Steven Pinker

Steven Arthur Pinker (born September 18, 1954) is a Canadian-American cognitive psychologist, psycholinguist, popular science author, and public intellectual. He is an advocate of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind.

Pinker is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, and his academic specializations are visual cognition and developmental linguistics. His experimental subjects include mental imagery, shape recognition, visual attention, children's language development, regular and irregular phenomena in language, the neural bases of words and grammar, as well as the psychology of cooperation and communication, including euphemism, innuendo, emotional expression, and common knowledge. He has written two technical books that proposed a general theory of language acquisition and applied it to children's learning of verbs. In particular, his work with Alan Prince published in 1989 critiqued the connectionist model of how children acquire the past tense of English verbs, positing that children use default rules, such as adding ''-ed'' to make regular forms, sometimes in error, but are obliged to learn irregular forms one by one.

Pinker is the author of nine books for general audiences. ''The Language Instinct'' (1994), ''How the Mind Works'' (1997), ''Words and Rules'' (2000), ''The Blank Slate'' (2002), and ''The Stuff of Thought'' (2007) describe aspects of psycholinguistics and cognitive science, and include accounts of his own research, positing that language is an innate behavior shaped by natural selection and adapted to our communication needs. Pinker's ''The Sense of Style'' (2014) is a general language-oriented style guide.The Sense of Style Pinker's book ''The Better Angels of Our Nature'' (2011) posits that violence in human societies has generally declined over time, and identifies six major trends and five historical forces of this decline, the most important being the humanitarian revolution brought by the Enlightenment and its associated cultivation of reason. ''Enlightenment Now'' (2018) elaborates this argument by using social science data to show a general improvement of the human condition over recent history brought by reason, science and humanism. The nature and importance of reason is further explored in his next book '' Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters'' (2021).

In 2004, Pinker was named in ''Time''s "The 100 Most Influential People in the World Today", and in the years 2005, 2008, 2010, and 2011 in ''Foreign Policy''s list of "Top 100 Global Thinkers". Pinker was also included in '' Prospect Magazine's'' top 10 "World Thinkers" in 2013. He has won awards from the American Psychological Association, the National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Institution, the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, and the American Humanist Association. He delivered the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh in 2013. He has served on the editorial boards of a variety of journals, and on the advisory boards of several institutions. Pinker was the chair of the Usage Panel of the ''American Heritage Dictionary'' from 2008 to 2018.

Biography

Pinker was born in Montreal, Quebec, in 1954, to a middle-class Jewish family. His grandparents emigrated to Canada from Poland and Romania in 1926, and owned a small necktie factory in Montreal. His father was a lawyer. His mother eventually became a high-school vice-principal. His brother is a policy analyst for the Canadian government, while his sister, Susan Pinker, is a psychologist and writer who authored '' The Sexual Paradox'' and ''The Village Effect''.Steven Pinker: the mind reader
''The Guardian'' Accessed November 25, 2006.

Pinker graduated from Dawson College in 1973. He graduated from McGill University in 1976 with a Bachelor of Arts in psychology, then did doctoral studies in experimental psychology at Harvard University under Stephen Kosslyn, receiving a PhD in 1979. He did research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for a year, then became a professor at Harvard and then Stanford University.

From 1982 until 2003 Pinker taught at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, was the co-director of the Center for Cognitive Science (1985–1994), and eventually became the director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience (1994–1999), taking a one-year sabbatical at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1995–96. Since 2003 he has been serving as the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard and between 2008 and 2013 he also held the title of Harvard College Professor in recognition of his dedication to teaching. He currently gives lectures as a visiting professor at the New College of the Humanities, a private college in London."The professoriate"
, New College of the Humanities. Retrieved June 8, 2011."Professor Steven Pinker"
New College of the Humanities. Retrieved November 4, 2014.

Pinker married Nancy Etcoff in 1980 and they divorced in 1992; he married again in 1995 and again divorced.Biography for Steven Pinker at imdb
Retrieved September 12, 2007. His third wife, whom he married in 2007, is the novelist and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein."How Steven Pinker Works" by Kristin E. Blagg
''The Harvard Crimson'' Accessed February 3, 2006. He has two stepdaughters, the novelist Yael Goldstein Love and the poet Danielle Blau.

