In The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature, Steven Pinker examines samples of everyday speech to validate modern theories of cognitive science. Pinker is currently a professor and experimental psychologist at Harvard University. He earned his doctorate at Harvard in 1979, then moved to MIT for a postdoctoral fellowship and has been back and forth between the two since then. He’s best known for his work on language and the mind; his early research focused on visual cognition, while his more recent work focused more on child language acquisition (with a particular emphasis on verbs). The Stuff of Thought makes excellent use of verbal acquisition data to provide insight to cognitive function. While a basic knowledge in semantic formalism would be helpful for getting more out of the book, I feel that it is a well-balanced composition of popular culture and linguistic theory. Colorful metaphors bring to light linguistic principles essential for Pinker’s arguments on human nature.Pinker writes that through language, many complex ideas and attitudes are communicated in varying detail. These concepts shine through language, but they stem from a deeper, and at the most basic level, innate, system. Conceptual semantics, the language of thought, is important to understand because it provides evidence that our utterances are not inane, but that they have meaningful, interpretable content. He presents the question: how do children acquire language in the first place? It’s clear that they are not memorizing the information based on their affinity to regularize (ie runned is a regularized version of the irregular past tense) – which is something that is not found in the input (adult speech). They are analyzing the input to make generalizations using innate building blocks. There is much discussion on what exactly these building blocks are and their functions, all in an effort of fortifying the concept of the human mind.The machinery innate to our minds, that is, what we are born capable of, is a topic worthy of much philosophical discussion because the answer is still unknown. Pinker takes time to introduce Fodor’s Extreme Nativism (words are the smallest building blocks, and therefore the meaning is the word itself) and Radical Pragmatics (there is very little innate knowledge – all meanings are devised from the context in which the words are uttered). He argues in favor of conceptual semantics, which suggests spatial and eventive qualities of words are innate, while qualities specific to the words are learned. He uses metaphor and the attributes of various words with similar meanings that belong in different syntaxes to support his claim. His ultimate statement on the mind is that it’s clear, through linguistic evidence, that our mind is shaped by the world, and the world by our mind. That is, our perception of reality is a product of the way we think, which is derived from the world around us.Pinker’s style is informative and memorable. His makes great use of everyday language, like advertisements and common phrases, to communicate sophisticated linguistic theories, as when he describes the verb classes when discussing the difficulties of the acquisition of verbs. The frequent appearance of metaphors based on media and pop culture keeps the reader engaged by eliminating technical terminology and making the research accessible to a much wider audience. He initially draws on the events of 9/11 to explain the slight differentiations semantics makes, a topic well understood by the majority of Americans. I appreciate that he lets his personal style show through and really gives the reader a sense of being included in the observations and linguistic inductions that he makes. While I would not consider his analysis neuroscience based, it finds a home in cognitive science, which is valuable for understanding neuroscience on the level of higher cognitive function.The Stuff of Thought provides an excellent introduction to the relationship between cognitive science and language, all while engaging the reader in a light-weight, cultured script. I give The Stuff of Thought five stars for its integrity to the field and appealing writing style. Anyone with an interest in cognitive science and a passion for linguistics and languages would be no less than thrilled with this book.