HumanProject
09-15-2008, 04:41 AM
Thank you, Dr. Schlinger, for reminding us of Pinker's awesome leaps. We read Pinker's rhetorical extravagances and are dumbfounded; we emit a shocked, embarrassed giggle, and look away; and he gets away with it, as he did in these quotes provided by Shlinger:
“First, let us do away with the folklore that parents teach their children language” and “The very concept of imitation is suspect to begin with (if children are such general imitators why don’t they imitate their parents’ habit of sitting quietly in airplanes?)”
Would we let our undergrads get away with the kind of logic? But we let him get away with it. Does something about his writing exert a hynoptic force such that we take it in, become glazed, and then don't immediately began warning our friends that the Emperor has no clothes?
“First, let us do away with the folklore that parents teach their children language” and “The very concept of imitation is suspect to begin with (if children are such general imitators why don’t they imitate their parents’ habit of sitting quietly in airplanes?)”
Would we let our undergrads get away with the kind of logic? But we let him get away with it. Does something about his writing exert a hynoptic force such that we take it in, become glazed, and then don't immediately began warning our friends that the Emperor has no clothes?