"Why do people believe that there are dangerous implications of the idea that the mind is a product of the brain, that the brain is organized in part by the genome, and that the genome was shaped by natural selection?" -- Steven Pinker
Steven Arthur Pinker (born September 18, 1954) is a Canadian-American experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, linguist and author of popular science. He is a Harvard College Professor and Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University and is known for his wide-ranging advocacy of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind.
Pinker’s academic specializations are visual cognition and psycholinguistics. His academic contributions 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 more popular 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). Pinker's books have won numerous awards and been New York Times best-sellers.
"Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system, painting and sculpture on the visual system. Poetry and literature depend on language.""As many political writers have pointed out, commitment to political equality is not an empirical claim that people are clones.""But in most cases even the possibility that the correlations reflect shared genes is taboo.""But the newest research is showing that many properties of the brain are genetically organized, and don't depend on information coming in from the senses.""By exploring the political and moral colorings of discoveries about what makes us tick, we can have a more honest science and a less fearful intellectual milieu.""Evolutionary psychology is one of four sciences that are bringing human nature back into the picture.""I don't consider myself to be that radical a thinker.""I think this confusion leads intellectuals and artists themselves to believe that the elite arts and humanities are a kind of higher, exalted form of human endeavor.""Many artists and scholars have pointed out that ultimately art depends on human nature.""Most intellectuals today have a phobia of any explanation of the mind that invokes genetics.""My opinions about human nature are shared by many psychologists, linguists, and biologists, not to mention philosophers and scholars going back centuries.""Parents provide their children with genes as well as an environment, so the fact that talkative parents have kids with good language skills could simply mean that and that the same genes that make parents talkative make children articulate.""People today sometimes get uncomfortable with empirical claims that seem to clash with their political assumptions, often because they haven't given much thought to the connections.""Personality and socialization aren't the same thing.""So no, it's not all in the genes, but what isn't in the genes isn't in the family environment either. It can't be explained in terms of the overall personalities or the child-rearing practices of parents.""The connections I draw between human nature and political systems in my new book, for example, were prefigured in the debates during the Enlightenment and during the framing of the American Constitution.""The great appeal of the doctrine that the mind is a blank slate is the simple mathematical fact that zero equals zero.""There has to be innate circuitry that does the learning, that creates the culture, that acquires the culture, and that responds to socialization.""Why are empirical questions about how the mind works so weighted down with political and moral and emotional baggage?"
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. 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 Tromsų, 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 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. 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 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. As a teenager, he says he considered himself an anarchist until he witnessed civil unrest following a police strike in 1969. He has reported the result of a test of his political orientation that characterized him as neither leftist nor rightist, more libertarian than authoritarian.
Pinker is known within psychology for his theory of language acquisition, his research on the 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. 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.
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)
The Ingredients of Language (1999)
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)
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
