YouSaid · the spoken record

Steven Pinker

lines on the record: 86
first: 2016-11-02
most recent: 2016-11-02
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Happen to be, it's good that we all settle on a standard to maximize communication and efficiency and certain aesthetic judgments. So the standardization is a good thing, but that doesn't necessarily mean that one standard is inherent objectively better than another.”
2016-11-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it is in the sense that I would not make the argument that there's anything, that the fact that I don't have any rat music on my iPod is not an argument for the objective merit of rat music compared to any other kind of music. There I'm a relativist. And likewise, the grammatical structure of African-American English vernacular, as linguists call it, black English, ebonics, there's really nothing inherently to choose between the rules in black English vernacular and any other English vernacular. There I'm also a relativist. On the other hand, when it comes to what dialect we should use in formal essays, in the academic literature in the New York Times, it's good to have a standard. The standard could have been black English if history had run differently.”
2016-11-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, I never got rap music, so I don't want to say it's overrated. It may be that I'm overrated and that I, or at least I overrate myself, but I just know. I was probably born too soon.”
2016-11-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Life. I've documented the historical declines of violence. As an economist, you know that we've gotten a lot wealthier and life has gotten better in many ways. We live longer, we're healthier, we have a rich, more breadth of experience. These are all, I would say, fruits of the enlightenment, despite the fact that as products of evolution, we've got a lot of irrational quirks baked into us. Fortunately, and this gets us back to, say, modularity or specialization, we don't only have irrational passions, we do have this big frontal cortex kind of grafted onto a brain, which now and again can override our passions. We can exert self-control, we can count 10, we can say for a rainy day, we can hold our horses. Not uniformly, not always reliably, but enough that it's something that we could celebrate and try to encourage.”
2016-11-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Work badly not, but probably on the whole, democracy is a better idea. But you can have weapons. Denmark. I mean, I grew up in Canada. Sure. And I grew up with a picture of a queen in my classroom. So yes, if you have a purely, have all the pageantry and gossip that you have with having a nice juicy monarchy. But the queen doesn't actually think up the laws. It's probably not a bad compromise. But both the progress of science, and I really do believe there is such a thing as scientific progress. We see it in the fruits of technology, but we also see it just in the depth and satisfying nature of scientific explanation. And not linearly and not inexorably, but in progress in so many dimensions of human.”
2016-11-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And historically, even though it's true that people do all kinds of crazy things subject to all kinds of irrational prejudices, passions, and so on, some ideas really do get dropped by bad ideas, get dropped by the wayside, not necessarily quickly, not necessarily absolutely. But we don't have human sacrifice anymore. We don't throw virgins into volcanoes to get better weather. We don't have too many hereditary monarchies anymore.”
2016-11-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“to the passions was not so much a psychological claim that people will lose self-control and they'll let their emotions get better of them. He was partly making a conceptual point that”
2016-11-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, what are we doing here if you don't believe in reason? Why don't we have an arm wrestle or a beauty contest? First of all, by the very act of even posing this question, you're committed to reason. That's what we're trying to explore here. So it's too late. You've already committed yourself to reason. That's one. Number two, Hume, even though he was a very insightful psychologist and he emphasized that humans are subject to all kinds of irrational passions and biases and so on. That was one of the reasons that he did philosophy was to expose some of those fallacies the better that we should be able to work around them. And his argument about reason being a slave”
2016-11-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There is something that is innate, but it's something the innate stuff allows us to learn. And so it's kind of gets beneath a dichotomy into something that I like to think is more intellectually satisfying.”
2016-11-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of bored by the idea of is language innate or is it learned? It's just, you know, it's neither it's not halfway in between because that doesn't give you any insight either. But rather there is an innate structure that does the learning because learning doesn't happen by magic. There has to be something in place that does the learning. Let's characterize the nature of the learning mechanism in terms of its information processing abilities, what is its computational architecture as the computer scientists say. Once you have that, that is the solution to the nature-nurture problem, namely what's innate is an ability to learn. But since any mechanism does some things well and some things not so well, that gives you insight as to what and how we learn. And that makes irrelevant the question of is it or is it learned?”
