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UBC : IS+H : Lecture 04 : Steven Pinker

525 Views Length: 59:06 Steven Pinker, "The Humanities and Human Nature" :

Many humanities scholars have expressed a malaise about the current state of their fields, reflecting a lack of optimism about the possibility of a progressive agenda for discovery and… Steven Pinker, "The Humanities and Human Nature" :

Many humanities scholars have expressed a malaise about the current state of their fields, reflecting a lack of optimism about the possibility of a progressive agenda for discovery and accumulation of knowledge. I argue that consilience with the social and biological sciences offers the exciting prospect that both sets of fields could prosper from exploring how the activities of the humanities spring from human nature -- the cognitive, linguistic, emotional, and social faculties that arise from the evolved structure of the human brain. I list several areas in which the two can be brought together, and explore in greater depth two connections flowing out of my own research on language: the application of research on inflectional morphology to an analysis of literary form, and the application of research on indirect speech acts to an analysis of dialogue and plot. More