Language Instinct' Debate [Hardcover]

Geoffrey Sampson (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0826473849 | ISBN-13: 978-0826473844 | Publication Date: April 1, 2005 | Edition: Revised Edition

When it was first published in 1997, Geoffrey Sampson's Educating Eve was described as the definitive response to Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct and Noam Chomsky's nativism. In this revised and expanded new edition, Sampson revisits his original arguments in the light of fresh evidence that has emerged since the original publication. Since Chomsky revolutionized the study of language in the 1960s, it has increasingly come to be accepted that language and other knowledge structures are hard-wired in our genes. According to this view, human beings are born with a rich structure of cognition already in place. But people do not realize how thin the evidence for that idea is. The 'Language Instinct' Debate examines the various arguments for instinctive knowledge, and finds that each one rests on false premisses or embodies logical fallacies. The structures of language are shown to be purely cultural creations. With a new chapter entitled 'How People Really Speak' which uses corpus data to analyse how language is used in spontaneous English conversation, responses to critics, extensive revisions throughout, and a new preface by Paul Postal of New York University, this new edition will be an essential purchase for students, academics, and general readers interested in the debate about the 'language instinct'.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Sampson's book is worth reading, because it provides a view of how human languages work without appealing to nativist assumptions...I have recommended Pinker (1994) to my colleagues and students, and almost all of them have told me that it is one of the best books that they have read about language. Sampson agrees that Pinker's book "is superbly well written", but he also says "a book can be well written, and its conclusions quite wrong" (p. 14). I will now also recommend Sampson's book to my colleagues and students, and let them judge between the two." (Linguist List, The )

Title mention in Anuario Filosófico, Vol XXXIX/1 2006

"Now we have a much revised, corrected and expanded version which answers Sampson's many critics and makes ever clearer the fact that all the Chomsky and Pinker theories are not nearly as well supported as most psychologists and linguists seem to imagine. Sampson has a sharp eye for scholarly fudging of facts, illogical arguments, and towering theories tottering on weak foundations. At the very least Sampson's no-nonsense book, remarkable for its lucidity and readability in a field not notable for these virtues, forces upon us a recognition of the parlous state of a lot of linguistic argument and compels us to return the Scottish verdict of "not Proven." We realize that in linguistics the problem is not so much what we do not know as that much of what we pretend to know is simply not supported by sufficient evidence.
Sampson may not bring down the temple of a false god but he has most certainly shaken the pillars. Anyone interested in language and culture will find the book captivating."- Leonard R. N. Ashley, Geolinguistics, Vol. 31 2005

“Sampson’s book is worth reading, because it provides a view of how human languages work without appealing to nativist assumptions…I have recommended Pinker (1994) to my colleagues and students, and almost all of them have told me that it is one of the best books that they have read about language. Sampson agrees that Pinker’s book “is superbly well written”, but he also says “a book can be well written, and its conclusions quite wrong” (p. 14). I will now also recommend Sampson’s book to my colleagues and students, and let them judge between the two.” (Linguist List, The )

Title mention in Anuario Filosófico, Vol XXXIX/1 2006

"Now we have a much revised, corrected and expanded version which answers Sampson’s many critics and makes ever clearer the fact that all the Chomsky and Pinker theories are not nearly as well supported as most psychologists and linguists seem to imagine. Sampson has a sharp eye for scholarly fudging of facts, illogical arguments, and towering theories tottering on weak foundations. At the very least Sampson’s no-nonsense book, remarkable for its lucidity and readability in a field not notable for these virtues, forces upon us a recognition of the parlous state of a lot of linguistic argument and compels us to return the Scottish verdict of "not Proven." We realize that in linguistics the problem is not so much what we do not know as that much of what we pretend to know is simply not supported by sufficient evidence.
Sampson may not bring down the temple of a false god but he has most certainly shaken the pillars. Anyone interested in language and culture will find the book captivating."- Leonard R. N. Ashley, Geolinguistics, Vol. 31 2005

About the Author

Geoffrey Sampson is Professor of Natural Language Computing at the School of Informatics, University of Sussex.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Continuum; Revised Edition edition (April 1, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0826473849
• ISBN-13: 978-0826473844
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,152,462 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

33 of 41 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The sound of leather on willow floats across the village green, November 14, 2006

By 

O. Buxton "Olly Buxton" (Highgate, UK) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Language Instinct' Debate (Paperback)

There's nothing better than seeing an overconfident favourite getting a proper seeing to from an unfancied underdog.

All the same, when best-selling MIT and Harvard-credentialised psycho-linguist Steven Pinker's book "the Language Instinct" - a work feted far and wide and rarely challenged in polite circles - is subjected to critical treatment by an curmudgeonly British professor from an unfashionable second tier university in the home counties, it is a hopeful chap indeed who thinks an upset might be on the cards.

Pinker, after all, has the weight of Noam Chomsky (self styled most important intellect on the planet) behind him, and rates consistently favourable mentions from the literary review sections of important newspapers and that peculiar clique of populist science writers (Dan Dennett, Alan Sokal and Richard Dawkins among others).

