The Language Instinct - Reception

Reception

Pinker's assumptions about the innateness of language have been challenged; opponents claim that "either the logic is fallacious, or the factual data are incorrect (or, sometimes, both)".

The statement that deaf babies "spontaneously invent sign languages with complex grammar" is actually only true in groups of deaf children (deaf communities) while a lone deaf child in a village where everyone else can hear never invents more than simple gestures. This actually supports a view of language as a social adaptation evolutionary kludge.

Richard Webster writes that The Language Instinct argues cogently that the human capacity for language is part of the genetic endowment associated with the evolution through natural selection of specialised neural networks within the brain, and that its attack on the 'Standard Social Science Model' of human nature is effective. Webster accepts Pinker's argument that, twentieth-century social scientists have, for ideological motives, minimized the extent to which human nature is influenced by genetics. However, Webster finds Pinker's speculation about other specialized neural networks that may have evolved within the human brain, such as "intuitive mechanics" and "intuitive biology", to be questionable, and believes that there is a danger that they will be treated by others as science. Webster believes that such speculations strengthen supporters of extreme genetic determinism.