Steven Pinker
Steven Arthur Pinker (born September 18 1954) is a prominent Canadian-American experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, and popular science writer known for his spirited and wide-ranging advocacy of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind.
Pinker’s academic specializations are visual cognition and language development in children, and he is most famous for popularizing the idea that language is an "instinct" or biological adaptation shaped by natural selection rather than a by-product of general intelligence. He is the author of five books for a general audience, which include The Language Instinct (1994), How the Mind Works (1999), Words and Rules (2000), The Blank Slate (2002), and The Stuff of Thought (2007). Pinker's books have won numerous awards and been New York Times best-sellers.
Biography
Career
Pinker was born in Canada and graduated from Montreal's Dawson College in 1973, received a first class bachelor's degree in experimental psychology from McGill University in 1976, then went on to earn his doctorate in the same discipline at Harvard in 1979. Pinker is currently the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard, having previously been director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Pinker was named one of Time Magazine's 100 most influential people in the world in 2004[1] and one of Prospect and Foreign Policy's 100 top public intellectuals in 2005.[2] He has also received honorary doctorates from the universities of Newcastle, Surrey, Tel Aviv and McGill.
In January 2005, Pinker defended Lawrence Summers, President of Harvard University, whose comments about the gender gap in mathematics and science angered much of the faculty.[3]
Pinker addresses the criticisms of scholars like Geoffrey Sampson (as outlined in his "Educating Eve", a biting criticism of the alleged language 'instinct' Pinker advocates) and Suren Naicker (as outlined in his "Rationalism vs. Empiricism: a critique of the Chomskyan paradigm").
There has been talk that he left MIT due to pressure regarding the nature of his general work, but Pinker himself refuses to comment, or verify this claim.
In 2007 he was invited on The Colbert Report and asked under pressure to sum up how the brain works in five words – Pinker answered "Brain cells fire in patterns."
Personal
Pinker was born into the English-speaking Jewish community of Montreal. He has said, "I was never religious in the theological sense... I never outgrew my conversion to atheism at 13, but at various times was a serious cultural Jew."[4]. His father, a trained lawyer, first worked as a traveling salesman, while his mother was first a home-maker then a guidance counselor and high-school vice-principal. He has two younger siblings; his brother is a policy analyst for the Canadian government, his sister is a writer and school psychologist.[5][6] Pinker married Nancy Etcoff in 1980 and they divorced 1992; he married Ilavenil Subbiah in 1995 and they, too, divorced.[7] His current girlfriend, Rebecca Goldstein, is a professor of philosophy at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut.[8] He has no children.
Theories of language and mind
Pinker is most famous for his work — popularized in The Language Instinct (1994) — on how children acquire language, and for his popularization of Noam Chomsky's work on language as an innate faculty of mind. Pinker has suggested an evolutionary mental module for language, although this idea remains controversial. Additionally Pinker argues that many other human mental faculties are evolved (and is an ally of Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins in many evolutionary disputes).
Written work
Pinker's books, How the Mind Works and The Blank Slate, are from the evolutionary psychology tradition, which views the mind as a kind of Swiss-army knife equipped with a set of specialized tools (or modules) to deal with problems faced by our Pleistocene ancestors. Pinker and other evolutionary psychologists believe that these tools evolved by natural selection, just like other body parts. The field of evolutionary psychology was pioneered by E. O. Wilson, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby. The Language Instinct has been criticized by Geoffrey Sampson in his book, The 'Language Instinct' Debate [1]. The assumptions underlying the nativist view have also been subject to sustained criticism in Jeffrey Elman's Rethinking Innateness: A Connectionist Perspective on Development (Neural Networks and Connectionist Modeling).
Pinker has also studied swear words (epithets) and how they represent what he calls "a window into emotion." He has written on the taboo of certain words; various types of swear words that exist in various languages, the grammar of swearing, and the circumstances that lead to swearing.
Selected publications
Books
- Language Learnability and Language Development (1984)
- Visual Cognition (1985)
- Connections and Symbols (1988)
- Learnability and Cognition: The Acquisition of Argument Structure (1989)
- Lexical and Conceptual Semantics (1992)
- The Language Instinct (1994)
- How the Mind Works (1997)
- Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language (1999)
- The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (2002)
- The Best American Science and Nature Writing (editor and introduction author, 2004)
- Hotheads (an extract from How the Mind Works, 2005)
- The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature (2007)
Articles and essays
- Pinker, S. (1991) Rules of Language. Science, 253, 530–535.
