Steven Arthur Pinker (born September 18, 1954) is a Canadian-American cognitive psychologist, linguist, and popular science author. He is Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, 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 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, and 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, arguing instead 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 also the author of eight books for general audiences. His earlier works argue that the human faculty for language is an instinct, an innate behavior shaped by natural selection and adapted to our communication needs. 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 [the field of] psycholinguistics and cognitive science, and include accounts of his own research. Pinker's The Sense of Style (2014), as a general style guide, is another language-oriented work. Informed by modern science and psychology, it offers advice on how to produce more comprehensible and unambiguous writing in nonfiction contexts and explains why so much of today's academic and popular writing is difficult for readers to understand.
Pinker's two other books for the public leave behind individual questions of language and learning in favor of broader societal themes. The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011) makes the case that violence in human societies has, in general, steadily declined with time, and identifies six major causes of this decline. Enlightenment Now (2018) continues the optimistic thesis of The Better Angels of Our Nature by using social science data from various sources to argue for a general improvement of the human condition over recent history.
Pinker has been named as one of the world's most influential intellectuals by various magazines. 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. He has frequently participated in public debates on science and society.
Biography
Pinker was born in Montreal, Quebec, in 1954, to a middle-class Jewish family. His parents were Roslyn (Wiesenfeld) and Harry Pinker. His grandparents emigrated to Canada from Poland and Romania in 1926, and owned a small necktie factory in 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
Robert 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 Ilavenil Subbiah in 1995 and they too 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 received a Bachelor of Arts in psychology from McGill University in 1976, and earned his Doctorate of Philosophy in experimental psychology at Harvard University in 1979 under Stephen Kosslyn. He did research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 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, 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.
About his Jewish background Pinker 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, when:
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 identifies himself as an equity feminist,
which he defines as "a moral doctrine about equal treatment that makes
no commitments regarding open empirical issues in psychology or
biology". He reported the result of a test of his political orientation that characterized him as "neither leftist nor rightist, more libertarian than authoritarian."
He describes himself as having "experienced a primitive tribal
stirring" after his genes were shown to trace back to the Middle East,
noting that he "found it just as thrilling to zoom outward in the
diagrams of my genetic lineage and see my place in a family tree that
embraces all of humanity".
Pinker also identifies himself as an atheist. In the 2007 interview with the Point of Inquiry
podcast, Pinker states that he would "defend atheism as an empirically
supported view." He sees theism and atheism as competing empirical
hypotheses, and states that "we're learning more and more about what
makes us tick, including our moral sense, without needing the assumption
of a deity or a soul. It's naturally getting crowded out by the
successive naturalistic explanations."
Throughout the criminal court trial of pedophile philanthropist Jeffrey Epstein, Pinker lent his name and expertise to Epstein's defense.
Pinker notably prepared a linguistic argument that argued for Epstein's
innocence and attempted to undermine the prosecution's case by casting
doubt on the victim's credibility. Pinker also provided character reference for Epstein.
In 2019, Epstein's case re-emerged in the public spotlight and Pinker
retroactively repudiated his support for Epstein following Epstein's
death.
Research and theory
Pinker discussing his book Enlightenment Now at CSICon.
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." 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[ing] a 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[ing] on 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 verb
"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 an influential 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 Vpast → Vstem
+ 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 the paper "Natural Language and Natural Selection", arguing
that the human language faculty must have evolved through natural selection.
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 of the 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.
Pinker's research includes delving into human nature and what science says about it. In his interview on the Point of Inquiry
podcast in 2007, he provides the following examples of what he
considers defensible conclusions of what science says human nature is:
- The sexes are not statistically identical; "their interests and talents form two overlapping distributions". Any policy that wants to provide equal outcomes for both men and women will have to discriminate against one or the other.
- "Individuals differ in personality and intelligence."
- "People favor themselves and their families over an abstraction called society."
- Humans are "systematically self deceived. Each one of us thinks of ourselves as more competent and benevolent than we are."
- "People crave status and power"
Pinker also speaks about evolutionary psychology
in the podcast and believes that this area of science is going to pay
off. He cites the fact that there are many areas of study, such as
beauty, religion, play, and sexuality, that were not studied 15 years
ago. It is thanks to evolutionary psychology that these areas are being
studied.
