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Steven Pinker

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Steven Pinker
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Steven Pinker
Born (1954-09-18) September 18, 1954 (age 69)
Montreal, Canada
NationalityCanadian-American
Alma materHarvard University
McGill University
Known forPopular books on language and cognitive psychology
Scientific career
FieldsLanguage acquisition
Mental imagery
Evolutionary psychology
InstitutionsHarvard University
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Doctoral advisorStephen Kosslyn
Doctoral studentsGary Marcus
Michael T. Ullman

Steven Arthur Pinker (born September 18, 1954 in Montreal, Quebec) is a 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.

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.

Early life and education

Pinker was born in Montreal and graduated from Dawson College in 1973. He earned 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 then did research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for a year.

Career in academia

Pinker became an assistant professor at Harvard and then Stanford University. From 1982 until 2003, except for a one-year sabbatical at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1995-6, Pinker taught at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, and eventually became the director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. He became the Peter de Florez Professor of Psychology in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and a MacVicar Faculty Fellow.

In September 2003, Pinker returned to Harvard in after 21 years at MIT. As of 2008, he is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard.[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, 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.[4]

On May 13, 2006, Pinker received the American Humanist Association's Humanist of the Year award for his contributions to public understanding of human evolution.[5]

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."[6] Following his 2007 visit to The Colbert Report, Pinker returned in February 2009 to another interview with Stephen in which the two discussed the mapping of the Human Genome, and the now-available means to map an individual's risks and predispositions to certain genetic conditions, diseases, etc. by using modern genetic testing techniques. Pinker also went on to admit that, as one of the "PGP-10" participants in the Personal Genome Project, he had published the results of his own personal genetic tests online.[7]

Theories of language and 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 partly opposes Noam Chomsky and others who regard the human capacity for language to be the by-product of other adaptations.

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). In The Language Instinct, 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[8]. 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).

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."[9] As a teenager, he says he considered himself an anarchist until he witnessed civil unrest following a police strike in 1969.[10] In testing for political orientation, he has been found "neither leftist nor rightist, more libertarian than authoritarian."[11] 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.[9][12]

Pinker married Nancy Etcoff in 1980 and they divorced 1992. He then married Ilavenil Subbiah in 1995 and they, too, divorced.[13] He is now married to the American novelist and professor of philosophy, Rebecca Goldstein.[14] He has no children.[11] With regard to his childlessness, he has stated "By Darwinian standards I am a horrible mistake, a pathetic loser, not one iota less than if I were a card-carrying member of Queer Nation. But I am happy to be that way, and if my genes don't like it, they can go jump in the lake."[15]

In 2001, Steven Pinker became the first member of the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists,[16] "chosen by acclamation" because his hair "has long been the object of admiration, and envy, and intense study."[17]

Selected publications

Books

Reviews of Pinker's 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. ^ "Long Biography at Harvard Department of Psychology". Retrieved 2009-01-19.
  2. ^ Wright, Robert (2004-04-26). "Steven Pinker: How Our Minds Evolved". Time Magazine. Retrieved 2006-02-08.
  3. ^ "The Prospect/FP Top 100 Public Intellectuals" (free registration required). Foreign Policy. Retrieved 2006-02-08.
  4. ^ "Psychoanalysis Q & A: Steven Pinker". The Harvard Crimson. Retrieved 2006-02-08.
  5. ^ "Steven Pinker Receives Humanist of the Year Award". American Humanist Association. 2006-05-12. Retrieved 2009-01-19.
  6. ^ Press, Michelle (2007). "Cyclic Universe – World of Words – Nuclear Terror". Scientific American. 297 (3). Scientific American, Inc.: 120. Retrieved 2008-08-03. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
  7. ^ "PGP-10 participants". Retrieved 2009-10-25.
  8. ^ Sampson, Geoffrey (2008-08-19). "Empiricism v. Nativism: Nature or Nurture?". Retrieved 2009-01-19.
  9. ^ a b Douglas, Ed (1999-11-06). "Steven Pinker: the mind reader". The Guardian. Retrieved 2006-02-03.
  10. ^ Pinker, Steven (2002). The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. Penguin Putnam. ISBN 0-670-03151-8. 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).
  11. ^ a b Pinker, Steven (2009-01-07). "My Genome, My Self". The New York Times Magazine. Retrieved 2009-01-11.
  12. ^ Shermer, Michael (2001-03-22). "The Pinker Instinct". Altadena, CA: Skeptic Magazine. Retrieved 2007-09-11.
  13. ^ "Biography for Steven Pinker". Internet Movie Database. Retrieved 2007-09-12.
  14. ^ Crace, John (17 June 2008). "Steven Pinker: The evolutionary man". The Guardian. Retrieved 2009-06-06. {{cite news}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
  15. ^ Pinker, Steven. (1997). How the Mind Works. New York: W.W. Norton, p. 52.
  16. ^ Marc Abrahams, ed. (2001-02-04). "LFH Survey". mini-AIR. Retrieved 2009-04-27. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)CS1 maint: date and year (link)
  17. ^ "Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists". Annals of Improbable Research. Retrieved 2009-04-27.
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