- Ullman, M., Corkin, S., Coppola, M., Hickok, G., Growdon, J. H., Koroshetz, W. J., & Pinker, S. (1997) A neural dissociation within language: Evidence that the mental dictionary is part of declarative memory, and that grammatical rules are processed by the procedural system. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 9, 289–299.
- Pinker, S. (2003) Language as an adaptation to the cognitive niche. In M. Christiansen & S. Kirby (Eds.), Language evolution: States of the Art. New York: Oxford University Press.
- Pinker, S. (2005) So How Does the Mind Work? Mind and Language, 20(1), 1–24.
- Jackendoff, R. & Pinker, S. (2005) The nature of the language faculty and its implications for evolution of language (Reply to Fitch, Hauser, & Chomsky) Cognition, 97(2), 211–225.
- S. Pinker (2007), "In Defense of Dangerous Ideas" (Chicago Sun-Times, July 15, 2007, http://www.suntimes.com/news/otherviews/469317,CST-CONT-danger15.article)
References
- ^ ""Steven Pinker: How Our Minds Evolved" by Robert Wright, [[Time Magazine]]". Retrieved 8 February.
{{cite web}}: Check date values in:|accessdate=(help); URL–wikilink conflict (help); Unknown parameter|accessyear=ignored (|access-date=suggested) (help) - ^ ""The Prospect/FP Top 100 Public Intellectuals," [[Foreign Policy (magazine)|Foreign Policy]] (free registration required)". Retrieved 8 February.
{{cite web}}: Check date values in:|accessdate=(help); URL–wikilink conflict (help); Unknown parameter|accessyear=ignored (|access-date=suggested) (help) - ^ ""PSYCHOANALYSIS Q-and-A: Steven Pinker," [[The Harvard Crimson]]". Retrieved 8 February.
{{cite web}}: Check date values in:|accessdate=(help); URL–wikilink conflict (help); Unknown parameter|accessyear=ignored (|access-date=suggested) (help) - ^ ""Steven Pinker: the mind reader" by Ed Douglas, [[The Guardian]]". Retrieved 3 February.
{{cite web}}: Check date values in:|accessdate=(help); URL–wikilink conflict (help); Unknown parameter|accessyear=ignored (|access-date=suggested) (help) - ^ SHERMER, MICHAEL (2001-03-01), THE PINKER INSTINCT, Altadena, CA: Skeptics Society & Skeptic Magazine, retrieved 2007-09-11
- ^ ""Steven Pinker: the mind reader," [[The Guardian]]". Retrieved 25 November.
{{cite web}}: Check date values in:|accessdate=(help); URL–wikilink conflict (help); Unknown parameter|accessyear=ignored (|access-date=suggested) (help) - ^ "Biography for Steven Pinker". Retrieved 2007-09-12.
- ^ ""How Steven Pinker Works" by Kristin E. Blagg, [[The Harvard Crimson]]". Retrieved 3 February.
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External links
- Language Instinct ?: Gradualistic Natural Selection is not a good enough explanation
- Steven Pinker: The stuff of thought TED, July, 2005
- Steven Pinker: A brief history of violence TED, March, 2007
Debates
- The Two Steves Debate with Steven Rose
- The Science of Gender and Science Debate with Elizabeth Spelke
Vitae
- Steven Pinker's Website
- Time magazine page on Pinker
- Gen Kuroki's Website about Steven Pinker
- Steven Pinker Multimedia. Extensive lists of audio and video files
- "Steven Pinker: the mind reader," The Guardian Profile, November 6, 1999
- Detailed Pinker interview focusing on The Stuff of Thought
- Live interview with Steven Pinker on "The Blank Slate"
- Online video interview with Pinker
- "Basic Instincts" - The Guardian profile by Oliver Burkeman, September 22, 2007.
Reviews
- Article on The Language Instinct by Theodore Dalrymple
- Louis Menand's critique of The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker, originally published in The New Yorker magazine
- "Meet the Flintstones" by Simon Blackburn, a critique of The Blank Slate.
- Biology vs. the Blank Slate Reason magazine interview with Pinker
- Evolutionary Psychology of Religion
- "The Blind Programmer", a review of How the Mind Works by Edward Oakes.
- Detailed review of The Stuff of Thought, by Steven Pinker
- Steven Pinker to speak at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C. on September 17, 2007