Why do I curse? Steven fucking Pinker

The impetus for the title of this blog is a book by Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct. Quite simply, I wanted to parody that notion and so I did a search in a thesaurus for the term instinct. I found the search result of gut reaction amusing and the rest is history. Given that one of his first books was the impetus for the title of this blog, I think that it is only fair that I should post about his recent book, The Stuff of Thought, and its subsequent media coverage.

Although I will not buy his book, I want to comment on what he wrote in The New Republic. The problem with Pinker is that his work is so readable. It lulls the reader into to thinking that it's so amusing and interesting it also must be right. Well I'm sorry to shit in your cereal, but he's not. So just a quick disclaimer. Enjoy the book for what it is, a fun read, but don't unequivocally believe him.

The criticism of Pinker is that he is a defender of Chomsky, and thus overly focused on grammar as necessary and sufficient for meaning. His position is obvious in the way he begins the article with a discussion of the classification of curse words. Are they nouns? Verbs? Adverbs? Yes, that is why we curse, because the grammatical category of curse words is so important to the speaker that when he choses to say, You are a fucking idiot. versus You are fucking an idiot. is all up to syntax. Neither the speaker nor the listener need to consult their grammar trees to understand the nuances in meaning between these two utterances. Different contexts dictate their uses and not the analysis of language in a vacuum.

To close on a positive note, a better approach that I believe Pinker could elaborate on in his work is this quote from the section on the work of the biologists Valerie Curtis and Adam Biran,

"Although the strongest component of the disgust reaction is a desire not to eat or touch the offending substance, it's also disgusting to think about effluvia, together with the body parts and activities that excrete them. And, because of the involuntariness of speech perception, it's unpleasant to hear the words for them."

What is the involuntariness of speech perception, and how does it make hearing words unpleasant? There's a chapter in the book, Grounding Cognition, which may point him in the right direction. I just hope he doesn't call it an instinct, or even a gut reaction.