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books: Reading between the lines.

Watch Your LanguageWhat our words reveal about our minds, but not about the world.

By Christine Kenneally
Posted Wednesday, Oct. 17, 2007, at 11:37 AM ET

(Continued from page 1)

It is remarkable that no one is ever taught that these classes exist, let alone what they mean. Yet when a child learns the verbs of a language, they implicitly learn about the way verbs huddle together. As Pinker points out, verbs could be grouped for all sorts of meaning, for example, based on whether they describe things that look the same, feel the same, or smell the same. But they are not; what their groupings reveal is a distinctly and universally human fixation on different kinds of motion, how force is applied, how time gets parceled up, and how states change—this is the stuff of thought.

Pinker walks his readers with a firm and friendly hand through many finely detailed examples, picking out a word or exposing a metaphor, turning it over, trying it out in different contexts, and exposing its internal mechanism. Again and again, seemingly inconsequential quirks of language reveal the same cosmic preoccupations. In addition to physical objects and the laws that move them, the way we carve up the universe includes a basic taxonomy of human vs. nonhuman things, animate vs. inanimate objects, discrete objects vs. continuous stuff, and flexible vs. rigid things. Our language is also shaped by a timeline along which events are bounded or unbounded. Also fundamental is the idea of a goal, as well as an important distinction between means and ends.

Not all of these meanings appear in all languages, but some large set of them do, suggesting pretty strongly that they are fundamental to how human beings think about the world, not just how we talk about it. Pinker runs through many different experiments that show how basic some of these concepts are to human thinking, independent of language use.

Yet although they are essential to thought, the principles and distinctions revealed by language are not fundamental to the world and how it works. Time is not a line; objects are not bounded or unbounded in the ways that we construe them. Nor does the world break down in any clean way into, for example, things that are human vs. things that are nonhuman. The stuff of human thought is wrong. Well, maybe not wrong, but it's not right, either. Rather, as Pinker shows, our default ideas about how the world is partitioned are a "cognitive lens" with which to view all the, you know, things around us. After all, he says, "though we can never directly know the world, it's not as if one could know the world without some kind of mind." The trick, of course, is to be aware of the lens at the same time you are looking through it.

How then should we view language? If it's not the case that language determines how we see the world, and it's not true that the world itself determines language, what is it? If you're adept enough with it, then language is a paradox: revealing the universal concerns of our species, while at the same time enabling us to see, at least a little bit, beyond them.

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Christine Kenneally is the author of The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language. Her writings can be found on the blog www.christinekenneally.com.
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