note I have a PhD in Cognitive Science. In my dissertation, I spend about a chapter and

a half fairly but superlatively sighting you and saying why I think you're wrong, so. For

the record every time Steven and I have argued he is being right, and I'm sure it was the

case this time as well. Steven is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard,

I believe. Is that roughly correct? He recently devolved. He was at MIT for many years, but

that's okay just to make it shorter. I asked Steven what he wanted me to say if anything

in particular and he wants me to definitely call out two things. One, well, and he wanted

me to call out one thing, which is that he was listed by Time Magazine as one of the

most 100 Most Influential People of All Time, which I find fairly creepy. But Steven wanted

me to mention that he appeared on Colbert and didn't suck. And with that it's a great,

great, great honor to introduce one of the fathers of the field of actually understanding

how human mind works, Steven Pinker. >> PINKER: Thank you so much. It's a real

pleasure and honor to be here. This old wood cut of the story of the blind man and the

elephant is a reminder that any complex subject can be studied in many ways. And that is certainly

true for a subject as complex as human nature. Anthropology can study universal patterns

of the belief and behavior across the world's societies as well as the ways in which they

defer. Biology can document how the process of evolution selected the genes that helped

to wire the brain. Psychology, my own field, can get people to disclose their foibles in

laboratory studies, and even fiction can illuminate human nature by showing the universal themes

and plots that obsess people in their myths and stories. This afternoon, I'm going to

give you the view from language: what kind of insight we can gain into thought, emotion

and social relations from words and how we use them. I'll talk about grammar as a window

into thought, swearing as a window into emotion, and innuendo as a window into social relationships.

And in each case, I'll start with a puzzle in language show how it reveals a much deeper

feature of the human mind using specific examples from English, the language of which all of

us are familiar. But examples that have close counterparts in many languages and that follow

an overall logic that can be found in all languages. So let's begin with language as

a window into thought. And the puzzle I will start off with comes from a delightful book

by Richard Lederer called "Crazy English" which has the following passage: "You have

to marvel at the unique lunacy of a language where a house can burn up as it burns down,

and in which you fill in a form by filling it out. Why is it called 'after dark' when

it is really after light? Things that we claim are underwater and underground are surrounded

by, not under the water and ground." So the first puzzle is why languages talk about the

physical world in such crazy ways. And the answer I'm going to suggest is that there

is a theory of physics embedded in our language: A concept of space in our prepositions, a

concept of matter in our nouns, a concept of space in our propositions, a concept of

a matter in our nouns, a concept of time in our tenses, and a concept of causality in

our verbs. That understanding the intuitive physics in language helps to explain not just

the quirks of language itself but the mental models that humans use to make sense of their

lives. So, let's start off with space. How do we locate an object relative to a place,

a reference location or coordinate frame? Well, you can imagine an ideal hypothetical

system of prepositions where every proposition was composed of six syllables: one each for

distance in the up-down, left-right and front-back direction, and then one each for the angle

of pitch, roll and yaw. Needless to say, no language uses this system. Instead, location

is digitized. Languages make distinctions like near versus far, on versus off, in versus

out, on versus under. Which is why Groucho could say, "If I could held you any closer,

I'd be on the other side of you." Also scale is relative. You can use the same spatial

term across to refer to an ant walking across a hand or a bus driving across the country.

And the interpretation of the word "there" will defer in a sentence like put it there,

depending on whether the person uttering it is a crane operator or a brain surgeon. Also

shape is schematic. In reality, all objects are 3-dimentional arrangements of matter.

But language idealizes them as essentially 1-deminsional, 2-dimensional, or 3-dimensional.

So we've got a line which courses a 1-dimentional, but also a road which is conceived up as 1-dimentional

with a little width flashing it out, and a beam which is also conceived as 1-dimentional

but with a finite thickness flashing it out. In contrast, we've got a surface which is

2-dimentional or a slab also construed as 2-dimentional with some finite thickness.

