The Canadian psychologist Steven Pinker argues that language is a human instinct, and that people think not in English or Chinese but in a deeper “language of thought” which every language then puts into words. He rejects the strong claim that the language we speak controls how we think, and holds that most differences between peoples’ ways of thinking come from their culture and surroundings, not their grammar. Therapeutic Shamanism agrees that words are not the same as what lies beneath them, and differs from him on the power that words have.
Who is Steven Pinker? #
A cognitive psychologist and writer on language and the mind. He was born in Montreal in 1954, taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and has been Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University since 2003.1 His three best-known books on language are The Language Instinct (1994), Words and Rules (1999) and The Stuff of Thought (2007). The first argued, building on the linguist Noam Chomsky’s work, that the ability to learn language is part of human nature, an instinct shaped by evolution, in more or less the way that spiders know how to spin webs.1 See Who is Noam Chomsky, and what does linguistics say about how language shapes thought?
What does Pinker say about whether language shapes thought? #
That the strong version is wrong. The idea that thought is the same thing as language, he wrote in The Language Instinct, is “wrong, all wrong”, one of the conventional absurdities that everyone believes because they half remember hearing it somewhere. People think in a language of thought, sometimes called ‘mentalese’, which has symbols for concepts and ways of combining them, and learning English or Apache is learning to translate between that inner language and strings of words.2
In The Stuff of Thought he opens the question with a folk tale. The elders of the mythical town of Chelm, short of sour cream for a festival, pass a law that water shall be called sour cream and sour cream water; the town then has plenty of ‘sour cream’ but is short of ‘water’. The joke works, Pinker points out, because everyone knows that people understand reality independently of the words used to describe it, even if many forget it when they start to theorise.3
He does not deny that language affects thought in ordinary ways. Words pass on knowledge, the way something is framed changes how people judge it, and a language gathers words for what its speakers care about. What he denies is the dramatic claim. To show that a language really determines thought, he sets three tests: speakers of one language must find it impossible or very hard to think in a way that comes naturally to speakers of another; the difference must be in real reasoning, not just in impressions; and it must be caused by the language, not by the culture or environment that the language and the thinking both reflect.3
What is his best-known example? #
The Tzeltal. Tzeltal is spoken in the Chiapas region of Mexico by farmers descended from the Maya, and it has no general words for ‘left’ and ‘right’. Speakers describe where things are by the mountain slope that dominates their villages, ‘up-the-slope’, ‘down-the-slope’ and ‘across-the-slope’, even indoors and even for a spoon beside a teacup. The linguist Stephen Levinson’s team found that Tzeltal speakers, asked to copy a row of toys on to a second table after turning round, tended to keep the toys in the same direction relative to the land, where Dutch speakers kept them in the same order relative to their own bodies.4
Pinker reads the result differently. The psychologists Peggy Li, Linda Abarbanell and Anna Papafragou found that when a task called for it, Tzeltal speakers could go either way, using their own bodies or the land as the frame. Another Maya people nearby, speaking Tzotzil, whose language does have relative words for left and right but whose way of life is much the same, arranged the toys just as the Tzeltal speakers did. These farmers spend their lives outdoors on a mountainside, walking up and down it between their fields, and so, for Pinker, “it is the culture and environment, not the language” that makes the difference.4 See What did Sapir and Whorf actually claim about language and thought?
What does language reveal, according to Pinker? #
A shared human nature. In The Stuff of Thought he treats words and grammar as a window on to the concepts beneath them, the ideas of space, time, cause, substance and intention that every mind brings to experience, and he finds that “even our most abstract concepts are understood in terms of concrete scenarios.”5 He also sets out what words cannot do. Language is public and made of separate units, so it “must hide the aspects of our experience that are private and smoothly blended”: our sensations and emotions, our inklings and intuitions, and the way our bodies move.6 And words are not thoughts; for Pinker, much of human wisdom consists of not mistaking one for the other.7
Who disagrees with him? #
Many linguists, from several directions. Nicholas Evans and Stephen Levinson, surveying the world’s languages in 2009, found almost no features that all languages share, and argued that the idea of a single human design for language, which Pinker had illustrated with a Martian scientist who would think all humans speak one language, is a myth; the psychologist Michael Tomasello, writing alongside them, declared universal grammar “dead”. Others, such as the cognitive scientist Asifa Majid, have found that what a language names well depends a lot on the culture that speaks it. See What is the ‘myth of language universals’? and What did Asifa Majid find about how languages name smells and senses?
Pinker has answered in kind. With the linguist Ray Jackendoff he replied to Evans and Levinson in the same journal, agreeing that linguists had been too quick to assume universals, but holding that a survey which looks only at differences is “myopic”, taking for granted everything languages have in common and ignoring all the kinds of language that never occur.8
How does this connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
In the idea that what matters most lies beneath words. Language is largely a middle-worldMiddle-world. Ordinary physical reality together with its energetic layers: the realm of individuality, separation and mixed intentions, and the only realm where harm is possible. “If there is a hell, then it is the middle-world.” Read the full answer thing, a way of labelling, defining and dividing up the world, whilst the Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer is largely beyond it, closer to poetry, painting or music.9 Deep Lower-World journeys are mostly beyond words, experienced through sensations, imagery and metaphor.10 Pinker’s account of what language has to leave out, the private, blended stuff of sensation, feeling and intuition, comes close to this from a quite different starting point, though his concern is ordinary experience and not shamanic reality. See Why are there no words or symbols in the Lower-World?
His case for a shared human nature beneath the differences between cultures also has a counterpart. Shamanic cultures all over the world, however different, share a core of beliefs and practices so consistent that it is almost as if they were innate, hard-wired into us.11 See Who was Michael Harner, and what is core shamanism?
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism see differently? #
On the power of words. Pinker explains word magic, the near-universal sense that a name is part of what it names, so that spells, prayers and curses can act on the world, as a mistake: the link between a sound and a meaning is arbitrary, and he counts magic and prayer among the products of the human habit of “hallucinating causal powers”.12 Shamans are very clear that words have power, in that they shape how we experience reality, and can to some extent shape reality itself.13
The difference shows in practice. Because shamanism is a co-created process, how a person thinks and the language they use shape what they meet in a journey. It helps to think “Next, Bear appeared” and not “Next, a bear appeared”, because ‘a’, ‘the’ or ‘my’ reduces Animal to animal, making the encounter less Lower-World and more middle-world; a small change of wording has a profound effect on what happens in journeys and on how authentic they are.14 Pinker’s townsfolk of Chelm cannot turn water into sour cream by renaming it, and in ordinary reality that holds; in the co-created shamanic realms, what something is called helps decide what is met. See What part do silence, words and names play?