The best you could say for Sampson, on the other hand, is that he lacks profile: His tenure is at the University of Sussex - yes, there is one - and the profile he does have isn't the sort most people would want: as far back as 1977, Christopher Hitchens described him as "an academic nonentity who made various other incautious allegations [about Noam Chomsky's political views] and who later ... strolled into the propellers and was distributed into such fine particles that he has never been heard from again." Ouch.

That's all ancient history, though, and the pleasant surprise is that over the last thirty years the plucky little Britisher has made a full recovery from his encounter with the propellers and is in fine enough fettle to give said global linguistic superstar a good old-fashioned intellectual walloping. Even read alone, Pinker's book is built on a wobbly edifice, but with Sampson's expert guide, it looks positively idiotic. Sampson is systematic: he sets up each of Pinker's arguments (such as they are), represents them fairly (I read Pinker's original concurrently to check) and then, like a gentleman cricketer on the village green dispatches each of them deftly to the boundary through extra-cover.

I'm really not sure why Geoffrey Sampson's book hasn't received more attention: possibly the author's history (he seems to made a number of "incautious" political statements over his life and doesn't seem to be the recanting type), but also because it swims bravely against an intellectual tide: Sampson is - though I don't think he expressly says it - a relativist:

"What the language learner is trying to bring his tacit theory into correspondence with is not some single, consistent grammar inhering in a collective national psyche, the sort of mystic entity that a sociologist such as Emile Durkheim would call a "social fact". Rather, he is trying to reconstruct a system underlying the usage of various speakers to whom he is exposed, and these speakers will almost certainly be working at any given time with non-identical tacit theories of their own - so that there will not be any wholly coherent and irrefutable grammar available to be formulated"

Advocating relativism, as I think Sampson coherently and convincingly does, has the misfortune to be about as incautious as criticising Noam Chomsky these days, so perhaps Sampson's card is marked and that's that. All the same, the passage cited above is beautifully put, and by itself is more persuasive than Steven Pinker's whole book.

All the same, who's laughing now? Probably not G. Sampson esq., as he strolls from the wicket at stumps, having carried his bat valiantly, but not having managed to save the innings. But up on the grassy bank, this cricket connoisseur stand to applaud this stylish, defiant knock.

Well batted, sir.

Olly Buxton

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Spoiler Alert!, July 16, 2007

By 

Daniel May (Minnesota) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Language Instinct' Debate (Hardcover)

This book certainly brought a different perspective to the empiricist/ nativist debate. It shed reasonable doubt upon the idea that we are born with innate semantic structure. Mr. Sampson does a good job of showing the empirical evidence does not always indicate the universals the nativists claim are substantial. After reading this book, I am certainly more confident in the creativity of human intelligence.

However, I have my qualms with Mr. Sampson. I am not a linguist, but most of the arguments were not out of my grasp. At times the author was repetitive, ambiguous and he often went on tangents, particularly in the last few chapters in which it seems he is struggling to respond to all of the critics of his first edition. Particularly I note how he struggled to convince the reader that Karl Popper would advocate his position. I am not very familiar with this philosopher, but Mr. Sampson is forced to combine quotes to manipulate his words. It seems that he just wants people to be on his side. All this, after he argued against the atrocities of hegemony! Aside from his prose, the biggest annoyance I had with this book was that he waits until the end to reveal his true stance. This is the spoiler: he believes that the mind is literally infinitely creative. This seems to contradict his statement earlier in the book that he believes Stephen Pinker's The Blank Slate to be of great value despite the fact that this conclusion can only come from complete denial of everything this book stands for. Mr. Sampson calls upon the ghost in the machine, Descarte's dualism, as the source of human creativity. This view was not integrated into the book but simply pops out at the end, at least from my perspective. Regardless of whether it is true or not, as he admits, it is not a scientific argument.

It is a shame that Steven Pinker did not write this book, as it would have been more eloquent, and without the unnecessary supernatural conclusion. This book is at least a good start, hopefully someone will build off of it

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Dense, repetitive and could have been better researched, July 9, 2008

By 

Carlos Raul Molina (Durham, North Carolina, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Language Instinct' Debate (Paperback)

Geoffrey Sampson's critical approach to Pinker's best-selling "The Language Instinct" makes some good points against the nativist position on language acquisition. Mostly, advocating for a return to empiricism, and using the science philosophy of K. Popper, Sampson tries to debunk the basic tenets of Chomsky's (and Pinker's) theory of language acquisition.

Some arguments are clearly backed by evidence. For instance, the idea that "language mutants" with an specific genetic disorder that affects the use of suffixes has been not well research by Pinker, since further evidence shows that the gene involved in the problem is NOT only relevant for linguistic forms, but to more general learning processes.

However, the philosophical and logical arguments against Chomsky's classic proofs such as "poverty of stimulus" and the like are not as clear. Maybe Sampson keeps his arguments at a logical level (which makes it harder to fallow the argumentation, very dense at moments), instead on relying on more empirical evidence.

In sum, it is an interesting book, but the style and the dense argumentation (as well as some subtle clear dislike for Chomsky and his role in the world of ideas) doesn't make it a candidate to be THE definite critical voice in the linguistic innateness debate.