This idealized geometry governs are used of prepositions. So, for example the preposition

"along" requires an essentially 1-dimentional object. You can say the ant walked along the

line or along the road or along the beam, but not the ant walked along the plate or

along the ball which sounds a little anomalous. It governs the way we apply nouns to shape.

So we don't refer to a wire as a cylinder as a long, skinny cylinder, nor a CD is a

cylinder, a short fat one even though geometrically speaking that's what they are. But because

we ignore certain dimensions as insubstantial and idealize the shape as one of the remaining

dimensions. And I think it goes into our overall sense of shape, what we conceive of as similar

to what else, as when a child says, "I don't want a little crayon box. I want the box that

looks like audience." That is not the eight box of eight crayon box of Crayola, but the

sixty-four Crayon box where the crayons are arranged in pitched rows like the balcony

of an auditorium. A fourth quirk is that the boundaries of object are treated like objects

themselves. And this is something you may have heard of, heard from Ray Jackendoff,

my colleague who I understood stands--spoke here recently. We have words like "edge" which

refer to the 1-D boundary of a 2-D surface. And so, we could say the ant walked along

the edge of the plate, even if we can't see the ant walked along the plate. Or, and word

like "end" which is the boundary either of a 1-D ribbon or a 2-D beam, as long it's essentially

1-D. And you could even cut the end off a ribbon, which geometrically speaking ought

to be impossible but we conceive of the end as if it was an object itself. That explains

the mystery of why we say, "underwater" and "underground" when the thing is surrounded

by water or ground. It's because the word "water" or "ground" can refer to the 2-D surface

of the 3-D volume, not just the 3-D volume itself, and you can be under that surface.

So why is the language of space so crazy? Well, I think the main reason is that preposition

divide up space into regions with different causal consequences. And the clearest illustration

of that comes from a story that I clipped out at the Boston Globe a few years ago: Woman

rescued from frozen pond dies. A woman who fell through thin ice Sunday and was under

water for 90 minutes died yesterday. The Lincoln Fire Department said a miscommunication between

the caller who reported the accident and the dispatcher significantly delayed her rescue.

The rescue workers believed that a woman had fallen on the ice, not through it, and that

left the rescuers combing the woods to find the scene of the accident. So that digital

distinction between "on" and "through" in this case was literally a matter of life and

death even though it involved just a couple of feet in analog space. Let me turn to substance

in language. Language distinguishes stuff from things. Indeed, language taxonomises

matter into four categories. There are countable things as an apple; masses as in much apple

sauce; plurals as in many apples; and collections as in a dozen apples. These aren't so much

different kinds of matter as different frames or attitudes in looking at matter which is

why we can look at the same mass of little rocks and think of it either as pebbles, a

collection of individuals or as gravel, an amorphous stuff, and why we have the cliche

about the person who can't see the forest for the trees. In Crazy English, Lederer asks,

"Why does a man with hair on his head have more hair than a man with hairs on his head?"

Why is the language of substance so crazy? Well, words for matter allow people to agree

on how to package and quantify the continuous material world. In an obvious context in which

we see that is at the supermarket where chunks of matter have to be transacted and they can

be priced per item, which is what a count noun does; by weight, which is what a mass

noun does; or by the dozen, which is what a collective noun does. And in fact, that

same mindset that we apply to packaging matter in the physical world, we also apply to abstract

concepts. So just as we have the distinction between pebbles and gravel, we have a distinction

between many opinions as if they were discrete object and much advice as if it was an amorphous

mass. We do the same thing to happenings in time. We package the flow of experience in

the same way that we package the continuum of matter. For example, let's say I would

ask you, how many events took place in the morning of 9/11 in New York City? One answer

is there was one event, because a single plan was executed. You can demarcate events by

the realization of a plan. Another answer is two, because two buildings were destroyed.

