Steven Pinker
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{{Infobox Person
|name=Steven Pinker
|image=StevePinker.jpg
|image_size=120px
|birth_name=Steven Arthur Pinker
|birth_date={{bda|1954|09|18}}
|right|framed|[[Steven Pinker]]
|nationality=Canadian-American
|occupation=Scientist <br /> Author
|employer=[[Harvard]]
}}
'''Steven Arthur Pinker''' (born [[September 18]] [[1954]]) is a prominent [[Canada|Canadian]]-[[United States|American]] [[experimental psychology|experimental psychologist]], [[cognitive science|cognitive scientist]], and author of [[popular science]]. Pinker is known for his wide-ranging advocacy of [[evolutionary psychology]] and the [[computational theory of mind]].
Pinker’s academic specializations are [[perception|visual cognition]] and [[language development|language development in children]], and he is most famous for popularizing the idea that language is an "instinct" or [[adaptation|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]]'' (1999), ''[[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.
== Biography==
===Career===
Pinker was born in [[Canada]] and graduated from [[Montreal]]'s [[Dawson College]] in 1973, received a [[bachelor's degree]] in [[experimental psychology]] from [[McGill University]] in 1976, then went on to earn his [[Doctor of Philosophy|doctorate]] in the same discipline at [[Harvard University|Harvard]] in 1979. He did research at the [[Massachusetts Institute of Technology]] (MIT) for a year, then became an [[assistant professor]] at Harvard and then [[Stanford University]]. From 1982 until 2003, Pinker taught in 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 2007, he is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard.<ref>[http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/about/longbio.html Official Biography]</ref>
Pinker was named one of ''[[Time Magazine]]'s'' 100 most influential people in the world in 2004<ref>{{cite web|title="Steven Pinker: How Our Minds Evolved" by Robert Wright, ''[[Time Magazine]]''|url=http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/about/media/2004_04_26_time.htm|accessdaymonth=8 February |accessyear=2006}}</ref> and one of ''[[Prospect (magazine)|Prospect]]'' and ''[[Foreign Policy (magazine)|Foreign Policy]]'''s 100 top public intellectuals in 2005.<ref>{{cite web|title="The Prospect/FP Top 100 Public Intellectuals," ''[[Foreign Policy (magazine)|Foreign Policy]]'' (free registration required) |url=http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3249|accessdaymonth=8 February |accessyear=2006}}</ref> He has also received honorary doctorates from the universities of [[University of Newcastle|Newcastle]], [[University of Surrey|Surrey]], [[Tel Aviv University|Tel Aviv]], [[McGill University|McGill]], and the [[University of Tromsø]], Norway.
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>{{cite web|title="PSYCHOANALYSIS Q-and-A: Steven Pinker," ''[[The Harvard Crimson]]''|url=http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=505366|accessdaymonth=8 February |accessyear=2006}}</ref>
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 [[Jew]]ish community of [[Montreal]]. 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 [[Secular Jewish culture|cultural Jew]]."<ref name = "Douglas">{{cite web|title= "Steven Pinker: the mind reader" by Ed Douglas, ‘‘[[The Guardian]]’’|url= http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,3926387,00.html|accessdaymonth=3 February |accessyear= 2006}}</ref> As a teenager, he says he considered himself an [[anarchism|anarchist]] until he witnessed [[civil unrest]] following a police strike in 1969.<ref>"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, Steven (2002), ''The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature'', [[Penguin Putnam]], ISBN 0-670-03151-8.</ref> His father, a trained lawyer, first worked as a traveling salesman, 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 [[Government of Canada|Canadian government]]. His sister, [[Susan Pinker]], is a school [[psychologist]] and writer, author of ''[[The Sexual Paradox]]''.<ref name=siblings>{{Citation | last =Shermer | first =Michael
| authorlink=Michael Shermer | publication-date =[[2001-03-01]] | title =The Pinker Instinct | publication-place =Altadena, CA | publisher =Skeptics Society & Skeptic Magazine | url =http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-10144194_ITM | accessdate =2007-09-11}}</ref><ref>{{cite web|title="Steven Pinker: the mind reader," ''[[The Guardian]]''|url=http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,3926387,00.html|accessdaymonth=25 November |accessyear=2006}}</ref> Pinker married Nancy Etcoff in 1980 and they divorced 1992; he married Ilavenil Subbiah in 1995 and they, too, divorced.<ref name=wives>{{cite web |url=http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0684348/bio |title=Biography for Steven Pinker |accessdate=2007-09-12}}</ref> His partner is the novelist and philosopher [[Rebecca Goldstein]].<ref name = "Blagg">{{cite web|title="How Steven Pinker Works" by Kristin E. Blagg, ''[[The Harvard Crimson]]''|url= http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/about/media/2005_11_04_harvardcrimson.html| accessdaymonth=3 February | accessyear= 2006}}</ref> He has no children.
==Theories of language and mind==
Pinker is most famous for his work — popularized in ''[[The Language Instinct]]'' (1994) — on how children [[language acquisition|acquire language]], and for his popularization of [[Noam Chomsky]]'s work on language as an innate faculty of mind. Pinker has suggested an [[evolution]]ary [[mental module]] for language, although this idea remains controversial (see below). Additionally Pinker argues that many other human mental faculties are [[Adaptive_Evolution|adaptive]] (and is an ally of [[Daniel Dennett]] and [[Richard Dawkins]] in many evolutionary disputes).
