The final part of my series, which began with this post and continued with this one, concerns Steven Pinker. My overview of Pinker's works will be narrower than for the other linguist-writers I discussed.
Steven Pinker is an experimental psychologist interested in how the human mind works in relationship to language, but he's also an unabashed popularizer whose books are full of pop culture references (especially comic strips). I'm aware that he pushes some theories that are controversial in the field. I'm not here to argue for or against those theories, but simply to observe his talents as a popularizer of linguistics and cognitive science.
His most famous book is The Language Instinct, but the first book of his that I read was Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language, which, I have to say, altered the way I look at language. It deals at length with the phenomenon of irregularity in grammar (for example, why about 200 of the verbs in English do not follow the rule of adding an -ed to create the past tense), and what this says about the way we think.
His most recent book that I read is The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature, which covers, among other things, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the nature of profanity, our conceptions of discreteness as revealed through count and mass nouns, and the importance of metaphors. I discuss the book in more detail here, but I just want to say that if you read nothing else by Pinker, you should examine his chapter on cause and effect, how essential the concept is to our ordinary experience yet how tantalizingly difficult it is for philosophers to define. His layout of the topic is eye-opening and sheds light on just about everything we spend our time arguing about, from politics to religion to legal matters.
Questions like--"Why did Obama win the election?" "How would things be different if Obama weren't black?" "What caused the economic downturn?" "Did dropping the bomb on Hiroshima save more lives than it destroyed?"--all hinge on how we reconstruct causes and effects. Any opinions we may hold on these matters can never be conclusively proven or disproven, but that does not stop us from thinking our own views self-evident and anyone else's absurd. It is essential to the fabric of our thinking, and written into the language itself.