Steven Pinker

Steven Arthur Pinker born September 18, 1954 is the Canadian-American cognitive psychologist, psycholinguist, popular science author as alive as public intellectual. He is an advocate of evolutionary psychology together with the computational idea of mind.

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

Pinker is also 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. Pinker's book The Better Angels of Our Nature 2011 posits that violence in human societies has loosely steadily declined over time, and identifies six major trends and five historical forces of this decline, the nearly 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 proceeds of the human precondition 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 Foreign Policy's list of "Top 100 Global Thinkers". Pinker was also covered 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 reported 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 use 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.

Pinker married Nancy Etcoff in 1980 and they divorced in 1992; he married again in 1995 and again divorced. His third wife, whom he married in 2007, is the novelist and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein. He has two stepdaughters: the novelist Yael Goldstein Love and the poet Danielle Blau.

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 Ph.D. 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 names of Harvard College Professor in recognition of his dedication to teaching. He currently offers lectures as a visiting professor at the New College of the Humanities, a private college in London.

Pinker adopted atheism at 13, but at various times was a serious "cultural Jew."