===Written work===
Pinker's books,'' [[How the Mind Works]]'' and ''[[The Blank Slate]]'', are from the [[evolutionary psychology]] tradition, which views the mind as a kind of Swiss-army knife equipped with a set of specialized tools (or modules) to deal with problems faced by our [[Pleistocene]] ancestors. Pinker and other [[List of evolutionary psychologists|evolutionary psychologists]] believe that these tools evolved by [[natural selection]], just like other body parts. The field of [[evolutionary psychology]] was pioneered by [[E. O. Wilson]], [[Leda Cosmides]] and [[John Tooby]]. ''[[The Language Instinct]]'' has been criticized by [[Geoffrey Sampson]] in his book, ''The 'Language Instinct' Debate'' [http://www.grsampson.net/REmpNat.html]. The assumptions underlying the [[Psychological nativism|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)''.
==Selected publications==
===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|Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language]]'' (1999)
* ''[[The Blank Slate|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)
* ''[[The Stuff of Thought|The Stuff of Thought: 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]], http://richarddawkins.net/article,1449,In-defense-of-dangerous-ideas,Steven-Pinker)
* a great number of Pinker's articles in http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/
==References==
{{reflist}}
==External links==
* [http://www.percepp.com/pinker.htm Language Instinct ?: Gradualistic Natural Selection is not a good enough explanation]
* [http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/164 Steven Pinker: The stuff of thought] [[TED (conference)|TED]], July, 2005
* [http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/163 Steven Pinker: A brief history of violence] TED, March, 2007
* [http://fora.tv/2007/10/15/Steven_Pinker_Games_People_Play Steven Pinker discusses the "Games People Play: Indirect Speech as a Window into Social Relationships"]
* [http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/magazine/13Psychology-t.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print Steven Pinker discusses the evolutionary psychology of morality in "The Moral Instinct"] [[The New York Times]], [[January 13]], [[2008]]
* [http://www.cbc.ca/thehour/video.php?id=1918 Steven Pinker on The Hour]
{{wikiquote}}
===Debates===
* [http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/pinker_rose/pinker_rose_p1.html The Two Steves] Debate with Steven Rose
* [http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/debate05/debate05_index.html The Science of Gender and Science] Debate with Elizabeth Spelke
===Vitae===
*[http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/ Steven Pinker's Website]
*[http://www.time.com/time/subscriber/2004/time100/scientists/100pinker.html Time magazine page on Pinker]
*[http://www.math.tohoku.ac.jp/~kuroki/Pinker/ Gen Kuroki's Website about Steven Pinker]
*[http://www.reitstoen.com/pinker.php Steven Pinker Multimedia]. Extensive lists of audio and video files
*[http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,3926387,00.html "Steven Pinker: the mind reader,"] ''[[The Guardian]]'' Profile, [[November 6]], [[1999]]
*[http://www.cosmoetica.com/DSI4.htm Detailed Pinker interview focusing on ''The Stuff of Thought'']
*[http://www.booktalk.org/transcripts/transcript5.php Live interview with Steven Pinker on "The Blank Slate"]
*[http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3554279466299738997 Online video interview with Pinker]
*[http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/scienceandnature/story/0,,2174421,00.html "Basic Instincts"] - ''[[The Guardian]]'' profile by Oliver Burkeman, [[September 22]], [[2007]].
===Reviews===
*[http://www.city-journal.org/html/16_4_urbanities-language.html Article on The Language Instinct] by [[Theodore Dalrymple]]
*[http://www.hereinstead.com/sys-tmpl/bmenadonpinker/ Louis Menand's critique of The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker], originally published in ''[[The New Yorker]]'' magazine
*[http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/~swb24/reviews/Pinker.htm "Meet the Flintstones"] by [[Simon Blackburn]], a critique of [[The Blank Slate]].
*[http://reason.com/0210/fe.rb.biology.shtml Biology vs. the Blank Slate] ''[[Reason (magazine)|Reason]]'' magazine interview with Pinker
*[http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/media/2004_10_29_religion.htm Evolutionary Psychology of Religion]
*[http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft9803/articles/oakes.html "The Blind Programmer"], a review of ''How the Mind Works'' by Edward Oakes.
*[http://books.monstersandcritics.com/features/article_1325183.php/Featured_Book_Review_The_Stuff_Of_Thought_by_Steven_Pinker_ Detailed review of ''The Stuff of Thought'', by Steven Pinker]
*[http://www7.nationalacademies.org/arts/Steven_Pinker.html Steven Pinker to speak at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C. on [[September 17]], [[2007]]]
{{Steven Pinker}}
{{Persondata
|NAME=Pinker, Steven
|ALTERNATIVE NAMES=
|SHORT DESCRIPTION=[[United States of American|American]] [[cognitive science|cognitive scientist]]
|DATE OF BIRTH=[[18 September]] [[1954]]
|PLACE OF BIRTH=[[Montreal]]
|DATE OF DEATH=
|PLACE OF DEATH=
}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Pinker, Steven}}
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