to acquire knowledge. Now, that contrasts with what they identify as a more ideal model
of communication, which they call Classic Style, where there, the scenario is that the
writer has seen something in the world which the reader hasn't noticed, he positions the
reader so she can see it with her own eyes, the writer and reader are equals, and the
style is conversation. That captures a lot of what we sense as good, crisp, clear writing,
and it's just a different mindset from the one that academics begin with when they put
pen to paper.
- We wanted to ask you about whether you have any thoughts about emoticons or emoji.
- It's one of those innovations where old people rag on young people for ruining the language.
But I was pleased to see when I did research for the Sense of Style that one of the classic
style manuals from the 1950s, by F. L. Lucas, a distinguished Oxford don, said that, you
know, there's really a problem that the English language does not have a punctuation character
that indicates that a preceding sentence was offered ironically or in jest. Communication
would be so much more efficient if we had that punctuation character. So back in the
early '50s, this Oxford don was basically calling for the smiley face! Now that we have
it, the language experts are still complaining. Well, this proves the theory of Lily Tomlin,
that man evolved language in order to satisfy his deep need to complain.
- I haven't heard that one before. But I'm surprised I haven't. All right. We wanted
to ask you a few questions that we got from our viewers, who naturally wanted to ask you
some things. So the first of these is from Mohammed, and he wanted to know what your
golden advice is for beginning researchers of language.
Pick a question that you find fascinating. If I had to sum it up in one word, you've
got to be excited about your own work, if you want to put the requisite amount of effort
into it, for it to seem like fun, and not work.
- Yeah. I definitely agree with that, although I think his opinion matters about this more
than mine does. So our next question comes from Greg, who wanted to ask you whether our
interactions with social media, like Twitter and texting and Facebook, etc., not whether
this will influence so much our vocabulary, because clearly we do have new words showing
up, but whether you think this might have effects on our grammatical rules, and this
kind of thing, over time as well.
- I tend to doubt it, because everyone commands a variety of registers, that they use in different
scenarios, and in different media. We speak differently to a spouse or a family member
than we do when addressing an audience. We write differently in a term paper than when
we're texting. And just as telegrams in their heyday, when people had to omit the prepositions
and articles because they were paying by the word, and so you had that telegraphic form
of English, that didn't really change the grammar of the English language, because people
restricted it to telegrams.
- Mmhm. Although it did give us "telegraphic speech" as a nice term, which I now have to
explain whenever we teach first language acquisition. It's sort of like, "what is a telegraph"?
So... Our last question from our followers is from Pachanka, who wanted to know about
machine learning for language. So what do you think the best approach might be for machines,
for computers to sort of try to pick out natural language, to pick it up?
Well, the computational linguistic systems that we have now, like Google Translate, have
gotten a good chunk of the way by using statistical patterns in large corpora. But it seems to
me they're kind of hitting a ceiling. Google Translate is much better than not having anything,
but if you had to rely on it for anything beyond the level of "it was about some Russians",
then it's actually quite limited. And I think the reason is that there's probably a large
number of topics, of themes, of idioms that people use a fair amount of the time, and
then there's this vast long tail of unfamiliar combinations, ideas, scenarios that collectively
add up to an enormous amount of the language. No single one of them appears often enough
for machine learning to glom onto it statistically. I think that the essence of language is that
there are combinatorial rules that generate this vast universe of ideas, and that if computational
linguistics continues to try to kluge it without some equivalent of those rules, then it's
going to find itself at that ceiling. That at some point, you've got to do what I think
the human brain does, and look at the way we recombine phrases in semantically predictable ways.
- So get more of the human style of linguistics into it, too.
- There used to be, I think it was, I forget if it was IBM or Google, where the chief engineer
said, "every time we fire a linguist, the quality of our translation goes up". I mean,
that's kind of a cute joke, but I think it's probably outlived its usefulness, and now
it's time to start hiring linguists again.
- Yeah. We approve of hiring linguists.
Thanks a lot for coming. We really appreciate it.
- Thanks for having me. This is a wonderful idea, and I'll be glad to help it along.