Pinker adopted atheism at 13, but at various times was a serious "cultural Jew.""Steven Pinker: the mind reader" by Ed Douglas
''The Guardian'' Accessed February 3, 2006.

Pinker is an avid cyclist.

Linguistic career

Pinker's research on visual cognition, begun in collaboration with his thesis adviser, Stephen Kosslyn, showed that mental images represent scenes and objects as they appear from a specific vantage point (rather than capturing their intrinsic three-dimensional structure), and thus correspond to the neuroscientist David Marr's theory of a "two-and-a-half-dimensional sketch."The nature of the language faculty and its implications for evolution of language He also showed that this level of representation is used in visual attention, and in object recognition (at least for asymmetrical shapes), contrary to Marr's theory that recognition uses viewpoint-independent representations.

In psycholinguistics, Pinker became known early in his career for promoting computational learning theory as a way to understand language acquisition in children. He wrote a tutorial review of the field followed by two books that advanced his own theory of language acquisition, and a series of experiments on how children acquire the passive, dative, and locative constructions. These books were ''Language Learnability and Language Development'' (1984), in Pinker's words "outlin nga theory of how children acquire the words and grammatical structures of their mother tongue", and ''Learnability and Cognition: The Acquisition of Argument Structure'' (1989), in Pinker's words "focus ngon one aspect of this process, the ability to use different kinds of verbs in appropriate sentences, such as intransitive verbs, transitive verbs, and verbs taking different combinations of complements and indirect objects". He then focused on verbs of two kinds that illustrate what he considers to be the processes required for human language: retrieving whole words from memory, like the past form of the irregular verbPinker has written a piece o
The Irregular Verbs
, stating that "I like the Irregular verbs of English, all 180 of them, because of what they tell us about the history of the language and the human minds that have perpetuated it. "bring", namely "brought"; and using rules to combine (parts of) words, like the past form of the regular verb "walk", namely "walked".

In 1988 Pinker and Alan Prince published a critique of a connectionist model of the acquisition of the past tense (a textbook problem in language acquisition), followed by a series of studies of how people use and acquire the past tense. This included a monograph on children's regularization of irregular forms and his popular 1999 book, '' Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language''. Pinker argued that language depends on two things: the associative remembering of sounds and their meanings in words, and the use of rules to manipulate symbols for grammar. He presented evidence against connectionism, where a child would have to learn all forms of all words and would simply retrieve each needed form from memory, in favour of the older alternative theory, the use of words and rules combined by generative phonology. He showed that mistakes made by children indicate the use of default rules to add suffixes such as "-ed": for instance 'breaked' and 'comed' for 'broke' and 'came'. He argued that this shows that irregular verb-forms in English have to be learnt and retrieved from memory individually, and that the children making these errors were predicting the regular "-ed" ending in an open-ended way by applying a mental rule. This rule for combining verb stems and the usual suffix can be expressed as V_past → V_stem + d, where V is a verb and d is the regular ending. Pinker further argued that since the ten most frequently occurring English verbs (be, have, do, say, make ... ) are all irregular, while 98.2% of the thousand least common verbs are regular, there is a "massive correlation" of frequency and irregularity. He explains this by arguing that every irregular form, such as 'took', 'came' and 'got', has to be committed to memory by the children in each generation, or else lost, and that the common forms are the most easily memorized. Any irregular verb that falls in popularity past a certain point is lost, and all future generations will treat it as a regular verb instead.

In 1990 Pinker, with Paul Bloom, published a paper arguing that the human language faculty must have evolved through natural selection.Pinker, S. & Bloom, P. (1990). Natural language and natural selection. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13 (4): 707‐784 The article provided arguments for a continuity-based view of language evolution, contrary to then-current discontinuity-based theories that see language as suddenly appearing with the advent of ''Homo sapiens'' as a kind of evolutionary accident. This discontinuity-based view was prominently argued by two main authorities, linguist Noam Chomsky and Stephen Jay Gould. The paper became widely cited and created renewed interest in the evolutionary prehistory of language, and has been credited with shifting the central question of the debate from "did language evolve?" to "how did language evolve?" The article also presaged Pinker's argument in ''The Language Instinct''.

