The Stuff of Thought

Steven Pinker's fifth science book analyzes language as a cognitive tool and asks what words, grammar and metaphor reveal about how people think and feel. Pinker holds that speech always does two jobs at once, conveying a message and managing the relationship between speaker and listener, which is why a polite request to pass the salt comes out as a musing. He examines what swearing shows about emotion and innuendo about relationships, how prepositions and tenses encode human ideas of space and time, and what baby names say about families and society. One chapter asks whether the September 11 attacks were one event or two, a distinction with billions of insurance dollars at stake. It appeared in 2007.

Dominic Steil, chief technology officer of Dapps Inc, said in an interview that it was one of the books that most shaped him.