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The Stuff of Thought

Explore The Stuff of Thought by Steven Pinker: 18 Hacker News mentions from 16 participants in 2007-02-22–2026-11-01. Read original excerpts, compare opinions and save this book.

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The Stuff of Thought
Steven Pinker
Mind & Personal Growth

The Stuff of Thought

18 mentions · 16 participants · 10 recommenders

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Mmajor4x
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Ssradman
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VvanderZwan
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VvanderZwan
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Xxapata
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Mmidas007
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Ppfedor
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Ffive18pm
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UUmofomia
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Jjseliger
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Ggiardini
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… rather than merely "DNS" (but NOT in the title!). I find that somewhat distracting. Examples: " It's hard to observe the DNS..." "Using the DNS is often compared to..." When should "the DNS" ("the domain name system") become "DNS"? Should it? I'm currently reading: Steven Pinker's "The Stuff of Thought". My apologies for unshouldering this heavy linguistic burden.

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Aarijo
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Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan - Nassim Nicholas Taleb The (Mis)behavior of Markets - Benoit Mandelbrot The Stuff of Thought - Steven Pinker The Logic of Scientific Discovery - Karl Popper The Four Steps to Epiphany - Steven G. Blank

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Ffburnaby
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Steven Pinker discusses this topic in his books: - "The Language Instinct" covers it in detail - "The Stuff of Thought", in which he pretty much responds directly to this article. I definitely side with his views on this one, though it's too complicated to discuss here, and he does too good a job not to recommend the read (which is why I'm pointing to his books!).

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Aandreyf
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…art of it. I've read Lakoff, and second your recommendation to anyone interested in this stuff. I'd also recommend Pinker's "Stuff of Thought" ( http://www.amazon.com/dp/0143114247/ ) for this topic. AI will never come from digital machines If you consider AI as limited to human cognition, sure. I don't think it's anyone's goal to clone human cognition, however - humans are full of biases, survival instincts, tribal intuitions, etc. Then I think we can agree that a subset of human cognition could also be very interesting, and I imagine the subset of cognition which can be "hoisted" without an embodied mind is quite significant. For example, I think we can achieve the level of cognition of congenial deafblindness (those born without vision and hearing), which is pretty extensive.

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Mmdemare
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…k a question to Cyberdyne Customers. Why is the last form incorrect? What rules apply here? If you're interested in questions like this, I can recommend Steven Pinker's "The Stuff of Thought" ( http://www.amazon.com/Stuff-Thought-Language-Window-Nature/d... )

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Nnonrecursive
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I've read a lot of Steven Pinker's books, and they were all enjoyable. The ones I've read include: The Language Instinct How the Mind Works The Blank Slate The Stuff of Thought

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Rrussell
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Steven Pinker pretty convincingly demolished S-W (for me) in "The Stuff of Thought". He argues that there is an abstract linguistic framework upon which the concepts in a language are built, things like content-locatives, container-locatives, causatives, and much more. Recommended book.

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Ppfedor
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…s even an almost one-to-one mapping between individual sentences. To anyone interested in the relations between the language and thinking, I recommend an excellent book "The Stuff of Thought" by Steven Pinker. One chapter is devoted to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, more specifically, to debunking it.

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