Popularization of science
Pinker in 2011.
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.
The reality of Pinker's proposed language instinct, and the
related claim that grammar is innate and genetically based, has been
contested by many linguists. One prominent opponent of Pinker's view is Geoffrey Sampson whose 1997 book, Educating Eve: The 'Language Instinct' Debate has been described as the "definitive response" to Pinker's book.
Sampson argues that while it may seem attractive to argue the nature
side of the 'nature versus nurture' debate, the nurture side may better
support the creativity and nobility of the human mind. Sampson denies
there is a language instinct, and argues that children can learn
language because people can learn anything. Others have sought a middle ground between Pinker's nativism and Sampson's culturalism.
The assumptions underlying the nativist view have also been criticised in Jeffrey Elman's Rethinking Innateness: A Connectionist Perspective on Development, which defends the connectionist approach that Pinker attacked. In his 1996 book Impossible Minds, the machine intelligence researcher Igor Aleksander calls The Language Instinct
excellent, and argues that Pinker presents a relatively soft claim for
innatism, accompanied by a strong dislike of the 'Standard Social
Sciences Model' or SSSM (Pinker's term), which supposes that development
is purely dependent on culture. Further, Aleksander writes that while
Pinker criticises some attempts to explain language processing with
neural nets, Pinker later makes use of a neural net to create past tense
verb forms correctly. Aleksander concludes that while he doesn't
support the SSSM, "a cultural repository of language just seems the easy
trick for an efficient evolutionary system armed with an iconic state machine to play."
Two other books, How the Mind Works (1997) and The Blank Slate (2002), broadly surveyed the mind and defended the idea of a complex human nature with many mental faculties that are adaptive (Pinker is an ally of Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins in many disputes surrounding adaptationism).
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. On the debate
around The Blank Slate, Pinker called Thomas Sowell's book A Conflict of Visions "wonderful", and explained that "The Tragic Vision" and the "Utopian Vision" are the views of human nature behind right- and left-wing ideologies.
In Words and Rules: the Ingredients of Language
(1999), Pinker argues from his own research that regular and irregular
phenomena are products of computation and memory lookup, respectively,
and that language can be understood as an interaction between the two. "Words and Rules" is also the title of an essay by Pinker outlining many of the topics discussed in the book. Critiqueing the book from the perspective of generative linguistics Charles Yang, in the London Review of Books, writes that "this book never runs low on hubris or hyperbole".
The book's topic, the English past tense, is in Yang's view
unglamorous, and Pinker's attempts at compromise risk being in no man's
land between rival theories. Giving the example of German, Yang argues
that irregular nouns in that language at least all belong to classes,
governed by rules, and that things get even worse in languages that
attach prefixes and suffixes to make up long 'words': they can't be
learnt individually, as there are untold numbers of combinations. "All
Pinker (and the connectionists) are doing is turning over the rocks at
the base of the intellectual landslide caused by the Chomskian
revolution."
In The Stuff of Thought
(2007), Pinker looks at a wide range of issues around the way words
related to thoughts on the one hand, and to the world outside ourselves
on the other. Given his evolutionary perspective, a central question is
how an intelligent mind capable of abstract thought evolved: how a mind
adapted to Stone Age life could work in the modern world. Many quirks of language are the result.
Pinker is critical of theories about the evolutionary origins of language
that argue that linguistic cognition might have evolved from earlier
musical cognition. He sees language as being tied primarily to the
capacity for logical reasoning, and speculates that human proclivity for
music may be a spandrel
— a feature not adaptive in its own right, but that has persisted
through other traits that are more broadly practical, and thus selected
for. In How the Mind Works, Pinker reiterates Immanuel Kant's
view that music is not in itself an important cognitive phenomenon,
but that it happens to stimulate important auditory and spatio-motor
cognitive functions. Pinker compares music to "auditory cheesecake",
stating that "As far as biological cause and effect is concerned, music
is useless". This argument has been rejected by Daniel Levitin and Joseph Carroll, experts in music cognition, who argue that music has had an important role in the evolution of human cognition. In his book This Is Your Brain On Music, Levitin argues that music could provide adaptive advantage through sexual selection, social bonding, and cognitive development;
he questions the assumption that music is the antecedent to language,
as opposed to its progenitor, noting that many species display
music-like habits that could be seen as precursors to human music.
