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Article: Speaking your mind.(Book review)
- Article from:
- The American Conservative
- Article date:
- October 8, 2007
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2007 The American Conservative LLC. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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[The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature Steven Pinker, Viking, 484 pages]
BACK IN 1854, English mathematician George Boole published a book entitled An Investigation of the Laws of Thought. The objects of his inquiry, Boole tells us, were "the fundamental laws of those operations of the mind by which reasoning is performed." He sought to mathematize those laws and hoped, incidentally, to gather "some probable intimations concerning the nature and constitution of the human mind." Looking back on Boole's work a half-century later, Bertrand Russell sniffed, "If his book had really contained the laws of thought, it was curious that no-one should ...