Steven Pinker54-year-old may look like a rock star, but he’s actually alanguage explorer. Between the phrases and the syntax, Pinker searches for clues – what he calls “rabbit holes”? that take you to the depths of our brain. For more than a quarter of a century he has researched at centers such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Universities of Stanford and Harvard, where he is currently a professor of psychology. His books have been finalists for the prestigious Pulitzer Prize on two occasions, both for their scientific value and for their extraordinary amenity, as he illustrates his ideas with film dialogue, novel fragments and even comic strips.
In one of the most popular,The clean table(2002), Steven Pinker argues that at birth the brain is not a blank sheet that will be written by culture and experience, but is programmed with many aspects of our character, including talent. In other words, human nature is determined by natural selection. Not surprisingly, Pinker’s ideas have been at the center of some heated debate. Not long ago, she defended Lawrence Summers, the former president of Harvard University, who pointed to innate gender differences as a possible explanation for the shortage of women in science. Of course, Pinker’s endorsement further fueled the controversy.
In many different ways, Pinker’s latest bookThe world of words. An introduction to human nature-published in Spain by the Paidós publishing house-, it tries to show that our thinking, our way of interpreting reality, is based on a few key concepts. We have discussed this and other issues with him in his office at Harvard University.
– You have said that when you grew up in the Montreal Jewish community you were surrounded by fervent adherents to all kinds of political philosophies, and that wars were continually waged between languages and ideas. Has this influenced your efforts to describe the universal patterns of thought that underlie language?
– Certainly, it made me interested in those great issues of human nature. But I definitely wanted to study them in a deep way, not at the table talk level. So I got into cognitive psychology.
– In your best-selling book, The Blank Slate , you argue that the child’s mind is not an empty vessel that society can fill with the values and behaviors it prefers, but rather that we are born with certain genetic predispositions. Why do you think these ideas are so controversial?
-Considing people as biological organisms can be disturbing for many reasons. One of them is the possibility of inequality. If human nature is a clean sweep, then we are all equal by definition. But if we consider that nature determines our qualities, then some people may be better endowed than others, or with different qualities than others. Those who are concerned aboutracial, class or sexist discriminationthey would prefer the mind to be a clean sweep, because then it would be impossible to say, for example, that men are significantly different from women. I argue that we should not confuse our legitimate moral and political refusal to prejudge an individual on the basis of a category with the claim that people are biologically indistinguishable or that the mind of a newborn is a blank sheet.
The second fear is that of breaking the dream of the human race’s capacity for improvement. If children were clean sheets, we could model them to be the kind of people we want them to be. But if we are born with certain instincts and ignoble traits, such as violence and selfishness, then attempts at social reform and betterment of the human being could be a waste of time. I argue that the mind is a very complex system with many parts, and that some parts of the brain can be made to work against others. For example, the frontal lobes, with their ability to empathize and anticipate the consequences of our decisions, can override selfish or antisocial impulses. Thus, there is scope for social reform.
And third, there is the fear of determinism, the loss of free will and personal responsibility. But it is a mistake to consider it that way. Because even if there is no soul separate from the brain that influences behavior in any way – and even if we are nothing more than our brains – it is undoubtedly true that there are parts of the mind responsible for the potential consequences of our actions, it is that is, responsible for social norms, to reward, punish, believe or blame.
– In The World of Words he dedicates a chapter to foul terms and cultural differences in this linguistic field.
-I think that releasing tacos is both so offensive and so attractive because it allows you to press people’s emotional buttons, and especially their negative emotional buttons. Words carry an emotional charge that the listener processes involuntarily. You cannot hear a word just as a mere sound; it always evokes a meaning and an associated emotion in the brain. That is why words can serve as a probe to know the brain of other people. With them, we can manage their emotional springs at will.
And then there is the fact that the content of insults and tacos varies throughout history and from one culture to another. The common denominator among all of them is a negative emotion, but culture and time determine which emotion it is: rejection of bodily secretions, fear of the divine, or disgust towards sexual perversions. To this must be added a second question, and that is that one recognizes when another person is trying to evoke that negative emotion, at the same time that you know that your interlocutor knows that you are realizing their intentions. In large part, you are offended by it. The choice of words matters: it is not the same to say “fuck”, which is obscene, than “copulate”, although both refer to the same action. You know that when someone uses “copulate” they are talking about copulation, but if they use “fuck” they are trying to make you lose your composure. Again we run into pragmatics.
– He assures that by studying certain aspects of the acquisition of language by children – specifically, investigating how they learn to use verbs – you fell, like Alice, into a hidden world where you could observe the deepest cognitive structures. What did you see in that wonderland?
– In this aspect it is important to imagine how children learn to use simple verbs to put things in their proper place; verbs like “fill”, “throw”, “load” or “splash”, which imply movement of something to somewhere. The problem was how to explain how a young child, without prior knowledge of how a particular language works and who will not receive lessons on how to use words in certain circumstances, learns what the words and phrases mean in the that can be used. We adults, for example, will say “fill the glass with water” but not “fill the water inside the glass”, although we fully understand the meaning of the phrase. We will say “pour the water into the glass” but not “pour the glass with water”. The second version is reasonable, but it doesn’t sound good. However, with a verb like “load” we can say both “load the hay into the wagon” and “load the wagon with hay.”
