Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker (born September 18 1954, in Montreal, Canada) is a psychologist at Harvard University who studies language development in children and is also a writer of popular science books. He was a professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT for 21 years before returning to Harvard in 2003. He received a Bachelor of Arts (Psychology) from McGill University in 1976, and a Doctor of Philosophy (Experimental Psychology) from Harvard University in 1979.

Pinker has written about language and cognitive science for both specialist and popular audiences. He is most famous for his work on how children acquire language and for his skillful popularization of Noam Chomsky's work on language as an innate faculty of mind, though he and Chomsky differ on other issues. Pinker has suggested an evolutionary mechanism for this faculty, but this idea remains controversial and is rejected by Chomsky. Pinker also argues that many other human mental faculties are evolved, and is an ally of Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins in many evolutionary disputes.

His most recent book The Blank Slate was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and The Aventis Prizes for Science Books. In 2004, he was named one of Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People.

Pinker defended Harvard president Lawrence Summers after his comments on the gender gap in math and science sparked outrage among Harvard faculty.[1]

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 (1996)
• Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language (1999)
• The Blank Slate: The Denial of Human Nature in Modern Intellectual Life (2002)
• The Best American Science and Nature Writing (editor and introduction author, 2004)

External links

• Steven Pinker's Home Page
• Gen Kuroki's Unofficial Web Page about Steven Pinker
• Criticisms of Evolutionary Psychology