How the mind works. Steven Pinker. Allen Lane: W. W. Norton, 1998. Pp.660.

Abstract

Steven Pinker has written a very lengthy new book that, as the dust cover informs the reader, attempts to do for the rest of the mind what he did for language in his 1994 bestseller, The Language Instinct. What The Language Instinct did was to expand on Pinker and Bloom's (1990) thesis that language is an evolved system, an intricately designed set of mechanisms that must have been shaped by natural selection. What The Language Instinct did not do was provide a specific thesis about how language actually evolved. That Pinker did not provide a theory of actual language origins in his 1994 book is not a weakness. Indeed, Pinker's work has provided a useful rubric for subsequent linguistic theorizing (cf. Hurford, Studdert-Kennedy, & Knight, 1998). It is this directional strategy that also appears to be at the heart of “how the mind works.” Critically, Pinker wants the reader to think about three main ideas (see the interview with Pinker in The Evolutionist): (1) computation; (2) evolution; and (3) specialization.