So you have a verb that takes the container as a direct object, one that takes the content as that object, and the third that can work both ways. How do children manage to get it right almost always from the beginning? The answer is that they learn different ways of formulating the same situation. If I go to the sink and the glass ends up full, I can think of an activity such as doing something to the water – that is, causing it to enter the glass – or doing something to the glass – causing it to change from empty to full. For this reason, “fill” and “pour” have different behaviors. If the simplest action, like putting water in a glass, can be formulated in those two ways, with different consequences in terms of how we use words, that suggests that one of the two fundamental talents of the mind is to frame each multiple situation. modes. Debate and disagreement can arise when two people – or one person on different occasions – interpret the same event in different ways. “Pouring water” versus “filling a glass” is a harmless nuance, but saying “invade Iraq” versus “liberating Iraq,” or “confiscating assets” versus “redistributing resources” has more important consequences. This faculty suggests limitations to our rationality; for example, that we can be vulnerable to fallacies in reasoning or corruption of our institutions.
– Huey Newton, co-founder of the Black Panthers party in the 1960s, once said: “Power is the ability to define phenomena.” Isn’t that just in line with many of your observations?
– Indeed. Words are means of trying to change people’s thinking, but there is something objective about which you want to change their opinions. We are not simply trapped in a world of language. Let’s take “invading Iraq” versus “liberating Iraq,” two different ways of framing the same military action. However, there is a fact that we cannot ignore: if the majority of the population rejected the old regime and welcomed the new one, or vice versa. So, both interpretations are by no means equivalent: one is more true or valid than the other. Although you can choose one formulation over the other to convince people to believe one thing over the other, that does not necessarily mean that one interpretation is as true or as valid as the other. It is important to understand the great power of language, but it should not be overestimated.
– You say that language reveals our limitations, but you have also insisted that it can show us a way out of them. In this sense, his linguistic superhero is the metaphor.
– I actually have two superheroes. One is the metaphor and the other the combinatorial. Through metaphor we transfer and transform ways of thinking that come from very specific actions, such as pouring water, throwing stones or closing a jammed drawer. We can filter their content and use them as abstract structures to reason about other realities. For example, we use graphs to communicate mathematical relationships as if they were lines and surfaces in space. In fact, much of the scientific language is metaphorical. We speak of genetic code, where code originally meant “key”. We also refer to the planetary model as if it were similarly distributed to the Sun and the planets. We build metaphors with concrete elements and use them to represent abstract concepts.
When we combine the power of metaphors with the combinatorial nature of language and thought, we are able to create a practically infinite number of ideas, even though we are equipped with a finite inventory of concepts and relationships. I believe that it is the mechanism that the mind uses to reason about abstract concepts such as chess or politics, which are not physical and do not have an obvious relevance for the reproduction and survival of our species. It can also allow us – through the words of a skilled writer, for example – to dwell in another person’s consciousness.
– Argues that metaphors and combinatorics should be key to our education, that we should be encouraged to think and use language in a way that promotes our development and productivity. Why?
-We have to exploit the capacity of the mind to understand things in a familiar way and then apply them to new ideas and areas of thought. But we must take into account its limits, say to ourselves: “this is like that from this perspective but not from another”. Thus, for example, natural selection resembles an engineer because the organs of animals are designed to perform certain functions, but it is not in the sense that it has no long-term foresight. Analogies can give insights, but they can also lead to fallacious conclusions if not used carefully. With this caveat, the perception of similarities and connections is behind countless in sciences, arts, and many other fields.
-Don’t you think that most of education is just the opposite of what you describe? Many people think that it should be a kind of indoctrination into the conventional ideas of our society.
-It is key for me to exploit the little germ of motivation shared by all, which consists of finding out how things work, knowing the truth and not allowing them to deceive us. If we don’t like being lied to, neither in our private lives nor in business, why would you want them to do so about the origin of life or the destiny of the planet? I believe that the institutions that promote the search for truth, such as science, history and journalism, are aimed at strengthening this muscle of reality to a great extent. There are other parts of the mind that militate against, such as the one that worries about how we see ourselves and how others see us. This self-deception makes us want to project a more positive image to the world, whether it is true or not. It is an intrinsic trend, known to social psychology as the self-service bias or the Lake Wobegon effect – a fictional city created on an American radio show, where everyone seems to be above average. Almost everyone believes that they are above average in some positive trait. -or the group to which they belong-.
– Is there any kind of scientific or intellectual research that you feel especially close to?
-Yes, everything that makes me feel that there is something deep and mysterious happening under the surface. I’ve spent 20 years researching regular and irregular verbs, not because I’m an obsessive lover of language, but because it seemed to me that they exploited a fundamental distinction in language processing: between memory and rule-driven computing. Intuition tells me that even if I don’t understand the matter yet, and even if I don’t know if the answer is going to come, there is something important that I won’t be able to answer unless I understand a lot about the mind at a very deep level.
My attention to the choice of regular or irregular verbs was due to the feeling that this might reveal something about themental computing. All these years studying them have led us to the idea that this system optimizes the use of human concepts and cognitive formulation, in other words, the material from which thoughts are made. If you really understood why the verb “fill” differs from the verb “pour” and both are different from the verb “load”, you would have penetrated the deepest patterns of human thought.
It is the phenomenon that I call “rabbit hole”: we only perceive a small opening, but something very rich, deep, important and mysterious beats under the surface.
Marion Long