In 2007 Pinker provided to Alan Dershowitz, a personal friend of Pinker's who was Jeffrey Epstein's defense attorney, Pinker's own interpretation of the wording of a federal law pertaining to the enticement of minors into illegal sex acts via the internet. Dershowitz included Pinker's opinion in a letter to the court during proceedings that resulted in a plea deal in which all federal sex trafficking charges against Epstein were dropped. In 2019, Pinker stated that he was unaware of the nature of the charges against Epstein, and that he engaged in an unpaid favor for his Harvard colleague Dershowitz, as he had regularly done. He stated in a Buzzfeed interview that he regrets writing the letter. Pinker says he never received money from Epstein and met with him three times over more than a dozen years, and said he could never stand Epstein and tried to keep his distance.

Popularization of science

Human cognition and natural language

Pinker's 1994 ''The Language Instinct'' was the first of several books to combine cognitive science with behavioral genetics and evolutionary psychology. It introduces the science of language and popularizes Noam Chomsky's theory that language is an innate faculty of mind, with the controversial twist that the faculty for language evolved by natural selection as an adaptation for communication. Pinker criticizes several widely held ideas about language – that it needs to be taught, that people's grammar is poor and getting worse with new ways of speaking, the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis that language limits the kinds of thoughts a person can have, and that other great apes can learn languages. Pinker sees language as unique to humans, evolved to solve the specific problem of communication among social hunter-gatherers. He argues that it is as much an instinct as specialized adaptative behavior in other species, such as a spider's web-weaving or a beaver's dam-building.

Pinker states in his introduction that his ideas are "deeply influenced" by Chomsky; he also lists scientists whom Chomsky influenced to "open up whole new areas of language study, from child development and speech perception to neurology and genetics" – Eric Lenneberg, George Miller, Roger Brown, Morris Halle and Alvin Liberman. Brown mentored Pinker through his thesis; Pinker stated that Brown's "funny and instructive" book ''Words and Things'' (1958) was one of the inspirations for ''The Language Instinct''.

There has been debate about the explanatory adequacy of the theory. By 2015, the nativist views of Pinker and Chomsky had a number of challenges on the grounds that they had incorrect core assumptions and were inconsistent with research evidence from psycholinguistics and child language acquisition.* , quote p. 1030: "Some critiques directly challenge the logic of arguments made by Chomsky, Pinker, and like-minded theorists, questioning such core assumptions as the universality of generative grammar, the autonomy of syntax in language processing, and the fundamental unlearnability of language (e.g., Bates & Goodman, 1999; Braine, 1994; Pullum & Scholz, 2002; Tomasello, 1995). Other critiques focus on empirical evidence inconsistent with particular nativist assertions. For example, the claim that negative evidence is not available when children make grammatical errors, an assumption central to the "poverty of the stimulus" argument at the heart of Chomsky’s theory, is not supported by a recent analysis of parents’ reformulations in speech to children (Chouinard & Clark, 2003). These diverse challenges, both philosophical and data-driven, have fueled debate over four decades about the explanatory adequacy of nativist theories of language learning." * , quote pp. 58–60: "GG is generally seen as a declining paradigm and its proponents now tend to stay away from conferences like AAAL (the American Association of Applied Linguistics) and University of Boston Child Language Development conferences, as a cursory count of papers on the basis of abstracts shows ..In the psycholinguistic community, the idea of innateness and a Language Acquisition Device (LAD) were seen as problematic ..Now that generation of GG linguists is retiring and there is a tendency in many universities not to replace them with younger scholars of that school, but rather appoint UB oriented linguists. There is almost a euphoria that the grip of the nativists on what constitutes linguistics is gone and that other approaches and more social orientations are seen as meaningful alternatives. Others try to explain the reasons for the decline of GG ..Some informants are quite outspoken about the role of GG in AL. William Grabe states: "Fundamentally Chomsky is wrong and we wasted a lot of time. In 1964 Chomsky’s Aspects was published. Now, in 2014, we are 50 years later. What impact has all of that had in real world language use? This is an overstated theoretical direction." Jan Hulstijn summarizes: "Generative linguistics has had no noticeable (or durable) impact."" The reality of Pinker's proposed language instinct, and the related claim that grammar is innate and genetically based, has been contested by linguists such as Geoffrey Sampson

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