Steven Pinker - The Stuff of Thought: Language as a window into human nature
05 Jun 2008
The Stuff of Thought: Language as a window into human nature
Please be advised that this presentation contains very strong language.For Steven Pinker, the brilliance of the mind lies in the way it uses just two processes to turn the finite building blocks of our language into infinite meanings. The first is metaphor: we take a concrete idea and use it as a stand-in for abstract thoughts. The second is combination: we combine ideas according to rules, like the syntactic rules of language, to create new thoughts out of old ones.
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