Steven Arthur Pinker (born September 18, 1954) is a Canadian cognitive psychologist, psycholinguist, popular science author, and public intellectual. He is an advocate of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind. Pinker is the Johnstone Family professor of psychology at Harvard University.
Pinker specializes in visual cognition and developmental linguistics, as well as a number of experimental topics. He has written two technical books that propose a general theory of language acquisition. In particular, his work with Alan Prince posits that children use default rules sometimes in error but are obliged to learn irregular forms one by one. Pinker is the author of nine books for general audiences. The Language Instinct (1994), How the Mind Works (1997), Words and Rules (2000), The Blank Slate (2002), and The Stuff of Thought (2007) posit that language is an innate behavior shaped by natural selection and adapted to our communication needs. The Sense of Style (2014) is a general language-oriented style guide.The Sense of Style The Better Angels of Our Nature (2010) posits that violence in human societies has generally declined over time, and identifies six major trends and five historical forces of this decline. Enlightenment Now (2018) further argues that the human condition has generally improved over recent history because of reason, science, and humanism. The nature and importance of reason is also discussed in his book Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters (2021).
In 2004, Pinker was named in Times "The 100 Most Influential People in the World Today", and in 2005, 2008, 2010, and 2011 in Foreign Policys list of "Top 100 Global Thinkers". He was also included in Prospect Magazine's top 10 "World Thinkers" in 2013. He has won awards from the American Psychological Association, the National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Institution, the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, and the American Humanist Association. He has served on the editorial boards of various journals and the advisory boards of several institutions. Pinker chaired the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary from 2008 to 2018.
Biography Pinker was born on September 18, 1954, in Montreal, Quebec, to an upper-middle class secular Jewish family in an English-speaking community. He adopted atheism at 13 and has identified as a "cultural Jew"."Steven Pinker: the mind reader" by Ed Douglas The Guardian Accessed February 3, 2006.
His grandparents immigrated to Canada from Poland and Romania in 1926, and owned a small necktie factory in Montreal. His father, Harry, worked in real estate and was a lawyer. His mother, Roslyn, was originally a homemaker but later became a guidance counsellor and a high-school vice-principal. Pinker has called his mother "very intellectual" and "an intense reader [who] knows everything". He credits George Gamow's One Two Three... Infinity with sparking his love of science.
His brother, Robert, worked for the Canadian government for several decades as an administrator and a policy analyst, while his sister, Susan Pinker, is a psychologist and writer who authored The Sexual Paradox and The Village Effect. Susan is also a columnist for The Wall Street Journal.
Pinker graduated from Dawson College in 1971 with a Diploma of College Studies. He graduated from McGill University in 1976 with a Bachelor of Arts in psychology, then did doctoral studies in experimental psychology at Harvard University under Stephen Kosslyn, receiving a PhD in 1979. He did research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for a year, then became a professor at Harvard and later, Stanford University.
From 1982 until 2003, Pinker taught at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, co-directing the Center for Cognitive Science from 1985 to 1994 and directing the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience from 1994 to 1999, taking a sabbatical at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1995–96.
Since 2003, he has served as the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard, and between 2008 and 2013 he also held the title of Harvard College Professor in recognition of his dedication to teaching. In the early 2010s, he gave lectures as a visiting professor at the New College of the Humanities, a private college in London."The professoriate" , New College of the Humanities. Retrieved June 8, 2011."Professor Steven Pinker", New College of the Humanities. Retrieved November 4, 2014.
Pinker married Nancy Etcoff in 1980 and they divorced in 1992; he married again in 1995 and they divorced. His third wife, whom he married in 2007, is the novelist and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein."How Steven Pinker Works" by Kristin E. Blagg The Harvard Crimson Accessed February 3, 2006. He has two stepdaughters, the novelist Yael Goldstein Love and the poet Danielle Blau.
Pinker is an avid cyclist. He is an advocate of effective altruism, which he calls "one of the great new ideas of the 21st century".
Linguistic career
Pinker's research on visual cognition, begun in collaboration with his thesis adviser, Stephen Kosslyn, showed that mental images represent scenes and objects as they appear from a specific vantage point (rather than capturing their intrinsic three-dimensional structure), and thus correspond to the neuroscientist David Marr's theory of a "two-and-a-half-dimensional sketch."The nature of the language faculty and its implications for evolution of language He also showed that this level of representation is used in visual attention, and in object recognition (at least for asymmetrical shapes), contrary to Marr's theory that recognition uses viewpoint-independent representations.
