Talk:The Language Instinct

message: I've removed the following from "Reception:"
'The statement that deaf babies "spontaneously invent sign languages with complex grammar" is actually only true in groups of deaf children (deaf communities) while a lone deaf child in a village where everyone else can hear never invents more than simple gestures.[2][3] Some argue that this supports a view of language as a social adaptation evolutionary kludge.'
The first sentence may be true, but it should be attributed to someone responding to the book to fit within this section. The second sentence needs to specify who 'some' are to be included.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.217.108.4 (talk) 06:53, 5 February 2014 (UTC)
thread_title: Reception

message: One went so far as to describe Pinker as the only linguist he knew who was able to write readable prose.
:I'd second that.
:Chomsky is readable.... Dave 04:14, Mar 14, 2005 (UTC)
Whew, just spent considerable time expanding on the stub. I admire Pinker's writing style, and the book's implications really are sweeping. It's important to put the work in the context of evolutionary psychology / sociobiology to understand what he and other authors are really getting at. --Kris Schnee 10:11, 9 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Old talk

message: "One went so far as to describe Pinker as the only linguist he knew who was able to write readable prose."
If this is a genuine quotation, a reference should be cited. Otherwise it should be deleted.
84.9.80.17 13:09, 9 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  Removed. Bjart 21:23, 12 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Citation needed 

message: The implications of the language-instinct hypothesis are far-reaching. Language and similar abilities are some of the traits that most clearly set humans apart from other animals, and have been claimed by thinkers such as Alfred Russel Wallace and Samuel Taylor Coleridge [1] as the work of God. If language and other mental abilities are in fact explainable as products of evolution, as Pinker argues, then appeal to a deus ex machina is not necessary to describe why these abilities exist.
The idea that language is learned rather than innate does not require a deus ex machina either. There is no controversy here. The question is whether the language capability exists as a separate instinct or is derived by learning from the general intellectual capabilities of the human species (the latter hypothesis is the one Pinker polemizes with). Both a specific instinct and the general intellectual capabilities can be the result of evolution rather than god. And the thoughts of figures like Coleridge and Wallace are quite irrelevant in a modern scientific context. --91.148.159.4 (talk) 16:57, 22 March 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: There is no reason for this to be disputed, the section is presenting Pinker's views.  If Pinker's views happen to be incorrect that is totally irrelevant, the correctly sourced and attributed facts are that he holds these views. --Xorkl000 (talk) 11:38, 16 June 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: But the section doesn't say these are P's views. It reads as the editor's interpretation. If they are P's views, that should be stated clearly and the views should be: 1. attributed to him rather than stated as a fact, and 2. cited with chapter and verse. That's what I said in my last sentence in the previous paragraph, but you apparently didn't care to read it to the end. If you don't have the patience to read other people's contributions, then don't (insert profanity) edit Wikipedia.--91.148.159.4 (talk) 23:37, 20 June 2008 (UTC)
replies: text:  My reading of the section is that these are P's views.  Perhaps the wording should be made less ambiguous on this point, and the statements correctly sourced/cited. --Xorkl000 (talk) 00:27, 24 June 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: I would have changed it, inserting stuff like "according to Pinker" everywhere and then adding a  tag. The problem is that if this is not really "according to Pinker", then such an edit would mean transforming some naive Original Research into outright calumny. I've read the book, and while I could possibly imagine Pinker writing some pretty stupid things to keep the reader entertained, I just don't remember any statements like these. I'm sure I would have remembered the Wallace-Coleridge stuff, at least. --91.148.159.4 (talk) 17:05, 24 June 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Disputed 

