The Language Instinct

How the Mind Creates Language

By: Steven Pinker

Narrated by: Arthur Morey

Length: 18 hrs and 55 mins

Publisher's summary

In this classic, the world’s expert on language and mind lucidly explains everything you always wanted to know about language: how it works, how children learn it, how it changes, how the brain computes it, and how it evolved. With deft use of examples of humor and wordplay, Steven Pinker weaves our vast knowledge of language into a compelling story: language is a human instinct, wired into our brains by evolution.

The Language Instinct received the William James Book Prize from the American Psychological Association and the Public Interest Award from the Linguistics Society of America. This edition includes an update on advances in the science of language since The Language Instinct was first published.

©2011 Steven Pinker (P)2011 Brilliance Audio, Inc.

Critic reviews

"Pinker writes with acid verve." ( Atlantic Monthly)

"An extremely valuable book, very informative, and very well written." (Noam Chomsky)

Poor narration

Very monotone and strange narration, which is especially important in a master work about language. The content itself was really interesting.

Dense

Some chapters of this are more detailed and technical than one can absorb in an audiobook, which made the listening a little longer than I might have liked, but it held my interest and has changed my view of language for the better, I hope. Professor Pinker’s disdain for fuzzy reasoning is always appreciated.

nice background - field has advanced since publish

Important background to linguistics and cognitive science wrt language, though readers should follow up with more recent accounts of particular areas of interest (good suggestions in the afterward).

Dense, slow, dry, technical and totally brilliant

I'm kind of conflicted about this book. On one hand, I had some serious difficulty managing to slog through it. Even in his more recent books, Pinker has a hard time making his information tell a story that holds the reader's interest (to his credit, he's gotten a little better in his last couple of books). This being an earlier work, you get to see him take nerd to a level you might not even realize existed without much in the way of charm or readability. His ability to get way too involved in over analyzing the mist insignificant details is both what makes him so fascinating and at the same boring beyond measure.

With all that said, sometimes people are in the mood for actually understanding something. Nonfiction books are supposed to be educational, but too often they are dumbed down and simplified, which can be quite unsatisfying. Sometimes slogging through difficult material can give greater rewards than books that spoon feed and smooth out the edges. Sometimes the tangents that analyze minute details satisfy curiosities that might otherwise linger. Pinker certainly "leaves no stone unturned", as the cliché goes. The result is that I really feel like I learned something instead of reading fluff or unbalanced ideology. Pinker does spend a little too much time getting into the nerd version of pissing matches with his contemporaries, but this isn't the worst example of this I've seen from him.

I've gone back and forth on whether to give this book 3 or 4 stars. I guess it's one book that can fit all over the rating scale for different reasons. But I am very glad I read it, and other people who like to get to the bottom of things will too.

Willful and Deliberate Extinction of Mankind

This book could be the basis for a taught psychological thriller or a science fiction horror story. It describes, in quite explicit detail, the willful and deliberate extinction of mankind. Let me say right here in the beginning that the author does not consider what he describes as the extinction of mankind because he believes that everything that makes us human resides in our brain and that will inevitably be understood, mapped and duplicated in an AI neural network, consciousness included. Therefore he considers the resulting Super intelligent AI, albeit non-biological, as completely human and therefore mankind simply transformed from biological to non-biological. He even uses the theory of evolution to describe the transformation of mankind from biological to biotechnical and finally to completely non-biological. I disagree with him that such a change in mankind has anything to do with evolution because evolution is considered to be a process inherently void of any external or internal construction, direction, or influence by an intelligent agent. His stretch of the term evolution inserts into the normal process of evolution the development and final transformation of mankind from biological to non-biological, which is constructed, directed, and influenced by an external intelligent agent, man.

