Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker

Born Steven Arthur Pinker
September 18, 1954 (1954-09-18) (age 54)
Nationality Canadian-American
Occupation Scientist
Author
Employer Harvard
Religious beliefs None (atheist)

Steven Arthur Pinker (born September 18, 1954) is a prominent Canadian-American experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, and author of popular science. Pinker is known for his 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. On this point, he opposes Noam Chomsky and others who regard the human capacity for language to be the by-product of other adaptations. On politics, Pinker expresses contempt for socialism, which he views as "utopian", and has described himself as a "big fan" of capitalism.1 He is the author of five books for a general audience, which include The Language Instinct (1994), How the Mind Works (1997), 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.

Contents

Biography

Career

Pinker was born in Canada and graduated from Montreal's Dawson College in 1973. He received a bachelor's degree in experimental psychology from McGill University in 1976, and then went on to earn his doctorate in the same discipline at Harvard in 1979. He did research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for a year, then became an assistant professor at Harvard and then Stanford University. From 1982 until 2003, Pinker taught at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, and eventually became the director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. (Except for a one-year sabbatical at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1995-6.) As of 2008, he is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard.2

Pinker was named one of Time Magazine's 100 most influential people in the world in 20043 and one of Prospect and Foreign Policy's 100 top public intellectuals in 2005.4 He has also received honorary doctorates from the universities of Newcastle, Surrey, Tel Aviv, McGill, and the University of Tromsø, Norway. He was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, in 1998 and in 2003.

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.5

On May 13th 2006, Pinker received the American Humanist Association's Humanist of the Year award for his contributions to public understanding of human evolution.6

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."7

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."8 As a teenager, he says he considered himself an anarchist until he witnessed civil unrest following a police strike in 1969.9 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, Susan Pinker, is a school psychologist and writer, author of The Sexual Paradox.1011 Pinker married Nancy Etcoff in 1980 and they divorced 1992; he married Ilavenil Subbiah in 1995 and they too divorced.12 His current wife is the novelist and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein.13 He has no children.citation needed

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 (see below). The Language Instinct is a book where Pinker argues that humans are born with an innate capacity for language. In addition, he deals sympathetically with the claim that all human language shows evidence of a universal grammar. Additionally Pinker argues that many other human mental faculties are adaptive (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 [2]. 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).

Selected publications

Books

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://richarddawkins.net/article,1449,In-defense-of-dangerous-ideas,Steven-Pinker)
  • a great number of Pinker's articles in http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/
  • S. Pinker (2008), "Truth in the Balance" (Greater Good Magazine, Fall 2008, http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/greatergood/2008fall/Pinker452.php)

References

  1. ^ [1]
  2. ^ Official Biography
  3. ^ ""Steven Pinker: How Our Minds Evolved" by Robert Wright, Time Magazine". Retrieved on February 8 2006.
  4. ^ ""The Prospect/FP Top 100 Public Intellectuals," Foreign Policy (free registration required)". Retrieved on February 8 2006.
  5. ^ ""PSYCHOANALYSIS Q-and-A: Steven Pinker," The Harvard Crimson". Retrieved on February 8 2006.
  6. ^ "Steven Pinker Receives Humanist of the Year Award", American Humanist Association (May 12, 2006). 
  7. ^ Press, Michelle (September 2007), "Reviews: Cyclic Universe•World of Words•Nuclear Terror", Scientific American (Scientific American, Inc.) 297 (3): 120, http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=cyclic-universe--world-of-words, retrieved on 3 August 2008 
  8. ^ ""Steven Pinker: the mind reader" by Ed Douglas, ‘‘The Guardian’’". Retrieved on February 3 2006.
  9. ^ "As a young teenager in proudly peaceable Canada during the romantic 1960s, I was a true believer in Bakunin's anarchism. I laughed off my parents' argument that if the government ever laid down its arms all hell would break loose. Our competing predictions were put to the test at 8:00 A.M. on October 17, 1969, when the Montreal police went on strike. ... This decisive empirical test left my politics in tatters (and offered a foretaste of life as a scientist)." — Pinker, Steven (2002), The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, Penguin Putnam, ISBN 0-670-03151-8.
  10. ^ Shermer, Michael (2001-03-01), The Pinker Instinct, Altadena, CA: Skeptics Society & Skeptic Magazine, http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-10144194_ITM, retrieved on 11 September 2007 
  11. ^ ""Steven Pinker: the mind reader," The Guardian". Retrieved on November 25 2006.
  12. ^ "Biography for Steven Pinker". Retrieved on 2007-09-12.
  13. ^ ""How Steven Pinker Works" by Kristin E. Blagg, The Harvard Crimson". Retrieved on February 3 2006.

External links

Sister project Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Steven Pinker

Debates

Vitae

Reviews

v • d • e
Steven Pinker
Major works
Related topics
Persondata
NAME Pinker, Steven
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION American cognitive scientist
DATE OF BIRTH September 18, 1954
PLACE OF BIRTH Montreal
DATE OF DEATH
PLACE OF DEATH

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