2016-11-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Illusions that are quirks of our own makeup, that we can understand what it is that give humans fulfillment and satisfaction and pleasure, what are the resources that we have to work with in improving a political system. And I also think that often going back to finding a middle ground, that the middle ground isn't finding, say, the arithmetic mean between the two extremes, but rather it's trying to go down a level of more finer grain causal mechanisms underneath the phenomena and to state a position that may not look like either of the original extremes because it's more precise. So in the case of language, for example, I've always been”
2016-11-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's not too far from the way I would see myself. Not so much in taking intermediate position that's just in find the Goldilock zone, like, oh, the truth is always halfway in between two extremes. I mean, it isn't always. On the other hand, I do believe in the Enlightenment vision that by understanding our world that the world is intelligible, that we can understand it, that progress in understanding and therefore progress in rational action are possible, including, pointedly, ourselves. That is, there is such a thing as human nature. It can be studied scientifically the way other phenomena are studied, that it's good to understand human nature because then we can discount when necessary.”
2016-11-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Be true in theory. So, yeah, I don't think there's any miracle that goes on in the brain when we make a decision. In that sense, we're determined. On the other hand, there is so much unpredictability, non-linearity for all intents and purposes were not determined.”
2016-11-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you didn't say yes. Yes, well. They may not be for any practical purpose determined in the sense that there may be processes that are chaotic, that are nonlinear, where some ions zig instead of zag because of Brownian movement or maybe even quantum phenomena. And as a result, the whole system might behave in one way or another. That is physically determined, but for all practical purposes random, it may be so complex that it might be like the weather taken to several higher degrees. In theory, perhaps Laplace's demon would be able to tell us what each of us will do next. But some things that are true in theory are so mind-bogglingly complicated that they may as well not”
2016-11-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“think that every aspect of reality will be intuitive. There may be some aspects where our best science will give us a characterization and will always scratch our head as we appreciate that it's true but it never feels totally satisfying.”
2016-11-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“more explicit cognitive level that they're true. So a heap of neurons that registers the environment that organizes the information acts on it, including a model of itself. From my point of view, it feels like something. Why that should be true? I don't know. But then again, here I am inside me and almost by definition they're going to be some things about the view of me inside me that me doing the view is not going to be able to articulate because the part that would do the articulating is part of the me trying to explain it. So I don't think there are a lot of cases where we're some cases where human intuition hits a wall and this is one of them, the nature of time. What could have been before the Big Bang if that was the beginning of everything? How can the universe be either finite or infinite? There's no reason to...”
2016-11-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“gravitate toward a view that sometimes has been credited to David Hume. Colin McGuinness is the contemporary philosopher who has kind of made it most prominent, sometimes I think mysteriously misleadingly called mysterianism. Tom Nagel in his seven article, What Is It Like To Be A Bat whose title captures the essence of the problem, speculated in that article along the lines that I'm suggesting, namely there may just be some facts about the universe that are true and will never be satisfied that we intuitively understand them, not because there is some mystery in the sense of undiscovered scientific principle, but just that our very way of grasping reality might make certain things puzzling to us, even though we know”
2016-11-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We know from neuroscience that there is no aspect of consciousness that does not have some physical correlate. There's no ESP, there's no life after death, there's no mysterious action at a distance. It's all information processing and neurons. Why it should feel like something to me to be that network of neurons. I don't think we have a satisfying answer to, and it may not be a scientific puzzle at all. There are some philosophers who claim that it just isn't a coherent intellectual question at all. Dan Dennett being the most famous. For some people, this is a kind of escape hatch from materialism and a way to bring back some notion of the soul. The problem there is that you'd expect the mind to have some kind of non-material powers, which it does not have. I tend to”
2016-11-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. I mean, but those are two, you could have subjective experience of redness and sourness and warmth and so on without it including some concept of yourself. And conversely, you could imagine an intelligent system, a robot, say, where there's no one home, where it monitors its own state, it presents itself in certain ways, and, at least as far as we know, it's not actually feeling anything. Of course, we don't know it, and that may be the key. philosophical problem of sentience or qualia or sometimes called the hard problem of consciousness, I think might ultimately be a quirk of our own way of analyzing the world, that is the mind reflecting on itself is naturally going to be puzzled by some aspects of itself.”
