The Stuff of Thought¶
Pinker, S. (2007). The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature.
Cited by¶
2 citations across 2 artifacts.
Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.
Primes¶
- Conceptual Blending
- The theory's power — its ability to cover diverse cases — is also its weakness; falsifiability is difficult because blending can be retrofitted to almost any example. Common failure mode: Attributing all novel concepts to blending without first checking whether direct analogy or metaphor suffices; interdisciplinary teams that adopt blending as an explanatory framework and over-apply it, labeling every cross-domain transfer a "blend"; educational or design contexts where blending theory is invoked to justify unrigorous conceptual leaps ("it's a blend, so novelty is guaranteed").
This sourceArgues for conceptual semantics and critiques conceptual-blending/metaphor theory as overstated, holding that direct logical inference and category membership explain much that is attributed to blending. SUPPORTS markers 187 and 191 (T6 critique that blending is applied inconsistently / over-extended — Pinker is the named critic). Link is the archive.org copy. NOTE: marker text says 'Pinker 2007' for the critique; correctly sourced.
- The theory's power — its ability to cover diverse cases — is also its weakness; falsifiability is difficult because blending can be retrofitted to almost any example. Common failure mode: Attributing all novel concepts to blending without first checking whether direct analogy or metaphor suffices; interdisciplinary teams that adopt blending as an explanatory framework and over-apply it, labeling every cross-domain transfer a "blend"; educational or design contexts where blending theory is invoked to justify unrigorous conceptual leaps ("it's a blend, so novelty is guaranteed").
- Cooperative Principle and Gricean Maxims
- Listed in the references but not attached to a specific claim.
Verification¶
This reference passed the adversarial substantiation pipeline: it was checked to exist and to support the claim it is attached to. See how references were verified.
Registry ID ref:ba264b8d4166 · see in the full table