Well organized and clearly explained. The problems arise from Pinker’s inability to keep himself out of the narrative ... A book can be bad without its thesis being untrue. That, at least, should be common knowledge.
Foregrounds Steven Pinker’s many virtues as a populariser of science: his lucid style, his ability to marshal technical research for a general audience ... Pinker ranges far and wide, showing how common knowledge plays a role in everything from laughter and tears, to euphemism and flirtation ... The nature of the book’s central phenomenon — common knowledge — is left impressionistic, although Pinker engagingly outlines its potential applications. The essence of common knowledge itself is not yet a matter of common knowledge.
As lively an exposition of cognitive science as you are likely to find ... A lucid, measured discussion of what we need to understand about our communications with each other ... [Pinker] struggles a bit to give weight to aspects of our moral lives that aren’t always amenable to reason (he is predictably dismissive about religion, for example) ... But it enlightens and provokes; to pick up his own metaphor, it is worth dancing with.
Serious and readable ... Diverting and often informative ... Mr. Pinker never digs into the difficulties of making and sharing knowledge ... An aside about how ‘humanitarian sentiments’ and ‘mass media’ affect common knowledge is insufficiently examined amid a plethora of anecdotes ... The central weakness of rational theories of choice and language is never addressed.
Wan and blinkered ... All too often reads like a hammer in search of a nail ... He tries to enfold even unwieldy and sprawling truths into his cramped formal apparatus ... The problem is not that he has a penchant for summarizing thought experiments…but that he cannot provide a convincing account of what the puzzles he loves have to do with the world ... This is the kind of public intellectualism that makes the public hate intellectuals.
