Steven Pinker

Categories: 1954 births | Canadian linguists | Canadian psychologists | Cognitive scientists | Jewish Canadians | Jewish scientists | Montrealers | Science writers

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Steven Pinker

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 and cognitive science 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, but 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 remain seminal works of modern evolutionary psychology, which frames the mind as a kind of swiss-army knife equipped with evolutionary tools to deal with problems faced by early hominids. Pinker, associated with other cognitive philosophers such as Noam Chomsky (M.I.T) is now being recognized as a psychodarwinist. Psychodarwinists such as Chomsky or David Buss believe that while physical body parts evolve due to natural selection, the intellectual mind evolves the same way. This is a rapidly growing psychological field especially with cognitive psychologists.

Pinker is author of some of the liveliest modern science writing. However, his books typically ignore and dismiss opposing evidence. In "Words and Rules" 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 popular as ever and the ongoing dispute does not appear to be heading towards any sort of resolution.

In recent years, Pinker has essentially ceased publishing empirical research in order to concentrate on writing for the general audience.

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' [1], 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 math and science angered much of the faculty.[2]

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