Background

Steven Arthur Pinker was born on September 18, 1954, in Montreal, Quebec, Canada to the family of Harry Pinker and Roslyn Wiesenfeld. Pinker was raised in a largely Jewish neighborhood of Montreal. His father was a lawyer, who worked as a manufacturer’s representative for a while. His mother was initially a home-maker, but later became a guidance counselor and high-school vice-principal. His grandparents were immigrants from Poland and Romania who came to Canada in 1926. They later set up a small neck-tie factory in Montreal. He is highly appreciative of his Jewish ancestry. Although he has been an atheist since he was 13 years old, he has stated that there have been times in his life when he had described himself as a "serious cultural Jewish." His younger brother, Robert, serves as a policy analyst for the Canadian government, while his younger sister, Susan, is a celebrated psychologist and author herself.

Education

Steven Pinker received his high school education at Wagar High School in Côte Saint-Luc, Quebec. In 1971, he enrolled at Dawson College, graduating two years later. He then attended McGill University, where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in psychology in 1976. In 1979, he got his Doctorate of Philosophy in experimental psychology from Harvard University under Stephen Kosslyn. He then invested a year in research at Massachusetts Institute of Technology before starting his career as an assistant professor at Harvard and later, at Stanford.

Career

Steven Pinker spent a year each at Harvard (1980-1981) and at Stanford (1981-1982) as an assistant professor. He then returned to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to take a job in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. He was associated with MIT from 1982 to 2003, for more than two decades.

During his tenure at MIT, Pinker served as the co-director of the Center for Cognitive Science from 1985 to 1994 and from 1994 to 1999, as the director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. In 1995, he took a one-year sabbatical at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Pinker came back to Harvard as a full-time professor in 2003 and began to teach as the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology. He received the honor of being a Harvard College Professor from 2008 to 2013. At present, he is a lecturer at the New College of the Humanities, a private college in London.

In 1994 Pinker published the first of eight books written for a general audience. The Language Instinct was an introduction to all aspects of language, held together by the idea that language is a biological adaptation. This was followed in 1997 by How the Mind Works, which offered a similar synthesis of the rest of the mind, from vision and reasoning to the emotions, humor, and art. In 1999 he published Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language which presented his research on regular and irregular verbs as a way of explaining how language works. In 2002 he published The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, which explored the political, moral, and emotional colorings of the concept of human nature. The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature, published in 2007, discussed the ways in which language reveals our thoughts, emotions, and social relationships. In 2011 he published The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. This was followed in 2014 by The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century. His most recent book, published in 2017, is Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. A collection of his academic articles called Language, Cognition, and Human Nature was published by Oxford University Press in 2013. Pinker frequently writes for The New York Times, The Guardian, Time, The Atlantic, and other magazines on diverse topics including language, consciousness, education, morality, politics, genetics, bioethics, and trends in violence.

Achievements

• Steven Arthur Pinker has garnered recognition for advocating evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind. He has won many prizes for his books (including the William James Book Prize three times, the Los Angeles Times Science Book Prize, the Eleanor Maccoby Book Prize, the Cundill Recognition of Excellence in History Award, and the Plain English International Award), his research (including the Troland Research Prize from the National Academy of Sciences, the Early Career Award from the American Psychological Association, the Henry Dale Prize from the Royal Institution of Great Britain, and the William James Award from the Association for Psychological Science), and his graduate and undergraduate teaching. He has also been named the Humanist of the Year, Honorary President of the Canadian Psychological Association, Time magazine's Hundred Most Influential People in the World Today, Foreign Policy's 100 Global Thinkers, and the recipient of eight honorary doctorates.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Visual Cognition

    (These essays tackle some of the central issues in visual ...)

    1985
  • Lexical and Conceptual Semantics

    (How are word meanings represented in the human mind and w...)

    1992
  • Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

    (Is the world really falling apart? Is the ideal of progre...)

    2018
  • The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

    (In this classic, the world's expert on language and mind ...)

    1994
  • The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century

    (In this entertaining and eminently practical book, the co...)

    2018
  • The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

    (Wasn't the twentieth century the most violent in history?...)

    2011
  • Words and Rules: The Ingredients Of Language

    (In Words and Rules, Steven Pinker explores profound myste...)

    1999
  • The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2004

    (The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2004, edited...)

    2004
  • Learnability and Cognition, new edition: The Acquisition of Argument Structure

    (Before Steven Pinker wrote bestsellers on language and hu...)

