What you will get from this article

The answer first. Pinker compares language to a spider’s web. A spider spins not because it studied under a master weaver or has architectural training, but because it has a spider’s brain. Humans acquire language because they have human brains. But he himself admits that the fact that every society has a complex language does not by itself prove an instinct. That is why the next articles’ argument, that children remake language, is needed.

Turning the common view upside down

At the start of chapter 1 Pinker has the reader take in a few short stories (octopus mating, a stain remedy, a soap-opera plot) and marvels that mere words can build precise thoughts in another mind (pp. 15–16). Then he lines up common opinions: language is humanity’s greatest cultural invention, it shapes thought, children learn by copying, falling standards have corrupted grammar. And he says:

Language is not a cultural artifact that we learn the way we learn to tell time or how the federal government works. Instead, it is a distinct piece of the biological makeup of our brains.

The spider’s web

Pinker explains “instinct” through the web (p. 18).

He adds that “there are differences between webs and words, of course,” but urges the reader to see language this way because it helps make sense of the phenomena.

The view implies that language, though unique to humans, is no reason to cut humans off from biology. Pinker cites bats using Doppler sonar and migratory birds navigating by constellations: nature is full of species-specific marvels (p. 19).

Darwin’s 1871 observation

According to Pinker, the first to state the idea of language as a kind of instinct was Darwin himself (The Descent of Man, 1871; p. 19). Darwin says language is unlike brewing or baking: in the babbling of small children we see an instinctive tendency to speak, while no child has an instinctive tendency to brew, bake, or write (p. 20).

To those who think instincts make us “fatal automata,” Pinker offers William James’s argument: humans have all the instincts animals have and many more, and flexible intelligence arises from their competition. So the instinctive nature of thought is precisely what makes it so hard to see that it is an instinct (p. 20).

The universality argument

Chapter 2 opens with first contact in the New Guinea highlands. In 1930 the Australian prospector Michael Leahy met about a million people who had been isolated from the outside world for some forty thousand years. Their “jabbering” was unmistakably language, and eight hundred different languages would be found in those highlands (pp. 25–26).

From this Pinker draws the following.

As a concrete case he takes the applicative in Kivunjo, a language at the foot of Mount Kilimanjaro. It corresponds to English “She baked me a brownie,” but in Kivunjo the verb carries seven prefixes and suffixes, two moods, fourteen tenses, and agrees with nouns of sixteen “genders” (p. 27). “Gender” there means kinds (humans, animals, extended objects, body parts), not male and female.

He also dismisses as a “pernicious illusion” the belief that working-class or less educated people speak a simpler language. Citing Labov’s work, he shows that Black English Vernacular is a complex, rule-governed dialect (pp. 28–31). For example, deleting “be” in BEV follows a rule almost identical to the standard-English contraction rule, so it is systematic, not random laziness (p. 30).

The weakness Pinker admits

This is the most important part of the section. Pinker writes that the ubiquity of complex language is, for many, compelling proof that language is innate, but that to tough-minded skeptics it is no proof at all (p. 31).

The philosopher Putnam’s objection runs:

Pinker does not rebut this head-on. He grants that “language is universal” does not lead to “there is a language instinct,” and says the core of the argument is that “children actually reinvent it, generation after generation” (p. 32).

Summary

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