Steven Pinker

Biography

Pinker was born on September 18, 1954, in Montreal, Quebec, to an upper-middle class secular Jewish family in an English-speaking community. He adopted atheism at 13 and has identified as a "cultural Jew".

His grandparents immigrated to Canada from Poland and Romania in 1926, and owned a small necktie factory in Montreal. His father, Harry, worked in real estate and was a lawyer. His mother, Roslyn, was originally a homemaker but later became a guidance counsellor and a high-school vice-principal. Pinker has called his mother "very intellectual" and "an intense reader [who] knows everything". He credits George Gamow's One Two Three... Infinity with sparking his love of science.

His brother, Robert, worked for the Canadian government for several decades as an administrator and a policy analyst, while his sister, Susan Pinker, is a psychologist and writer who authored The Sexual Paradox and The Village Effect. Susan is also a columnist for The Wall Street Journal.

Pinker graduated from Dawson College in 1971 with a Diploma of College Studies. He graduated from McGill University in 1976 with a Bachelor of Arts in psychology, then did doctoral studies in experimental psychology at Harvard University under Stephen Kosslyn, receiving a PhD in 1979. He did research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for a year, then became a professor at Harvard and later, Stanford University.

From 1982 until 2003, Pinker taught at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, co-directing the Center for Cognitive Science from 1985 to 1994 and directing the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience from 1994 to 1999, taking a sabbatical at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1995–96.

Since 2003, he has served as the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard, and between 2008 and 2013 he also held the title of Harvard College Professor in recognition of his dedication to teaching. In the early 2010s, he gave lectures as a visiting professor at the New College of the Humanities, a private college in London.

Pinker married Nancy Etcoff in 1980 and they divorced in 1992; he married again in 1995 and they divorced. His third wife, whom he married in 2007, is the novelist and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein. He has two stepdaughters, the novelist Yael Goldstein Love and the poet Danielle Blau.

Linguistic career

Pinker's research on visual cognition, begun in collaboration with his thesis adviser, Stephen Kosslyn, showed that mental images represent scenes and objects as they appear from a specific vantage point (rather than capturing their intrinsic three-dimensional structure), and thus correspond to the neuroscientist David Marr's theory of a "two-and-a-half-dimensional sketch." He also showed that this level of representation is used in visual attention, and in object recognition (at least for asymmetrical shapes), contrary to Marr's theory that recognition uses viewpoint-independent representations.

In psycholinguistics, Pinker became known early in his career for promoting computational learning theory as a way to understand language acquisition in children. He wrote a tutorial review of the field followed by two books that advanced his own theory of language acquisition, and a series of experiments on how children acquire the passive, dative, and locative constructions. These books were Language Learnability and Language Development (1984), in Pinker's words "outlin[ing] a theory of how children acquire the words and grammatical structures of their mother tongue", and Learnability and Cognition: The Acquisition of Argument Structure (1989), in Pinker's words "focus[ing] on one aspect of this process, the ability to use different kinds of verbs in appropriate sentences, such as intransitive verbs, transitive verbs, and verbs taking different combinations of complements and indirect objects". He then focused on verbs of two kinds that illustrate what he considers to be the processes required for human language: retrieving whole words from memory, like the past form of the irregular verb "bring", namely "brought"; and using rules to combine (parts of) words, like the past form of the regular verb "walk", namely "walked".

In 1988 Pinker and Alan Prince published a critique of a connectionist model of the acquisition of the past tense (a textbook problem in language acquisition), followed by a series of studies of how people use and acquire the past tense. This included a monograph on children's regularization of irregular forms and his popular 1999 book, Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language. Pinker argued that language depends on two things: the associative remembering of sounds and their meanings in words, and the use of rules to manipulate symbols for grammar. He presented evidence against connectionism, where a child would have to learn all forms of all words and would simply retrieve each needed form from memory, in favour of the older alternative theory, the use of words and rules combined by generative phonology. He showed that mistakes made by children indicate the use of default rules to add suffixes such as "-ed": for instance 'breaked' and 'comed' for 'broke' and 'came'. He argued that this shows that irregular verb-forms in English have to be learnt and retrieved from memory individually, and that the children making these errors were predicting the regular "-ed" ending in an open-ended way by applying a mental rule. This rule for combining verb stems and the usual suffix can be expressed as Vpast → Vstem + d, where V is a verb and d is the regular ending. Pinker further argued that since the ten most frequently occurring English verbs (be, have, do, say, make ... ) are all irregular, while 98.2% of the thousand least common verbs are regular, there is a "massive correlation" of frequency and irregularity. He explains this by arguing that every irregular form, such as 'took', 'came' and 'got', has to be committed to memory by the children in each generation, or else lost, and that the common forms are the most easily memorized. Any irregular verb that falls in popularity past a certain point is lost, and all future generations will treat it as a regular verb instead.

Popularization of science

Human cognition and natural language

Pinker credits Richard Dawkins's The Blind Watchmaker (1986) with inspiring him to try his hand at science writing. The Language Instinct (1994) was the first of several books to combine cognitive science with linguistics and evolutionary psychology. It popularizes Noam Chomsky's theory that language is an innate faculty of mind, with the controversial twist that the faculty for language evolved by natural selection as an adaptation for communication. Pinker criticizes several widely held ideas about language – that it needs to be taught, that people's grammar is poor and getting worse with new ways of speaking, the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis that language limits the kinds of thoughts a person can have, and that other great apes can learn languages. Pinker sees language as unique to humans, evolved to solve the specific problem of communication among social hunter-gatherers. He argues that it is as much an instinct as specialized adaptative behavior in other species, such as a spider's web-weaving or a beaver's dam-building.

