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Steven Pinker

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Steven Arthur Pinker
Steven Pinker (Göttingen, 2010)
Born (1954-09-18) September 18, 1954 (age 70)
Alma materDawson College, McGill University, Harvard University
Known forThe Blank Slate
AwardsGeorge Miller Prize (2010, Cognitive Neuroscience Society), Henry Dale Prize (2004, Royal Institution, Troland Award (2003, National Academy of Sciences), Humanist of the Year award (2006, issued by the AHA)
Scientific career
Fieldsevolutionary psychology, experimental psychology, cognitive science, linguistics

Steven Arthur Pinker (born September 18, 1954) is a Canadian-American experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, linguist and author of popular science writings. He is a Harvard College Professor and Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University[1] and is known for his advocacy of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind.

Pinker’s academic specializations are visual cognition and psycholinguistics. His academic pursuits include experiments on mental imagery, shape recognition, visual attention, children's language development, regular and irregular phenomena in language, the neural bases of words and grammar, and the psychology of innuendo and euphemism. He published two technical books which proposed a general theory of language acquisition and applied it to children's learning of verbs. In his less academic books, he argued 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).

Biography

Career

Pinker was born in Canada and graduated from Montreal's Dawson College in 1971. He received a BA degree in Psychology from McGill University in 1976, and then went on to earn his PhD degree in Experimental Psychology at Harvard University 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.[2]

Pinker was named one of Time Magazine's 100 most influential scientists and thinkers in the world in 2004[3] and one of Prospect and Foreign Policy's 100 top public intellectuals in 2005.[4] His research in cognitive psychology has won the Early Career Award (1984) and Boyd McCandless Award (1986) from the American Psychological Association, the Troland Award (1993) from the National Academy of Sciences, the Henry Dale Prize (2004) from the Royal Institution of Great Britain, and the George Miller Prize (2010) from the Cognitive Neuroscience Society. 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 2010, he was named by Foreign Policy magazine to its list of top global thinkers.[5]

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.[6]

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.[7]

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.[8]

Personal

His father, a lawyer, first worked as a manufacturer's representative, 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 psychologist and writer, author of The Sexual Paradox.[9][10] Pinker married Nancy Etcoff in 1980 and they divorced 1992; he married Ilavenil Subbiah in 1995 and they too divorced.[11] His current wife is the novelist and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein.[12] He has two stepdaughters: the novelist Yael Goldstein Love and the poet Danielle Blau.

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.[13] As a teenager, he says he considered himself an anarchist until he witnessed civil unrest following a police strike in 1969.[14] He has reported the result of a test of his political orientation that characterized him as neither leftist nor rightist, more libertarian than authoritarian.[15]

Theories of language and mind

Pinker is known within psychology for his theory of language acquisition, his research on the syntax, morphology, and meaning of verbs, and his criticism of connectionist (neural network) models of language. In The Language Instinct (1994) he popularized Noam Chomsky's work on language as an innate faculty of mind, with the twist that this faculty evolved by natural selection as a Darwinian adaptation for communication, although both ideas remain controversial (see below). He also defends the idea of a complex human nature which comprises many mental faculties that are adaptive (and is an ally of Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins in many evolutionary disputes). Another major theme in Pinker's theories is that human cognition works, in part, by combinatorial symbol-manipulation, not just associations among sensory features, as in many connectionist models.

Written work

Pinker's books, The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, Words and Rules, The Blank Slate, and The Stuff of Thought combine cognitive science with behavioral genetics and evolutionary psychology. The Language Instinct has been criticized by Geoffrey Sampson in his book, The 'Language Instinct' Debate.[16] 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), which defends the connectionist approach that Pinker has criticized.

Bibliography

Wikiquote has quotations related to Steven Pinker.

Books

Articles and essays

  • Pinker, S. (1991). "Rules of Language". Science. 253: 530–535. doi:10.1126/science.1857983.
  • 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. doi:10.1111/j.0268-1064.2005.00274.x.
  • 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. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2005.04.006.
  • S. Pinker (2007), "In Defense of Dangerous Ideas" Chicago Sun-Times, July 15, 2007
  • A number of Pinker's articles at Harvard

References

  1. ^ Steven Pinker - About. Department of Psychology Harvard University Accessed 2010-02-28
  2. ^ Official Biography. Harvard University
  3. ^ "Steven Pinker: How Our Minds Evolved" by Robert Wright Time Magazine Accessed 2006-02-08
  4. ^ "The Prospect/FP Top 100 Public Intellectuals" Foreign Policy (free registration required) Accessed 2006-082-08
  5. ^ "Foreign Policy Magazine"
  6. ^ "PSYCHOANALYSIS Q-and-A: Steven Pinker" The Harvard Crimson Accessed 2006-02-08
  7. ^ "Steven Pinker Receives Humanist of the Year Award". American Humanist Association. May 12, 2006.
  8. ^ Press, Michelle (September 2007). "Reviews: Cyclic Universe•World of Words•Nuclear Terror". Scientific American. Vol. 297, no. 3. Scientific American, Inc. p. 120. Retrieved 2008-08-03.
  9. ^ Shermer, Michael (2001-03-01). The Pinker Instinct. Altadena, CA: Skeptics Society & Skeptic Magazine. Retrieved 2007-09-11.
  10. ^ "Steven Pinker: the mind reader" The Guardian Accessed 2006-11-25
  11. ^ Biography for Steven Pinker at imdb Accessed 2007-09-12
  12. ^ "How Steven Pinker Works" by Kristin E. Blagg The Harvard Crimson Accessed 2006-02-03
  13. ^ "Steven Pinker: the mind reader" by Ed Douglas The Guardian Accessed 2006-02-03
  14. ^ "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.
  15. ^ "My Genome, My Self" by Steven Pinker The New York Times Sunday Magazine Accessed 2010-04-10
  16. ^ G. R. Sampson's official Website
Debates
Vitae
Reviews

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