Pinker has also been critical of "whole language" reading instruction techniques, stating in How the Mind Works, "... the
dominant technique, called 'whole language,' the insight that [spoken]
language is a naturally developing human instinct has been garbled into
the evolutionarily improbable claim that reading is a naturally developing human instinct." In the appendix to the 2007 reprinted edition of The Language Instinct, Pinker cited Why Our Children Can't Read by cognitive psychologist Diane McGuinness as his favorite book on the subject and noted:
One raging public debate involving language went unmentioned in The Language Instinct: the "reading wars," or dispute over whether children should be explicitly taught to read by decoding the sounds of words from their spelling (loosely known as "phonics") or whether they can develop it instinctively by being immersed in a text-rich environment (often called "whole language"). I tipped my hand in the paragraph in [the sixth chapter of the book] which said that language is an instinct but reading is not. Like most psycholinguists (but apparently unlike many school boards), I think it's essential for children to be taught to become aware of speech sounds and how they are coded in strings of letters.
The Better Angels of Our Nature
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Violence in the middle ages: detail from "Mars" in Das Mittelalterliche Hausbuch, c. 1475 – 1480. The image is used by Pinker in The Better Angels of Our Nature, with the comment "as the Housebook illustrations suggest, [the knights] did not restrict their killing to other knights".
In The Better Angels of Our Nature, published in 2011, Pinker
argues that violence, including tribal warfare, homicide, cruel
punishments, child abuse, animal cruelty, domestic violence, lynching,
pogroms, and international and civil wars, has decreased over multiple
scales of time and magnitude. Pinker considers it unlikely that human
nature has changed. In his view, it is more likely that human nature
comprises inclinations toward violence and those that counteract them,
the "better angels of our nature". He outlines six 'major historical
declines of violence' that all have their own socio/cultural/economic
causes:
- "The Pacification Process" – The rise of organized systems of government has a correlative relationship with the decline in violent deaths. As states expand they prevent tribal feuding, reducing losses.
- "The Civilizing Process" – Consolidation of centralized states and kingdoms throughout Europe results in the rise of criminal justice and commercial infrastructure, organizing previously chaotic systems that could lead to raiding and mass violence.
- "The Humanitarian Revolution" – The 18th - 20th century abandonment of institutionalized violence by the state (breaking on the wheel, burning at the stake). Suggests this is likely due to the spike in literacy after the invention of the printing press thereby allowing the proletariat to question conventional wisdom.
- "The Long Peace" – The powers of 20th Century believed that period of time to be the bloodiest in history. This led to a largely peaceful 65-year period post World War I and World War II. Developed countries have stopped warring (against each other and colonially), adopted democracy, and this has led a massive decline (on average) of deaths.
- "The New Peace" – The decline in organized conflicts of all kinds since the end of the Cold War.
- "The Rights Revolutions" – The reduction of systemic violence at smaller scales against vulnerable populations (racial minorities, women, children, homosexuals, animals).
The book was welcomed by many critics and reviewers, who found its
arguments convincing and its synthesis of a large volume of historical
evidence compelling.
It also aroused criticism on a variety of grounds, such as whether
deaths per capita was an appropriate metric, Pinker's atheism, lack of
moral leadership, excessive focus on Europe (though the book covers
other areas), the interpretation of historical data, questionable
methodologies, and its image of indigenous people.
English writing style in the 21st century
In his seventh popular book, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century
(2014), Pinker attempts to provide a writing style guide that is
informed by modern science and psychology, offering advice on how to
produce more comprehensible and unambiguous writing in nonfiction
contexts and explaining why so much of today's academic and popular
writing is difficult for readers to understand.
In a November 2014 episode of the Point of Inquiry
podcast, host Lindsay Beyerstein, asked Pinker how his style guide was
different from the many guides that already exist. His answer,
The Thinking Person's Guide because I don't issue dictates from on high as most manuals do but explain why the various guidelines will improve writing, what they do for language, what they do for the reader's experience, in the hope that the users will apply the rules judiciously knowing what they are designed to accomplish, rather than robotically.
