Chapter 3 Language

Whether we’re talking about philosophers like Aristotle, Plato, Hume, Locke, psychologists like Freud and Skinner, modern day approaches that computational analysis or cognitive nerve science, evolutionary theory, cross cultural psychology, if you can’t explain language, you’re not in the game.

What do I mean by language? And when I talk about language, at least for this beginning phase, I mean systems like English and Dutch and French and Navajo and Mandarin and so on. Now, you could use language in other ways. You could use the word language to describe animal communication or music or any communication system you want.

• The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker, which is a classic introduction to the science of language.
• The Power of Babel by John McWhorter, which takes a somewhat different approach than Pinker and looks more at language as a historical artifact, how it changes over time. Less psychology, less evolution, but a lot more history, and they’re both wonderful books.