2016-11-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I would distinguish certainly the self-concept, self-knowledge from the issue of subjective experience. And people often use the word consciousness to refer to both of these phenomena, namely self-consciousness or self-knowledge on the one hand and subjectivity or the qualitative nature of consciousness qualia, what it is like to feel something or taste something on the other. I think those are two different things.”
2016-11-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, the blood, of course, suffuses all of our tissues. You can't draw a dotted line around it. It's not like the rump roast and the flank steak of the supermarket cow display. And likewise, the mind can have a specialization and structure and different components without them literally being independent. So I think John Height, I would agree with John Height, that there are different mindsets, there are different faculties, there are different ways in which we can analyze the same set of events and that a lot of political disagreement consists of what frame of mind, if you want, what module you use to analyze a particular issue. So you've got to acknowledge the complexity, the multiplicity of the mind, even if you don't subscribe to the strict metaphor of modules.”
2016-11-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, see, modules never quite seemed like the best metaphor. I think there is structure or specialization. I don't think the mind is spam. I don't think it's just a home. I don't think we just have a homogeneous neural network in the skull. I think there is some organization. The problem with the module metaphor is that as soon as they are snapping components with very limited channels of communication between them, I think that's too strong, but I think it is reasonable to say that there are different faculties, to use an old-fashioned word, to choose a different metaphor. I think it may have been Chomsky who proposed that the mind is like a biological system made out of organs and tissues, where when I was in high school, I was taught, for example, that the blood was an organ.”
2016-11-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Well, the metaphor of the module comes from my former colleague Jerry Fodor, a philosopher and psycholinguist. And it comes in different versions. You had Howard Gardner proposing a theory of multiple intelligences. You have evolutionary psychologists proposing the metaphor of the mind is a Swiss army knife. Now it's more like a smartphone with a bunch of different apps. I think that I do agree these can all be opposed to a view of the mind that would just have a theory of everything, that there's just one principle. It's all Bayesian statistics or it's just the law of operant conditioning. How about all just...”
2016-11-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“and that that set of abilities would be what I would call, if I use the term universal grammar. And there are commonalities across the world's languages that come from the fact that language is created anew every generation by the minds of the children who construct it out of the data that they get from their parents and peers.”
2016-11-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It didn't proceed in the ordinary direction of kind of making the theory more precise, more testable. So with that caveat, in mind, I think there is such a thing as, and you could call it universal grammar, I think that in the following sense, that the child is biased to analyze the speech that he or she hears in particular ways, it does not simply record sentences verbatim. I mean, that's the memory half of the language system, but the algorithmic or computational or rule governed half looks for, tries to pull out combinatorial rules from the speech stream, that there are certain kinds of rules and elements that the child is To look for”
2016-11-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's not easy to pin down what the hypothesis is, partly because Chomsky himself revises his theory every decade or so, kind of a principle of Mao's continuous revolution. Never let people settle into any kind of comfortable consensus. So it's a moving target. Also, as you say, it was neither specified in a precise way nor field tested against a, say, a data set of language variation, which I think is unfortunate in terms of ordinary scientific practice. Linguistics is an eccentric field in some ways, partly because it was so polarized by a charismatic figure and his opponents that”
2016-11-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No shrink and stink. And admittedly, it would have been hard to have a movie called Honey I Shrank the Kids instead of Honey I Shrunk the Kids. But in my style manual, the sense of style I recommend hanging on to them. I think they're nice to have that three-way distinction because English conjugation is already so kind of depauperate, so degenerate that it's nice to preserve what distinctions that we have.”
2016-11-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, right. Yeah, a boat has not been in common usage for a few centuries. That's one of those that dropped out. Like Kid is the past tense of chideboat. Jim, right? Yes, Chitten, or Hulp is the past tense of help. Some of them survive in dialects in Appalachia, in remote parts of the British Isles, forms that were in use a couple of hundred years ago may have resisted the erosion for reasons that are completely obscure, partly capricious. But yeah, I like them. I like one distinction that is vanishing that I think is said is the three-way distinction in verbs like sync sank sunk stink stank stunk shrink shrink shrunk where the shrank and the stank are giving way to the parsiable form. No shrank and stink.”