He also indicated that the 21st century was applicable because
language and usage change over time and it has been a long time since William Strunk wrote Elements of Style.
Public debate
Pinker and Nils Brose speaking at a neuroscience conference.
Pinker is a frequent participant in public debates surrounding the
contributions of science to contemporary society. Social commentators
such as Ed West, author of The Diversity Illusion, consider Pinker important and daring in his willingness to confront taboos, as in The Blank Slate. This doctrine (the tabula rasa), writes West, remained accepted "as fact, rather than fantasy"
a decade after the book's publication. West describes Pinker as "no
polemicist, and he leaves readers to draw their own conclusions".
In January 2005, Pinker defended comments by then-President of Harvard University Lawrence Summers.
Summers had commented that gender gaps in mathematics and science were
due to "different availability of aptitude at the high end." In a debate between Pinker and Elizabeth Spelke on gender and science, Pinker argued in favor of gender essentialism and stereotype accuracy.
In 2009, in The New York Times, Pinker wrote a mixed review of Malcolm Gladwell's essays, criticizing his analytical methods. Gladwell replied, disputing Pinker's comments about the importance of IQ on teaching performance and by analogy, the effect, if any, of draft order on quarterback performance in the National Football League. Advanced NFL Stats
addressed the issue statistically, siding with Pinker and showing that
differences in methodology could explain the two men's differing
opinions.
In 2009, David Shenk criticized Pinker for siding with the "nature" argument and for "never once acknowledg[ing] gene-environment interaction or epigenetics" in an article on nature versus nurture in The New York Times. Pinker responded to a question about epigenetics as a possibility for the decline in violence in a lecture for the BBC World Service. Pinker said it was unlikely since the decline in violence happened too rapidly to be explained by genetic changes.
Helga Vierich and Cathryn Townsend wrote a critical review of Pinker's
sweeping "Civilizational" explanations for patterns of human violence
and warfare in response to a lecture he gave at Cambridge University in September 2015.
Steven Pinker is also noted for having identified the rename of Phillip Morris to Altria as an "egregious example" of phonesthesia,
with the company attempting to "switch its image from bad people who
sell addictive carcinogens to a place or state marked by altruism and
other lofty values".
Pinker continued to court controversy through his 2018 book Enlightenment Now, in which he argued that enlightenment rationality should be defended against attacks from both the left and right. The Guardian
criticized the book as a "triumphalist" work that has a "curious
relationship to intellectual history" and overestimates the role of
campus activists in mainstream discourse.
In a debate with Pinker, post-colonial theorist Homi Bhabha argued that, in Enlightenment Now,
Pinker downplayed the immoral consequences of Enlightenment philosophy,
such as inequality, slavery, imperialism, world wars, and genocide.
Pinker responded that humanity, prior to the Enlightenment, had been
characterized by poverty and disease.
Awards and distinctions
Pinker in Göttingen, 2010
Pinker was named one of Time's 100 most influential people in the world in 2004 and one of Prospect and Foreign Policy's 100 top public intellectuals in both years the poll was carried out, 2005 and 2008; in 2010 and 2011 he was named by Foreign Policy to its list of top global thinkers. In 2016, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.
His research in cognitive psychology has won the Early Career Award (1984) and Boyd McCandless Award (1986) from the American Psychological Association, the Troland Research 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, Simon Fraser University and the University of Tromsø. He was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, in 1998 and in 2003. On May 13, 2006, he received the American Humanist Association's Humanist of the Year award for his contributions to public understanding of human evolution.
Pinker has served on the editorial boards of journals such as Cognition, Daedalus, and PLOS One, and on the advisory boards of institutions for scientific research (e.g., the Allen Institute for Brain Science), free speech (e.g., the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education), the popularization of science (e.g., the World Science Festival and the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry), peace (e.g., the Peace Research Endowment), and secular humanism (e.g., the Freedom from Religion Foundation and the Secular Coalition for America).
Since 2008, he has chaired the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary, and wrote the essay on usage for the fifth edition of the Dictionary, which was published in 2011.
In February 2001, Pinker, "whose hair has long been the object of admiration, and envy, and intense study", was nominated by acclamation as the first member of the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists (LFHCfS) organized by the Annals of Improbable Research.
