Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker
File:StevePinker.jpg
Born	Steven Arthur Pinker (1954-09-18) September 18, 1954
Nationality	Canadian-American
Occupation(s)	Scientist Author
Employer	Harvard

Steven Arthur Pinker (born September 18, 1954) is a prominent Canadian-American experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, and author of popular science, currently employed in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. 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. 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.

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, after which he 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.

Pinker was named one of Time Magazine's 100 most influential people in the world in 2004 and one of Prospect and Foreign Policy's 100 top public intellectuals in 2005. 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.

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.

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. 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. Pinker married Nancy Etcoff in 1980 and they divorced 1992; he married Ilavenil Subbiah in 1995 and they too divorced. His current wife is the novelist and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein. He has no children.

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." As a teenager, he says he considered himself an anarchist until he witnessed civil unrest following a police strike in 1969.

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). 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 [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).

Bibliography

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://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/

External links

• C-SPAN BookTV In Depth video interview with Steven Pinker, 3 hrs., 11-2-2008]
• 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
• Steven Pinker discusses the "Games People Play: Indirect Speech as a Window into Social Relationships"
• Steven Pinker discusses the evolutionary psychology of morality in "The Moral Instinct" The New York Times, January 13, 2008
• Steven Pinker on The Hour
• Steven Pinker 2003 TEDTalk: Chalking it up to the blank slate

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
• 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.
• Steven Pinker to speak at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C. on September 17, 2007