Steven Pinker
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Steven Arthur Pinker (born September 18 1954) is a prominent American experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, and popular science writer known for his spirited and 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 popularising the idea that language is an "instinct" or biological adaptation shaped by natural selection rather than a by-product of general intelligence. His four books for a general audience — The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, Words and Rules and The Blank Slate — have won numerous awards.
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[edit] Biography and career
Pinker was born into the English-speaking Jewish community of Montreal, but became an atheist at age thirteen (although he still identifies with various aspects of Jewish culture<ref name = "Douglas">"Steven Pinker: the mind reader" by Ed Douglas, ‘‘The Guardian’’. Retrieved on 3 February, 2006.</ref>). His father, a trained lawyer, first worked as a travelling salesman, while his mother, was first a home-maker then a guidance counselor and high-school vice-principal. He has one brother and one sister.<ref>"Steven Pinker: the mind reader," The Guardian. Retrieved on 25 November, 2006.</ref> Pinker has been married and divorced twice, and his current girlfriend, Rebecca Goldstein, is a professor of philosophy at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut.<ref name = "Blagg">"How Steven Pinker Works" by Kristin E. Blagg, The Harvard Crimson. Retrieved on 3 February, 2006.</ref> He has no children.
Pinker received a first class bachelor's degree in experimental psychology from McGill University in 1976, then went on to earn his doctorate in the same discipline at Harvard in 1979. Pinker is currently the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard having previously directed of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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.<ref>"PSYCHOANALYSIS Q-and-A: Steven Pinker," The Harvard Crimson. Retrieved on 8 February, 2006.</ref>
[edit] Language as instinct
Pinker is most famous for his work - popularised 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. Additionally Pinker argues that many other human mental faculties are evolved, and is an ally of Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins in many evolutionary disputes.
[edit] Theory of mind
Pinker's books, How the Mind Works and The Blank Slate, are seminal works of modern evolutionary psychology, which views the mind as a kind of Swiss-army knife equipped by evolution with a set of specialized tools (or modules) to deal with problems faced by our Pleistocene ancestors. Pinker and other evolutionary psychologists believe the human mind evolved by natural selection, just like other body parts. This view, pioneered as a field by E. O. Wilson, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, is pursued under evolutionary psychology and is a rapidly growing research paradigm, especially among cognitive psychologists.
[edit] Awards and recognition
Pinker was named one of Time Magazine's 100 most influential people in the world in 2004<ref>"Steven Pinker: How Our Minds Evolved" by Robert Wright, Time Magazine. Retrieved on 8 February, 2006.</ref> and one of Prospect and Foreign Policy's 100 top public intellectuals in 2005.<ref>"The Prospect/FP Top 100 Public Intellectuals," Foreign Policy (free registration required). Retrieved on 8 February, 2006.</ref> He has also received honorary doctorates from the universities of Newcastle, Surrey, Tel Aviv and McGill.
[edit] Selected publications
[edit] 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)
[edit] 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.
[edit] References
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[edit] External links
- Steven Pinker's Website
- Article on The Language Instinct by Theodore Dalrymple
- Gen Kuroki's Website about Steven Pinker
- 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.
- Steven Pinker Multimedia. Extensive lists of audio and video files.
- Biology vs. the Blank Slate Reason magazine interview with Pinker
- "Steven Pinker: the mind reader," The Guardian Profile, November 6, 1999.
- Evolutionary Psychology of Religion
- "The Blind Programmer", a review of How the Mind Works by Edward Oakes.
- Live interview with Stephen Pinker on "The Blank Slate"
| Steven Pinker |
|---|
| The Language Instinct - How the Mind Works - Words and Rules - The Blank Slate |
| See also: Evolutionary psychology - Cognitive science - Leda Cosmides - John Tooby |
| Persondata | |
|---|---|
| NAME | Pinker, Steven |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | |
| SHORT DESCRIPTION | American cognitive scientist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | 18 September, 1954 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Montreal |
| DATE OF DEATH | |
| PLACE OF DEATH | |
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