What our language habits reveal

Steven Pinker on the case for optimism

Steven Pinker: What went wrong at Harvard

"But what is a mental image? Not for the last time, I got caught up, when I was in graduate school, in a raging controversy called the imagery debate. And this was a debate over the format of mental imagery. Now, everyone reports the experience of a mental picture, and that’s the way we describe it in English. But, of course, there isn’t a real picture in the brain. It isn’t as if there’s a little man sitting in a theater who’s looking at a screen. The behaviorists were right about this. How do