Consciousness surely does not depend on language. Babies, many animals, and patients robbed of speech by brain damage are not insensate robots; they have reactions like ours that indicate that someone's home.Steven Pinker
One of the things that people complain about is loneliness, disconnectedness. If you live in a society where your life is rarely threatened and most of your relationships are more on an economic exchange basis, then this could leave people feeling less connected.Steven Pinker
Indeed, children thrown together in a community that doesn't have a language of its own will invent one in order to communicate with each other.Steven Pinker
I don't think language could have evolved if it was the only distinctive trait. It goes hand in hand with our ability to develop tools and technologies, and also with the fact that we cooperate with nonrelatives.Steven Pinker
As individual people, embedded in our daily lives, of course we're interested in what makes one person different from another. We've got to hire one person and not another, marry one person and not another.Steven Pinker
The more you think about and interact with other people, the more you realize that it is untenable to privilege your interests over theirs.Steven Pinker
Society does not consist of individuals but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand.Karl Marx