You can demarcate time by salient physical events. This might seem like the height of

pointless semantic nitpicking or hairsplitting, but in fact it is a question with consequences

because the lease holder for the World Trade Center had an insurance policy that entitled

them to 3.5 billion dollars per destructive event. If 9/11 comprised one event, he stood

to gain three and half billion. If it comprised two events, he stood to gain seven billion.

And in a number of court cases tied up for many years, the lawyers debated this issue

in semantics. So if anyone says, "How much is a semantic distinction worth?" The answer

is $3.5 billion. Well, this brings me to the language of time. And this illustration reminds

us the time in many ways is conceived like space, and happenings are conceived like matter

as if there's a kind of "time-stuff" that could be chopped into the equivalent of objects,

except we call them events. We see this in the many spatial metaphors for time like "the

deadline is coming," or "we're approaching the deadline." We see it in kind of errors

that children make like, "Can I have any reading behind the dinner?" That is, after the dinner

as if events were stretched out in front of us. And we see it in the semantics of verb

tense. Now, verb tense, in many ways follows a semantics that is parallel to the semantics

of space and matter in the case of prepositions and nouns. First, time is digitized, and second

time is relative. That is, no language has tenses for precise intervals of time like

an hour, nor for locations in time like November 7, 2007. Instead, location in time is trichotomized

in English into three regions to find relative to the moment of speaking. An event can be

located in the specious present, an interval of about three seconds in which we don't make

temporal distinctions. It's the basic unit of nouns. This is the--specious present is

a term from William James, and it refers to an interval of time that embraces a deliberate

action like a handshake, a quick decision like how long you alight on a channel while

channel surfing and decide whether to click again, to the decay of unrehearsed short-term

memory to a line of poetry, and to a musical motif like the opening notes of Beethoven's

Fifth which we don't perceive as just one note, one note, one note but rather as a coherent

motif. Then there's the past stretching backwards indefinitely. So, every event from four seconds

ago back to the big bang is treated as identical by the English language, which is why Groucho

could say, "I've had a wonderful evening, but this wasn't it." And then, there's the future until eternity,

that is, everything from four seconds from now until the heat death of the universe all

lumped together. There are not only locations in time, what I just referred to, but shapes

in time what linguist call "aspect," that is, how a happening begins, unfolds, and ends.

Shape in time, like shape in space is treated schematically. We conceive of some happenings

as amorphously spread out in time without any crisp beginning or end, such as, the verb,

"to shake." We conceive of other events as momentaneous or a punctate, such as to swat

a fly. And then, still other events like to cross the street have no crisp beginning,

but are terminated until some goal has been achieved. In this case, you get to the other

side. Now the stretches of time that are defined by verbs can also be mentally packaged. In

the same way, that we can take a noun "beer" which just refers to the stuff generically

and then package it in a unit by use of the word "one" as in one beer, turned a mass noun

into a count noun. You can take an amorphous stretch of time like "shake it" and with the

use of particle like "out" turn it into an accomplishment that ends at a defined boundary

as in "shake it up," that is, shake it until up to completion. Likewise, we can take "wring

it" which is indefinite in terms of when it ends, and give an endpoint with the particle

"out" and say, "wring it out," that is, until it's dry. And that is why, a house can burn

up as it burns down, and you can fill in a form by filling it out. Finally, the boundary

of an event can be treated like an event itself, just as with space. Just as I can cut off

the end of a ribbon which is geometrically impossible, I can start the end of my talk

which is temporally impossible if you think of end as simply the instant of termination.

Why is it called "after dark" when it is really after light? Well, dark is--refers not just

to the interval of darkness but to the boundary of the interval of darkness, and it's exactly

isomorphic to why in the language of space we can say "underwater" when the thing is

surrounded by water. Why is the language of time so crazy? Well, we identify locations

in time coarsely, because stretches of time relative to the moment of speaking have different

consequences for knowledge and action. And a fancy-shmancy way of putting it would be