Pinker's actual thesis on this topic is that

English spelling is not as deranged as it first appears (185).

In fact, he refers to his discussion as a "defense of English spelling," although he admits it will be "halfhearted" (186), and he ends the chapter by saying,

Of course English spelling could be better than it is. But it is already much better than people think it is (189).

He also is not in favor of Shaw's proposed change to the alphabet, saying that it

would mandate different vowels in write and ride, different consonants in write and writing, and different spellings for the past-tense suffix in slapped, sobbed, and sorted (187).

As for his two main points, he seems to begin his defense with a very brief sketch of the historical development and classification of writing systems (186–187), which leads him to observe that

no writing system ever met Shaw's ideal of one symbol per sound (187).

He then turns to English itself, whose spelling is not truly as bizarre or random as some people think:

Indeed, for about eighty-four percent of English words, spelling is completely predictable from regular rules (187).

He then points out that spelling often communicates how words are connected in meaning, even if their pronunciations are different (e.g., "electric/electricity," "muscle/muscular," etc.). This is because of an essential dichotomy between written and spoken language:

The goal of reading, after all, is to understand the text, not pronounce it (188, italics added).

This is a crucial distinction for Pinker, as he ends the chapter with an even stronger statement of it, saying that

writing systems do not aim to represent the actual sounds of talking . . . but the abstract units of language underlying them (189).

Thus, according to Pinker, proposals like Shaw's, and similar criticisms of English spelling, are unreasonable on the grounds of both the history and the purpose of written language.

In his book The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language, first edition, author Steven Pinker first offers his criticism of the English spelling system, in full, on page 185 of chapter 6, which is titled "The Sounds of Silence".

According to Pinker, the complaint with the spelling of our language is that

it pretends to capture the sounds of words but does not

In this chapter there are two major discussion points. The first is the argument of how the English language in itself has specific mechanics of phonology and sounds, as well as phonetics.

The second part of the chapter argues that the mechanics do not match our spelling. It also offers a short history of how George Bernard Shaw felt that the English spelling system was illogical in the first place. In fact, Shaw worked quite diligently to reform our alphabet without much success.

GB Shaw's claims are quite true. The letters in English spelling have a striking variety of sounds when they are combined with different vowels and other consonants. They change all the time!

Shaw was the first to propose how interchangeable English spelling is by using the word "fish" as an example. Each sound in the word "fish", /f//i//s//h/, can be substituted with other letters that produce a similar sound. This being said, "fish" could be spelled as "ghoti". How so? Easily, according to Shaw. All we need to do is replace the /f/ with the alternative homophone gh phoneme, which we use in words such as "tough", and "rough", and even in last names such as McLaughlin. Then, we replace the /ish/ in "fish" with the homophone "ti" that we use in words such as "corporation and nation.

There are still more replacements that can be made to that same word. Who is to say, then, that children are wrong when they spell a word phonetically exactly as they hear it? Is that not the entire point of written communication, to match a symbol to a sound that makes sense?

On an interesting note, Pinker offers this short poem for people to understand the extent to which English spelling is confusing.

Beware of heard, a dreadful word That looks like beard and sounds like bird, And dead: it's said like bed, not bead-For goodness' sake don't call it "deed"! Watch out for meat and great and threat (They rhyme with suite and straight and debt).