In an interview on Autism and Asperger Syndrome

Your third choice is The Language Instinct by Stephen Pinker.

This is a popular science book from a highly respected cognitive scientist. He took one part of the mind, language, and looked at it from every angle. It’s a really wonderful example of what you can do: take research into something as fundamental to human nature as language and make it accessible to a wide audience.

He looks at how infants develop language, whether other animals are capable of understanding language, how the brain produces and processes language, how we use language in the media…he looks at it from every vantage point. It was, justifiably, a very popular and successful book. Language is at the core of many of the humanities, yet here was a scientist addressing it and bringing into contact, for example, people who work in literature with people who work in brain scanning.

In an interview on Language and the Mind

On to Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct, How the Mind Creates Language, which is incredibly famous. Is the virtue of this book that linguistics is an incredibly complicated subject and Pinker is somehow able to make its findings accessible to the lay reader?

There are two achievements in this book. One is to smuggle in Linguistics 101 into a popular book, which is just fantastic. It’s a fun read, he’s a really engaging writer. If you finish this book, you’ll never see language in the same way again. I felt that way when I picked it up about ten years ago – it set me on the path that led me to write my own book. At the same time, he also smuggles in his own argument about the nature of language, and the title says it all. He’s one of the camp that thinks there is this thing called ‘the language instinct’ that is hard-wired into the brain. Languages are fundamentally similar around the world, they show too many characteristics in common. There are too many logical ways to design a language that you could use, but no human natural language does. So his conclusion is that we have, through evolution, developed a language instinct. That is not something every linguist believes by any means. There’s a big disagreement over it.

But then Pinker also gives you all this fantastic stuff about how language really works in the first place. Anybody who is really curmudgeonly, who says: ‘Uggh. Language. Everybody I know speaks and writes like an idiot around me!’ He really turns that on its head and shows what a miracle the human language really is.

Does he, like you do in your book, go after the sticklers and grammar grouches, people like Lynn Truss, author of Eats, Shoots & Leaves, and others who bemoan the decline of language?

This book came out in 1994 so he’s taking aim at a different generation of sticklers, but yes, he also shows they don’t know what they’re talking about. Most grammar grouches have a fairly authoritarian approach to language. They have this idea that somewhere, somehow, there is somebody making rules, or that there are just hard and fast rules that have to be enforced, and people humiliated out of violating them.

Is language not about rules, then?

Pinker would argue that language is absolutely about rules. He wrote another book called Words and Rules which is all about how the brain processes language. It turns out that you know all these rules but you don’t even know that you know them. They are your internal language processing device. And to study that is much more fascinating than whether or not you should begin a sentence with ‘however’, which some people think you shouldn’t be able to do.

For example, Pinker shows that if you put the word ‘fuckin’ in the middle of a word – for instance, if you want to say: ‘That’s fan-fuckin’-tastic!’ You have to put the word fuckin’ in a certain place in the word. It goes before a certain stressed syllable. You can’t say: ‘That’s fantast-fuckin-ic!’ – and no English speaker would ever say that. Everybody knows it. They have this rule in their brain, but nobody knows they have it. Teasing out that kind of thing is fascinating and so much more interesting than: ‘Oh my God! That person used ‘whom’ wrong…’

We also have to accept that language changes over time, don’t we? When I was at school, it was drummed into me that ‘disinterested’ meant ‘unbiased’. But whenever I hear somebody say disinterested around me now, they mean ‘uninterested’. Wouldn’t Pinker argue that instead of correcting people, I should accept that disinterested now means uninterested?

I wouldn’t say that. The argument of descriptive linguists is often a bit caricatured by opponents, who say: ‘Oh, you’re saying there are no rules at all, you can just say whatever you like.’ It’s not really true. I’m sure Pinker uses ‘disinterested’ like you do. In traditional standard English usage, it means impartial and it has that role. There haven’t been enough people who have changed the meaning of the word, that it definitely now means only ‘bored’ or ‘not interested’. The majority of English usage still favours disinterested in the traditional sense, even though a lot of people make that mistake. It takes a big majority of the community of speakers over time to get the whole meaning of a word to change so that you can finally really say: ‘OK, this word has changed in meaning.’ I wouldn’t say we’ve reached that in the specific case of disinterested.

But we have with ‘silly’. What did ‘silly’ mean in the past?

It used to mean innocent. Words used to mean completely different things, almost their opposite, if you look back in their history.

In an interview on Empathy

Let’s move on to your first choice, Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct, which looks at how children learn language.

I chose this book because I thought it was a model example of a scientist taking quite a complicated area of science – the nature of language – and communicating it to a wider public in a very accessible way. He looks at it from every angle. He puts language on the table, as it were, and looks at it from the perspective of not just linguistics, but neuroscience as well – that is, how the brain is capable of generating language or understanding it. He also looks at evolution, whether human beings are the only species that have language, and how a language development can go wrong in different people.

How does that tie in with empathy, because I would have thought that language is a very important tool in empathising with people?

Yes, there is a strong link between language and empathy, but I think you can have empathy without language. The clearest example of that can be seen if you look at typically developing children, even before they have got language. Towards the end of the first year of life they are very actively looking at people’s faces and emotional expressions and they are modifying their behaviour based on how they see other people are reacting. They interpret other people’s faces. All of that is happening before a child even has words.

This is a problem with some people who are autistic because they can’t read people’s facial expressions.

Yes, one of the earliest signs of autism is just at that same time, between 12 and 24 months old. They are not looking at faces as much, and even if they are they are not reacting to people’s emotional expressions in the usual way. And that may be even if language is developing. These give us clues that language and empathy are independent. But you are absolutely right that once we have language it can facilitate the development of empathy because once you can understand what people are saying, their words can also be used as evidence of what they are thinking and feeling. It gives you a second source of information and helps you put yourself in their shoes and imagine what is going on in their mind. So you can imagine, in a typical child, that empathy really takes off in the early years, not just because of the empathy circuit in the brain developing, but also because language is facilitating it.