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Tagged with “steven pinker” (4) activity chart

  1. Evolving English — Steven Pinker

    Steven Pinker discusses the interplay of language and the mind and how psychological processes have shaped the English language.

    The best stuff is about using Google’s enormous database of word-from-books to track how language evolves over time, in particular the gradual erosion of irregular forms in English (keep/kept and drive/drove) in favour of their regular counterparts (beep/beeped and jive/jived).

    Which you WILL want to follow up with a visit to Google Ngrams - http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/ - essentially Google Trends but with all written words in the English language for the last 1,000 years (instead of all search terms in the last ten years).

    Mind-blowing.

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    —Huffduffed by boxman 2 years ago

  2. The Stuff of Thought: Language as a window into human nature

    With Steven Pinker, Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University.

    Chair: Matthew Taylor, chief executive, RSA

    For Steven Pinker, the brilliance of the mind lies in the way it uses just two processes to turn the finite building blocks of our language into infinite meanings. The first is metaphor: we take a concrete idea and use it as a stand-in for abstract thoughts. The second is combination: we combine ideas according to rules, like the syntactic rules of language, to create new thoughts out of old ones.

    How can a choice of metaphors start a war, impeach a president, or win an election? How does a mind that evolved to think about rocks and plants and enemies think about love and physics and democracy? How do we control the amount of information that we absorb? And what good does this actually do us?

    Join Steven Pinker as he tries to answer these questions and many more, unlocking the hidden workings of our thoughts, our emotions and our social relationships and showing us that language really can tell us unexpected and fascinating things about ourselves.

    From: http://www.thersa.org/events/audio-and-past-events/the-stuff-of-thought-language-as-a-window-into-human-nature

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    —Huffduffed by boxman 3 years ago

  3. NYPL: Adam Gopnik with Steven Pinker - How Far Can Darwin Take Us?

    Adam Gopnik, author of Angels & Ages, A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln and Modern Life and Steven Pinker, author of The Blank Slate and many other works, will discuss a fundamental question: How far can Darwin take us as a guide to why we are the way we are?

    Both outspoken appreciators of Darwin, Adam Gopnik and Steven Pinker will compare their visions—perhaps complementary, perhaps contrasting—of what Darwin’s legacy is on the two hundredth anniversary of his birth.

    http://www.nypl.org/research/chss/pep/pepdesc.cfm?id=5219

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    —Huffduffed by boxman 3 years ago

  4. Steven Pinker: A brief history of violence

    Steven Pinker charts the decline of violence from Biblical times to the present, and argues that, though it may seem illogical and even obscene, given Iraq and Darfur, we are living in the most peaceful time in our species’ existence.

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    —Huffduffed by boxman 4 years ago