The Blank Slate is one of my favorite nonfiction books and one of the most enlightening reading experiences I’ve had. To say that I was anxiously awaiting Pinker’s follow up would be an understatement.
However, the Stuff of Thought isn’t so much a follow up to Pinker’s work on The Blank Slate and How the Mind works as it is a finale to his popular works on language acquisition. The idea is that studying language gives us a special window into how the mind does, and in fact can, see and shape the world. The problem for me was that I found the level of detail on sentence construction and verb states and other language operations incredibly tedious. Clearly I wasn’t cut out for linguistics. They may have much to teach us, but I would have trouble staying awake for the class.
More interesting are the later chapters dealing with the dynamics of naming things, like babies, and the science behind why bad words are bad and what purpose they serve. If I were to hand to book to someone I knew I would suggest opening right to these chapters.
More likely, I would hand someone I knew a copy of The Blank Slate and tell them to enjoy.