    1989
  • Connections and Symbols

    (Connections and Symbols provides the first systematic ana...)

    1988
  • Language, Cognition, and Human Nature: Selected Articles

    (Language, Cognition, and Human Nature collects together f...)

    2013
  • How the Mind Works

    (In this Pulitzer Prize finalist and national bestseller, ...)

    1997
  • The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

    (One of the world's leading experts on language and the mi...)

    2003
  • Language Learnability and Language Development

    (In this influential study, Steven Pinker develops a new a...)

    1984
  • The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature

    (The Stuff of Thought is an exhilarating work of non-ficti...)

    2007
  • Hotheads 2005

Religion

Pinker is a vocal atheist and has been often compared to the likes of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and the late Christopher Hitchens. He considers atheism to be an empirically supported view and has stated that theism and atheism are competing, empirical hypotheses.

Politics

Pinker has stated that when he was a teenager, he used to regard himself as an anarchist but outgrew such convictions when he had a first-hand view of the civil unrest following a police strike in 1969. According to him, while that experience destroyed his early political beliefs, it also gave him a foretaste of the life of a scientist. He talked about a test that categorized his political inclination as neither right nor left, leaning more towards libertarian than authoritarian.

Views

Steven Pinker was still pursuing his doctorate degree when he started his research on visual cognition. Collaborating with Stephen Kosslyn, his thesis advisor, Pinker demonstrated through his research that mental images are scenes and objects as they seem from a specific vantage point and not a snapshot of its intrinsic three-dimensional structure. Pinker's findings bear resemblance to neuroscientist David Marr's theory of a "two-and-a-half-dimensional sketch." However, he contradicted Marr on the concept of object recognition. According to Marr, recognition is enabled by viewpoint-independent representations, whereas Pinker holds the view that specific vantage point representations are deployed in visual attention and object recognition, especially for asymmetrical shapes.

Pinker, in the early days of his career, advocated for the computational learning theory as a method for recognizing language acquisition in children. He put out a tutorial review and later published two books on the subject. These books were Language Learnability and Language Development (1984) and Learnability and Cognition: The Acquisition of Argument Structure (1989).

In 1988, Pinker's collaboration with Alan Prince produced a significant critique of a connectionist model of the acquisition of the past tense and went on to cite a series of studies that deal with how people use and acquire a language. As per his argument, language relies upon two components: the associated memory of sounds, and what they represent in words, and the usage of rules as tools to manipulate grammar. He published the paper Natural Language and Natural Selection in 1990, in collaboration with Paul Bloom. They put forward the idea that the languages that are used today have evolved through natural selection.

Pinker's findings challenged the contemporary discontinuity based theories which considered language as an evolutionary accident, suddenly appearing along with the homo sapiens, and proposed the concept of a continuity based view of human languages instead.

Some of Pinker's researches are about human nature and what science thinks about it. In 2007, he gave an interview on the Point of Inquiry podcast, where he mentioned five examples of defensible conclusions of what human nature is according to science. The first of these is the notion that sexes are not statistically identical. If there were to be a policy in place to get equal outcomes for both sexes, it would discriminate against one or the other. The second example states that individuals vary in personality and intelligence. The third example he gave is about individual choice, that people would always favor themselves and their family over an abstract concept like society. The fourth calls humans as self-deceived with each individual having a self-perception of being more competent and benevolent that they actually are. The last one simply states that people crave status and power.

Membership

Steven Pinker is a member of the American Psychological Association, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Sciences.

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  American Psychological Association , United States

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  American Academy of Arts and Sciences , United States

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  National Academy of Sciences , United States

Personality

Pinker described himself as a "control freak." When he needs a break from his busy schedule, he retreats to his home on Cape Cod and indulges in his hobbies, which include photography, kayaking, biking, and hiking.

Interests

• photography, kayaking, biking, hiking

• Philosophers & Thinkers

  Noam Chomsky, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett

Connections

Steven Pinker married the clinical psychologist Nancy Etcoff in 1980 but divorced in 1992. In 1995, Pinker married Malaysian-born cognitive psychologist Ilavenil Subbiah, but they also later divorced. His current wife, Rebecca Goldstein, is an author and a philosopher. Pinker has no children.

Father:

Harry Pinker

Mother:

Roslyn Wiesenfeld

Acquaintance:

Richard Dawkins

ex-wife:

Nancy Etcoff

ex-wife:

Ilavenil Subbiah

Wife:

Rebecca Goldstein

References

• Steven Pinker | Official Website
• Analysis of Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now
  2018