The Language Instinct

by Steven Pinker

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Pinker argues that language is a biological adaptation - an 'instinct' shaped by natural selection - rather than a cultural invention, synthesizing Chomsky's universal grammar with Darwinian evolutionary psychology. He marshals evidence from child language acquisition, pidgins and creoles, brain lesions, and cross-linguistic universals to defend an innate mental grammar while arguing against Chomsky's own scepticism about adaptationist explanations.

Published:: 1994
Pages:: 494

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In the Conversation

In this collection, The Language Instinct references 3 other books and is cited by 2 other books.

It draws on The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker and The Origin of Species.

It’s picked up by Wired for Story: The Writer's Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers from the Very First Sentence and The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century.

Scroll down to read the exact passages where other authors reference this book and what they say about it.

What This Book Draws On

The books Pinker references and why each one mattered to the argument.

Pinker cites Dawkins's Selfish Gene for the gene-centric view of evolution that underpins his argument that language is an adapted biological organ built by natural selection.

References

The Selfish Gene

by Richard Dawkins

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Pinker uses Dawkins's Blind Watchmaker argument about cumulative selection to refute Chomsky's scepticism that natural selection could have produced the language faculty.

References

The Blind Watchmaker

by Richard Dawkins

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Pinker grounds his evolutionary argument in Darwin's Origin of Species, explicitly framing language as an adaptation of the sort Darwin described for 'organs of extreme perfection.'

References

The Origin of Species

by Charles Darwin

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What Other Authors Say About It

The exact passages where other authors bring up “The Language Instinct” and what they take from it.

Cron repeatedly quotes Pinker's argument from The Language Instinct and his later work that fiction is a 'mental catalogue' of survival scenarios our brains are wired to rehearse

Cited in

Wired for Story: The Writer's Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers from the Very First Sentence

by Lisa Cron

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Pinker builds the book's cognitive foundations on his own Language Instinct, using its account of grammar-as-mental-faculty to argue that clear prose aligns with the mind's parsing machinery

Cited in

The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century

by Steven Pinker

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Intellectual Lineage

How ideas flow through the citation network. Ancestors are books this title builds on; descendants are books that build on it.

Builds on (2 layers deep)

Directly cites

The Selfish Gene

The Blind Watchmaker

The Origin of Species

2 steps back

The Extended Phenotype

Influenced

Directly cited by

Wired for Story: The Writer'...

The Sense of Style: The Thin...

Unexpected Connections

Books from completely different categories that share citation overlap with this one. These are the reads you would not find by browsing a single shelf.