2016-11-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I like the irregular. I'd like to see more of them. And it is sad when we lose. And occasionally a new one gets a toehold in the language like Snuck, for example, is about 120 years old. It came in on the analogy of Dig Doug and”
2016-11-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And there are almost unpronounceable regular words like sixths or edit, where because you're sticking an extra bit on the end of a word, you're actually messing up the nice contour of a standard word in the language. And that's another one of the tensions that over the course of the history of the language will kind of shape the balance of regular and irregular forms. So that is Hayekian in the sense that no one planned the language to be optimal in satisfying one criterion. There are trade-offs, there are multiple tugs, pushes and pulls, and as speakers, millions of speakers make little adjustments as they use the language, as kids learn the language. The language itself spontaneously evolves with some balance.”
2016-11-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The drain is prettier. It is prettier. And that's one of the reasons that irregular verbs do stay in the language. And one of the reasons that often lyricists and poets and novelists will prefer the irregular to the regular when there's a choice, strided versus strode, strove versus strved, hove versus heaved, is that they're good words. They actually fit the phonological template for a standard word in the language, the kind of sound that you would use for a nickname or a common word. And they are more euphonious because they aren't assembled in a cludy way from the verb stem and this bit of Detroit is hanging on the end, this ED or S, this suffix, which is serviceable. It allows you to convey a message, but it makes the sound of the word itself a bit clunky.”
2016-11-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Declines in frequency and verbs become more or less fashionable for all kinds of reasons, then you could have a generation that never successfully masters it. They'll default to the all-purpose add ED rule, and then the verb will go from irregular to regular for that generation and all subsequent generations. And so you've got an erosion of the stock of irregular verbs as they get filtered through the minds of children memorizing them, where it's the less frequent ones that tend to fall out of the language.”
2016-11-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know how well that analysis would work across a range of zones of irregularity. So it is certainly true that irregular verbs tend to be common, which is kind of the bane of the language learner. You learn Spanish or French and all of the words that you use all the time. You've got to memorize the conjugations. And I think the reason for that is I might even invoke Darwin more than Hayek, namely that in the generation to generation transmission process of an irregular verb, an irregular verb has to be memorized because by definition there is no rule behind it. The only way you know that the past tense have come as came is that you hear everyone else use came. Since memory thrives on frequency, the more often hear something, the better you remember it. If any verb”
2016-11-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We can memorize a more or less independent word to convey the idea like struck or sang, or we can apply an algorithm to say something in the past tense add ed to the end, and then we get walk walked. And because of the peculiarities of the history of a language, you can have that labor divided between the rule system, the algorithmic system, and the memory system, and it's the tension between those two systems that give rise to a lot of the quirkiness of language, including English irregular verbs.”
2016-11-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The word duck doesn't look like a duck or walk like a duck or quack like a duck, but I can use it to get you to think the thought of a duck because we and everyone in this room has memorized a pairing between that sound and that meaning. We don't just blurt out words, but we also combine them into phrases and sentences using rules that allow you to predict or compute the meaning of a combination from the meaning of the parts and the way that they're arranged. Those are the two mechanisms that make language possible. But there are some kinds of meanings where they can compete over which system expresses a particular concept. In the case of regularity irregularity, we have two different ways of conveying the concept and action that took place in the past or in the case of plurals like mouse, mice, and rat rats, two ways of talking about more than one thing.”
2016-11-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it taps two of the mechanisms that make intelligence possible. I mean, why would I spend a good chunk of my career studying the minutiae of irregular verbs? I do love language. I love linguistic detail for its own sake, but I chose that topic because I thought it shed light on bigger issues of cognitive organization. So why do we have 165 or so quirky exceptions like stride, strode, come, circum, sing, sang, go went, and so on? It just seems there could be no rhyme or reason behind it. I think it's just a consequence of the fact that we memorize words, and that's one of the two mechanisms behind language. We store by brute force wrote memory arbitrary pairings between a sound and a meaning.”
2016-11-02 · Conversations with Tyler · Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source