message: I have recently read the book, and found it most interesting. Apart from the chapter so headed, which was enraging. The people Pinker attacks are mostly people I've never heard of. The people I have heard of, who are regarded as genuine authorities on English usage, make no such assertions as Pinker attacks. For example, no one regarded as an authority defends the nonsensical ban on split infinitives. Not even the most conservative of them. None of them objects to ending a sentence with a preposition, most calling that ban a mere superstition. All of them have the objective of preserving written English as clear and lucid to all, not of keeping it fixed forever against all change, since all of them acknowledge change as inevitable and language as evolving. I have never seen such a set of straw men set up to be knocked over in my life, and it left me with severe doubts as to the worth of the rest of the book.
I will try at some point soon to contribute a section on the page with cites and so forth, but in the meantime just wanted to state my indignation.
81.155.104.20 (talk) 11:12, 18 April 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: You're right, it is a straw man argument, but so much of the general population believes that these notions (the ban on ending a sentence with a preposition, etc.) are etched in stone, so it's still worth mentioning. It was a while ago that I read this book, and I don't recall this section too well, but if he doesn't discuss how experts in the field of English usage also feel that such notions are bunk, then he should...so a modicum of indignation is appropriate ;)  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 64.229.192.120 (talk) 15:31, 29 August 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: 81.155.104.20 -- Only a few decades ago, many English-speaking schoolchildren were being taught not to split infinitives, and to be careful to use "prepositions" at the end of sentences only in somewhat limited and restrictive circumstances (of course, many such "prepositions" are not actually real prepositions, but instead verbal particles, as pointed out by Pinker).  And 95% of the usage panel consulted for the American Heritage Dictionary first edition disapproved of singular "their", etc. etc... AnonMoos (talk) 18:10, 17 August 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Mavens 

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thread_title: File:StevePinker.jpg Nominated for Deletion

message: An IP editor has objected to my removal of the following text, "There is evidence for rapid evolution, and humans are no exception. For instance, Tibetans have evolved more efficient lung and hemoglobin in just 3000 years. That means that even the Recent African Origin model for the evolution of modern humans leaves enough time for significant racial differences to form. The language instinct thesis predicts that it is possible to make language acquisition of the local language faster by eliminating innate potential to learn other languages, which then should have been selected for in cultures that values competence at a young age. The fact that people of any ethnic background can learn foreign languages therefore support learned, as opposed to instinctive, language."
I removed that material because, in my opinion, it is embarrassingly badly written, implausible, nearly incoherent, and improperly sourced. The source given is only, "Daniel Everett, New Scientist article on Piraha." One cannot even tell from that which article is the source, what issue it was published in, or any of the other crucial things that anyone who wants to verify that information would need to know. Polisher of Cobwebs (talk) 09:14, 19 August 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree that recent additions are inadequately sourced, and in this case I think we would need a quotation that allows us to verify the interpretation of the sources. They are also written as advancing a position. --Boson (talk) 20:59, 19 August 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Content issues 

message: Specific mechanisms theory predicts that at least three specific modules are necessary to get anything done at all: one for perceptual cognition, one for emotional motivation and one executive. None of them is of any use unless the other two are already there. This raises a severe evolvability paradox for psychological nativism/evolutionary psychology/computational theory of mind. There are also specific evolvability paradoxes, such as redundant phonemes (no reason why a vast range of innate phonetic potential should have evolved when far fewer phonemes are evidently enough for a complex language, as shown by Polynesian languages), the first moral evolvability paradox (that a single moral individual would not survive in a group where everyone else was amoral) and first individual evolvability paradoxes in regards to many sexual behaviors (especially species recognition and sexual characteristic recognition). Then there is evidence, especially from domestication research, that evolution can go very fast. This means that nativist theory predicts that different human groups should have evolved big racial differences in psychology by natural selection working on individual hereditary psychiatry. That prediction is falsified by studies showing that supposed racial differences disappear when social factors are taken into account. These evolvability paradoxes are described in greater detail on the pages "Brain" and "Self-organization" on Pure science Wiki, a wiki for the scientific method unaffected by academic pursuit of prestige.
79.138.146.232 (talk) 16:32, 8 January 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: Looks like original research to me, but just to be social... Geoffrey Miller in the Mating Mind gives an explanation for redundancy in language and its quick evolution, Robin Dunbar in Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language gives an account of morality and mechanisms for language evolution, Dawkins somewhere has an explanation for honest signalling in a Darwinian paradigm. This is not the place for this stuff, the Origin of Language page exists elsewhere, this is a book page and only should have its contents and reception. --Resip27 (talk) 13:20, 7 January 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  The evolution of language is not properly explained. 

message: What is the difference between genetic determinism and extreme genetic determinism? Genetic determinism already means that everything is 100% determined by genes. (Of course, Pinker is not a genetic determinist.) I am for deleting the word "extreme". --Hob Gadling (talk) 11:14, 8 November 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  "extreme genetic determinism"