In psycholinguistics, Pinker became known early in his career for promoting computational learning theory as a way to understand language acquisition in children. He wrote a tutorial review of the field followed by two books that advanced his own theory of language acquisition, and a series of experiments on how children acquire the passive, dative, and locative constructions. These books were Language Learnability and Language Development (1984), in Pinker's words "outlin[ing] a theory of how children acquire the words and grammatical structures of their mother tongue", and Learnability and Cognition: The Acquisition of Argument Structure (1989), in Pinker's words "focus[ing] on one aspect of this process, the ability to use different kinds of verbs in appropriate sentences, such as intransitive verbs, transitive verbs, and verbs taking different combinations of complements and indirect objects". He then focused on verbs of two kinds that illustrate what he considers to be the processes required for human language: retrieving whole words from memory, like the past form of the irregular verbPinker has written a piece on The Irregular Verbs , stating that "I like the Irregular verbs of English, all 180 of them, because of what they tell us about the history of the language and the human minds that have perpetuated it. "bring", namely "brought"; and using rules to combine (parts of) words, like the past form of the regular verb "walk", namely "walked".
In 1988 Pinker and Alan Prince published a critique of a connectionist model of the acquisition of the past tense (a textbook problem in language acquisition), followed by a series of studies of how people use and acquire the past tense. This included a monograph on children's regularization of irregular forms and his popular 1999 book, Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language. Pinker argued that language depends on two things: the associative remembering of sounds and their meanings in words, and the use of rules to manipulate symbols for grammar. He presented evidence against connectionism, where a child would have to learn all forms of all words and would simply retrieve each needed form from memory, in favour of the older alternative theory, the use of words and rules combined by generative phonology. He showed that mistakes made by children indicate the use of default rules to add suffixes such as "-ed": for instance 'breaked' and 'comed' for 'broke' and 'came'. He argued that this shows that irregular verb-forms in English have to be learnt and retrieved from memory individually, and that the children making these errors were predicting the regular "-ed" ending in an open-ended way by applying a mental rule. This rule for combining verb stems and the usual suffix can be expressed as Vpast → Vstem + d, where V is a verb and d is the regular ending. Pinker further argued that since the ten most frequently occurring English verbs (be, have, do, say, make ... ) are all irregular, while 98.2% of the thousand least common verbs are regular, there is a "massive correlation" of frequency and irregularity. He explains this by arguing that every irregular form, such as 'took', 'came' and 'got', has to be committed to memory by the children in each generation, or else lost, and that the common forms are the most easily memorized. Any irregular verb that falls in popularity past a certain point is lost, and all future generations will treat it as a regular verb instead.
In 1990 Pinker, with Paul Bloom, published a paper arguing that the human language faculty must have evolved through natural selection.Pinker, S. & Bloom, P. (1990). Natural language and natural selection. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13 (4): 707‐784 The article argued for a continuity-based view of language evolution, contrary to then-current discontinuity-based theories that see language as suddenly appearing with the advent of Homo sapiens as a kind of evolutionary accident. This discontinuity-based view was prominently held by two main authorities, linguist Noam Chomsky and Stephen Jay Gould. The paper became widely cited and created renewed interest in the evolutionary prehistory of language, and has been credited with shifting the central question of the debate from "did language evolve?" to "how did language evolve?"
In 2006 Pinker provided to Alan Dershowitz, a personal friend of Pinker's who was Jeffrey Epstein's defense attorney, Pinker's own interpretation of the wording of a federal law pertaining to the enticement of minors into illegal sex acts via the internet. Dershowitz included Pinker's opinion in a letter to the court during proceedings that resulted in a plea deal in which all federal sex trafficking charges against Epstein were dropped. In 2019, Pinker said he was unaware of the nature of the charges against Epstein, and that he did an unpaid favor for Dershowitz, as he had regularly done. He said in an interview with BuzzFeed News that he regrets writing the letter. Pinker has said he never received money from Epstein, met with him three times over more than a dozen years, could never stand Epstein, and tried to keep his distance.
Popularization of science
Human cognition and natural language
Pinker credits Richard Dawkins's The Blind Watchmaker (1986) with inspiring him to try his hand at science writing. The Language Instinct (1994) was the first of several books to combine cognitive science with linguistics and evolutionary psychology. It popularizes Noam Chomsky's theory that language is an innate faculty of mind, with the controversial twist that the faculty for language evolved by natural selection as an adaptation for communication. Pinker criticizes several widely held ideas about language – that it needs to be taught, that people's grammar is poor and getting worse with new ways of speaking, the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis that language limits the kinds of thoughts a person can have, and that other great apes can learn languages. Pinker sees language as unique to humans, evolved to solve the specific problem of communication among social hunter-gatherers. He argues that it is as much an instinct as specialized adaptative behavior in other species, such as a spider's web-weaving or a beaver's dam-building.