Dear Steven Pinker
Thanks for a very enjoyable lecture. (17mins 41 secs)
You clearly know more about language than I will ever want to know!
My problem is with what I sense is an assumption beneath the lecture.
To me the assumption feels something like this. Human ‘internality’ is mind. Mind is concepts. Concepts are very closely related to items of language.
An alternative is this – internality is conciousness and movements in consciousness. Perhaps ‘heart-mind’, ‘xin’ in Chinese is a better label – so that we don’t pin feelings to inferiority and inferiority to particular groups. e.g. women or ‘new men’.
Heart-mind itself can be seen much deeper than concepts or feelings – the stillness beyond the agitation of the mind as in Tolle’s ‘Stillness Speaks‘
Perhaps then we could say that ultimately language is the means by which we (might/could/should) come to understand that human reality is beyond language?
Soul Needs - One Garden 