Get Out Wednesday: Steven Pinker @ Town Hall

Famous neo-fro advocate Steven Pinker drops in at Town Hall tomorrow night, 7:30pm. Tickets are just $5. He'll be flogging his new book, The Stuff of Thought. Stuff? What's next, the Lintball of Thought?

The Harvard psychology professor and writer has spent years learning how children acquire language and then writing books about it without cutting the kids in on a single penny: The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate. An unapologetic heathen, Pinker claims the human mind "evolved" by "natural selection" just like other body parts. Rubbing elbows with Chomsky, he argues that language is built on our innate brain structure.

Perhaps it's only to be expected that in addition to discussing the concepts of metaphor, causality, naming, and courtesy -- as organizing tools that people use -- he turns his attention to the "tools" of blasphemy and obscenity. (If you attend, we can assure you the sulfurous odor from Pinker's presence washes out with good old-fashioned lye soap.) Here's William Saletan, writing in the godless New York Times about Pinker's view of metaphor:

Some thinkers worry that this power to frame perceptions can run away with us. In politics, the linguist George Lakoff has warned, “frames trump facts.” In this view, taxes can be depicted as burdens or as membership fees, driving public opinion this way or that. Pinker rejects Lakoff’s ideas, which have become fashionable among Democratic strategists. “Metaphors are generalizations,” he argues. Their implications can be tested against reality. Lakoff’s proposal to reframe taxes as membership fees flunks the test: if you don’t pay your membership fees, you lose your benefits; but if you don’t pay your taxes, you go to jail.