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Steven Pinker

Steven Arthur Pinker (born September 18 1954) is a prominent Canadian-born 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. His four books for a general audience — The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, Words and Rules and The Blank Slate — have won numerous awards.

Biography

Career

Pinker 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.

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.^[1]

Pinker was named one of Time Magazine's 100 most influential people in the world in 2004^[2] and one of Prospect and Foreign Policy's 100 top public intellectuals in 2005.^[3] He has also received honorary doctorates from the universities of Newcastle, Surrey, Tel Aviv and McGill.

Personal

Pinker was born into the English-speaking Jewish community of Montreal, but became an atheist at age thirteen (although he still identifies with various aspects of Jewish culture^[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 one brother and one sister.^[5] Pinker has been married and divorced twice, and his current girlfriend, Rebecca Goldstein, is a professor of philosophy at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut.^[6] 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.

Pinker's books, How the Mind Works and The Blank Slate, are seminal works of modern evolutionary psychology, which views the mind as a kind of Swiss-army knife equipped by evolution with a set of specialized tools (or modules) to deal with problems faced by our Pleistocene ancestors. Pinker and other evolutionary psychologists believe the human mind evolved by natural selection, just like other body parts. This view, pioneered as a field by E. O. Wilson, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, is pursued under evolutionary psychology and is a rapidly growing research paradigm, especially among cognitive psychologists.

One of Pinker's more unusual interests is the study of 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.

References

^ ""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: 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)
^ ""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)
^ ""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)
^ ""How Steven Pinker Works" by Kristin E. Blagg, [[The Harvard Crimson]]". Retrieved 3 February. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= (help); URL–wikilink conflict (help); Unknown parameter |accessyear= ignored (|access-date= suggested) (help)

External links

Steven Pinker's Website
Article on The Language Instinct by Theodore Dalrymple
Gen Kuroki's Website about Steven Pinker
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.
Steven Pinker Multimedia. Extensive lists of audio and video files.
Biology vs. the Blank Slate Reason magazine interview with Pinker
"Steven Pinker: the mind reader," The Guardian Profile, November 6, 1999.
Evolutionary Psychology of Religion
"The Blind Programmer", a review of How the Mind Works by Edward Oakes.
Live interview with Steven Pinker on "The Blank Slate"

Template:Persondata

[1] ""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)

[2] ""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)

[3] ""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)

[Douglas-4] ""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)

[5] ""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)

[Blagg-6] ""How Steven Pinker Works" by Kristin E. Blagg, [[The Harvard Crimson]]". Retrieved 3 February. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= (help); URL–wikilink conflict (help); Unknown parameter |accessyear= ignored (|access-date= suggested) (help)

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@@ Line 14: / Line 14: @@
 ===Personal===
-Pinker was born into the English-speaking Jewish community of [[Montreal]], but became an [[atheism|atheist]] at age thirteen (although he still identifies with various aspects of Jewish culture<ref name = "Douglas">{{cite web|title= "Steven Pinker: the mind reader" by Ed Douglas, ‘‘[[The Guardian]]’’|url= http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,3926387,00.html|accessdate=3 February|accessyear= 2006}}</ref>). His father, a trained lawyer, first worked as a travelling salesman, while his mother, was first a home-maker then a guidance counselor and high-school vice-principal. He has one brother and one sister.<ref>{{cite web|title="Steven Pinker: the mind reader," ''[[The Guardian]]''|url=http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,3926387,00.html|accessdate=25 November|accessyear=2006}}</ref> Pinker has been married and divorced twice, and his current girlfriend, [[Rebecca Goldstein]], is a professor of philosophy at [[Trinity College (Connecticut) |Trinity College]] in Hartford, Connecticut.<ref name = "Blagg">{{cite web|title="How Steven Pinker Works" by Kristin E. Blagg, ''[[The Harvard Crimson]]''|url= http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/about/media/2005_11_04_harvardcrimson.html| accessdate=3 February| accessyear= 2006}}</ref> He has no children.
+Pinker was born into the English-speaking Jewish community of [[Montreal]], but became an [[atheism|atheist]] at age thirteen (although he still identifies with various aspects of Jewish culture<ref name = "Douglas">{{cite web|title= "Steven Pinker: the mind reader" by Ed Douglas, ‘‘[[The Guardian]]’’|url= http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,3926387,00.html|accessdate=3 February|accessyear= 2006}}</ref>). 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 one brother and one sister.<ref>{{cite web|title="Steven Pinker: the mind reader," ''[[The Guardian]]''|url=http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,3926387,00.html|accessdate=25 November|accessyear=2006}}</ref> Pinker has been married and divorced twice, and his current girlfriend, [[Rebecca Goldstein]], is a professor of philosophy at [[Trinity College (Connecticut) |Trinity College]] in Hartford, Connecticut.<ref name = "Blagg">{{cite web|title="How Steven Pinker Works" by Kristin E. Blagg, ''[[The Harvard Crimson]]''|url= http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/about/media/2005_11_04_harvardcrimson.html| accessdate=3 February| accessyear= 2006}}</ref> He has no children.
 ==Theories of language and mind==