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Steven Pinker (born September 18 1954, in Montreal, Canada) is one of the most prominent cognitive scientists today. He is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and author of a number of best-selling books. His research on language and cognition has won prizes from the National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Institution of Great Britain, and the American Psychological Association.
Pinker was previously the director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was a professor for 21 years before returning to Harvard in 2003. He earned a Bachelor of Arts with First Class Honors in Psychology from McGill University in 1976, and a Doctor of Philosophy in Experimental Psychology from Harvard University in 1979.
Pinker has written about language, cognitive science and evolutionary psychology for both scientists and the public. He is most famous for his work on how children acquire language and for his modernization and 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. Pinker goes further than Chomsky, arguing many other human mental faculties are evolved, and is an ally of Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins in many evolutionary disputes. 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 Palaeocene ancestors. Pinker, associated with other cognitive philosophers such as Noam Chomsky (MIT) is now recognized as a psychodarwinist. Psychodarwinists believe the human mind evolved by natural selection just like other body parts. This view - pioneered by Leda Cosmides and John Tooby - is known as evolutionary psychology and is a rapidly growing research paradigm, especially among cognitive psychologists.
Pinker is author of some of the liveliest modern science writing. However, critics allege his books ignore or dismiss opposing evidence. In "Words and Rules," for example, he describes cognitive scientists as having dropped a competing model "like a hot potato" after his widely-cited criticism. If anything, that opposing view, Connectionism, remains as popular as ever and the ongoing dispute does not appear to be heading towards any sort of resolution.
His most recent book The Blank Slate was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Nonfiction and The Aventis Prizes for Science Books. In 2004, he was named one of Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People.
Pinker is a member of the organisation 'The Brights' , who believe that 'people with a naturalistic world view should not be stifled or marginalized'.
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.
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 (2005)
References
- Pinker, Steven. Steven Pinker. Retrieved from http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/ on June 29, 2005.
External links
- Steven Pinker's Website
- Gen Kuroki's Website about Steven Pinker
- Edge.org Biography of Steven Pinker (with video of Pinker)
- Biology vs. the Blank Slate Reason magazine interview with Pinker
- "Steven Pinker: the mind reader," The Guardian Profile, November 6, 1999.
- Jews, Genes, and Intelligence: A Lecture by Steven Pinker