The author seems quite comfortable with the process he describes in his book to the point that he has drastically modified his diet to try and ensure that he is alive when the early miraculous stage arrives so he may be technicnologically modified that he might live much longer than normal, and be cured of any biological deficiencies e.g., diabetes. He meticulously details how this process began, because it already has, but also how it will be supported and progressed and accepted by industry, the sciences, philosophies, and the majority of mankind, which is probably why the book is more than 500 pages or over 20 hours of narration. He has thought this out very extensively to the point of not just presenting his ideas but also addressing the critics of either parts of his plan or the entire plan. Furthermore he has not neglected to study and also detail the many societal institutions that are necessary to move this plan along. He notes that they already have thrown their support and money towards the current narrow forms of AI that will lead to the next acceptable stage and so on until it becomes too late to stop or take control of the process.

There is an irony that pops up very late in the book of which I cannot tell if the author himself is fully aware. For the large majority of the book it is implied that incredible technological advances in the very near future will allow mankind to end many biological problems and diseases that will lead to an almost utopian existence. I want to impress upon you that I am heavily stressing the word "almost" in the previous sentence. The author never even comes close to explicitly expressing a utopian concept. However, and this is where the irony enters, he does stress the phenomenal benefit that this incredible soft AI will have on mankind in all areas philosophical, intellectual, medical, etc. areas of human existence. With the elimination of disease, via Nano-bot technology, various levels of biotechnical humans i.e., trans-humans or "enhanced humans," will continue the march towards a Super intelligent AI, that is, an AI that has not only equaled the intelligence of man but far surpasses the intelligence of man. This Super intelligent AI will be the point of no return, the same as crossing the event horizon of a black hole, which is why the word "singularity" is in the title. It will be fully autonomous able to replicate itself and to improve itself. This leads to the extinction of mankind in that only fully conscious technological AI far smarter than man can ever be will be in existence. However, are you ready for the irony, what his idea ultimately leads to is first the huge benefits to mankind in all areas, then to enhanced humans, and finally to completely technological Super intelligent machines, is a complete new set of problems and diseases, albeit technological diseases, also come into existence. These technological problems/diseases will also be autonomous and self-replicating which will force the new "machinekind" to create technology to fight these threats e.g., Nano-bot autoimmune systems, along with many other technological "medical" and "environmental" protection systems. All the author's idea accomplishes is removing all threats to biological humanity through extinction and replacing it with a completely technological entity with very similar, although completely technological, problems and technological diseases akin to that which it has replaced.

This book, regardless the very detailed explanations, held my interest all the way to the end. It never became stale, static, repetitious, or dull and never even approached boring. The previous statement is true even though I do not support his so called "transformation" of man from biological to a Super intelligent non-biological entity. Once again the narration was superb and no doubt added to holding my interest in this lengthy material.

makes me want to read more from Steven Pinker

An excellent explication of evolutionary neo-Chomsky-aniism. A bit tedious in its minutia. Deliberately perhaps, to bring to mind Darwin's seminal work. Well worth a listen if you don't mind sleeping through some of it.

Dense, But So Good

If you could sum up The Language Instinct in three words, what would they be?

Informative, stimulating, enjoyable -- one of my all time favorites.

What was one of the most memorable moments of The Language Instinct?

I like the way the book develops and unfolds, explaining the way we learn and use language. I found the chapters on how pidgin and creole are created, and the roll of children in that, to be particularly fascinating.

What does Arthur Morey bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?

I like his voice. He is clear and engaging, and his style of deliver fits the book well.

If you were to make a film of this book, what would the tag line be?

I think the tag line of the book title as written would do just fine.

Any additional comments?

Highly recommended. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and learned a lot from it. I have gone back and listened to many chapters numbers of times. There is a lot of material here.

Includes brief updates on each chapter.

Any additional comments?

At the end of the book, there are brief updates, chapter by chapter, on more recent developments. (And it seemed that there wasn't much, of the 1994 material, that was really outdated.)

An interesting comic and literally ingenious angle

Loved it. The author cleat and headgear on, barrels into the snakepit of language origins, acquisition, and evolution. I enjoyed this jaunt and will review the work here again.

Hard to follow.

I picked this after listening to John McWhorter’s Great Courses lecture series, which reference led it several times. Unfortunately, this book is far more technical than McWhorter’s lectures and, I think, would lend itself better to a hard copy to follow along. There’s nothing wrong with the book or the narration, it’s just a topic that would be easier to understand if you could see the examples he gives.