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The Language Instinct with Steven Pinker
Steven Pinker, author of The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (1994) and co-founder of the Center for Cognitive Science, discusses his theory that language is a human instinct and not a human invention. Pinker defines language as ambiguous, and he believes that this ambiguity leads to the separation of words, meanings, and thoughts. He explores examples of what does and does not qualify as language, and demonstrates differences in sentence structure, dialects, pronouns, and meanings. The lecture concludes with audience questions.
Recorded Feb 23, 1995 at 92nd Street Y, New York.
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👋 THANKYOU.
Brilliant
Steven is amazing
Thank you so much! I am from Brazil and to have access to a free material like that is a revolution similar to what happened at Gutenberg's print time.
36:21 “There’s no way you could get a computer reasoning system an artificial intelligence to have its knowledge stored in the form of English sentences.”
Taking a course that recommended this book im grateful for free access to this information
So close, and yet so far away.
The mind no more creates language than it creates oxygen. Language is a given. The Sanskrit alphabet is based on fundamental sounds. Sanskrit is the mother of most languages.
starts at 2:25
Pinker on the evolution of the language instinct (Feb 23, 1995):
1:04:08
"[W]hen I talk about a language Instinct am I talking about brain wiring or am I talking about an adaptive tool? I'm talking about an adaptive tool that we have by virtue of brain wiring. That is, it was adaptive not just to each of us and therefore useful to learn but it was adaptive through long enough of our evolutionary history that the people with mutations that change their brain wiring in such a way that language came to them more easily had a selective advantage, and as that was repeated over many generations the brain became in some sense wired for language."