"The Stuff of Thought".

Have finished "The Stuff of Thought" by Pinker. First half was very detailed linguistics, and not for everyone, including me. However, I am glad I pushed through it, because it made the arguments and conclusions of the last half understandable and believable.

The last chapter is a wonderful summary of his understanding of  "The Stuff of Thought" , that is hard to resist. Hope that it can be read as an excerpt on AMAZON website.
Some excerpts;

Language offers the clearest window on how we can transcend our cognitive and emotional limitations.

The first way out is conceptual metaphor. Humans take their concepts of space, time, causality and substance, etch away the leaden physical contents they were designed for. and apply the residual framework to airier subject matter.
...
The second way out is the combinatorial power of language....(which)allows us to entertain an explosion of ideas even though we are equipped with with a finite inventory of concepts and relations.

He goes on to say bad ideas also come from this process but we also have methods to winnow them out.

His suggestion for the goal of education struck me as illuminating;

The goal of education (in a scientifically literate democracy) is to make up for the shortcomings in our instinctive ways of thinking about the physical and social world. And education is likely to succeed not by trying to implant abstract statements in empty minds, but by taking the mental models that are our standard equipment, applying them to new subjects in selective analogies, and assembling them into new and more sophisticated combinations. 


Pinker's  "How the Mind Works" and "The Blank Slate" were also very thought provoking.

I would love to attend a series of discussions/seminars on Pinker's books. I may start a book club.