Pinker states in his introduction that his ideas are "deeply influenced" by Chomsky; he also lists scientists whom Chomsky influenced to "open up whole new areas of language study, from child development and speech perception to neurology and genetics" – Eric Lenneberg, George Miller, Roger Brown, Morris Halle and Alvin Liberman. Brown mentored Pinker through his thesis; Pinker stated that Brown's "funny and instructive" book Words and Things (1958) was one of the inspirations for The Language Instinct.

There has been debate about the explanatory adequacy of the theory. By 2015, the linguistic nativist views of Pinker and Chomsky had a number of challenges on the grounds that they had incorrect core assumptions and were inconsistent with research evidence from psycholinguistics and child language acquisition. The reality of Pinker's proposed language instinct, and the related claim that grammar is innate and genetically based, has been contested by linguists such as Geoffrey Sampson in his 1997 book Educating Eve: The 'Language Instinct' Debate. Sampson argues that "while it may seem attractive to argue the nature side of the 'nature versus nurture' debate, the nurture side may better support the creativity and nobility of the human mind." Sampson denies there is a language instinct, and argues that children can learn language because people can learn anything. Others have sought a middle ground between Pinker's nativism and Sampson's culturalism.

The assumptions underlying the nativist view have also been questioned in Jeffrey Elman's Rethinking Innateness: A Connectionist Perspective on Development, which defends the connectionist approach that Pinker attacked. In his 1996 book Impossible Minds, the machine intelligence researcher Igor Aleksander calls The Language Instinct excellent, and argues that Pinker presents a relatively soft claim for innatism, accompanied by a strong dislike of the 'Standard Social Sciences Model' or SSSM (Pinker's term), according to which development is purely dependent on culture. Further, Aleksander writes that while Pinker criticises some attempts to explain language processing with neural nets, Pinker later makes use of a neural net to create past tense verb forms correctly. Aleksander concludes that while he doesn't support the SSSM, "a cultural repository of language just seems the easy trick for an efficient evolutionary system armed with an iconic state machine to play."

The Better Angels of Our Nature

In The Better Angels of Our Nature, published in 2011, Pinker argues that violence, including tribal warfare, homicide, cruel punishments, child abuse, animal cruelty, domestic violence, lynching, pogroms, and international and civil wars, has decreased over multiple scales of time and magnitude. Pinker considers it unlikely that human nature has changed. In his view, it is more likely that human nature comprises inclinations toward violence and those that counteract them, the "better angels of our nature". He outlines several "major historical declines of violence" that all have their own social/cultural/economic causes.

Response to the book was divided. Many critics found its arguments convincing and its synthesis of a large volume of historical evidence compelling. This and other aspects drew criticism, including the use of deaths per capita as a metric, Pinker's liberal humanism, the focus on Europe, the interpretation of historical data, and its image of indigenous people. Archaeologist David Wengrow summarized Pinker's approach to archaeological science as "a modern psychologist making it up as he goes along".

The Sense of Style

In his seventh popular book, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century (2014), Pinker attempts to provide a writing style guide that is informed by modern linguistics, science and psychology, regarding the existing style guides such as Strunk and White's Elements of Style as outdated and dogmatic.

When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows...

Pinker's most recent book, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows…: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life, explores the concept of common knowledge, including what happens when everyone knows something and everyone knows that everyone knows it, and the role it plays in social coordination, conventions, economics, politics, and everyday human interaction. Drawing on examples from game theory, social norms, markets, and media, the book explains how common knowledge underpins phenomena as varied as driving on the same side of the road, financial bubbles, revolutions, and online culture, and how people both generate and avoid common knowledge in their social lives.

Social views

Pinker identifies as a social liberal who is critical of some aspects of the political left. He supports same-sex marriage, universal basic income, the legalization of drugs, the taxation of carbon, and the abolition of capital punishment. Pinker is a strong supporter of the Democratic Party.

Pinker has argued that the far left has created an atmosphere of intellectual intolerance on college campuses and elsewhere, and helped form the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard to combat what he described as an epidemic of censorship at universities. He was a signatory of the Letter on Justice and Open Debate, which argued that discussion of political issues was being silenced by a widespread "intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and a tendency to dissolve complex issues into a binding moral certainty."

Pinker has sharply criticized social conservatives, such as former chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics Leon Kass, for opposing stem cell research, arguing that their moral views were mere expressions of disgust that were obstructing treatments that could save millions of lives.

Pinker is a frequent participant in public debates on the contributions of science to contemporary society. Social commentators such as Ed West, author of The Diversity Illusion, consider Pinker important and daring in his willingness to confront taboos, as in The Blank Slate. According to West, the doctrine of tabula rasa remained accepted "as fact, rather than fantasy" a decade after the book's publication. West describes Pinker as "no polemicist, and he leaves readers to draw their own conclusions".

In 2005, Pinker began promoting the view that Ashkenazi Jews are innately particularly intelligent.

In January 2005, Pinker defended comments by then-president of Harvard University Lawrence Summers. Summers had speculated that in addition to differing societal demands and discrimination, "different availability of aptitude at the high end" may contribute to gender gaps in mathematics and science. In a debate between Pinker and Elizabeth Spelke on gender and science, Pinker argued in favour of the proposition that the gender difference in representation in elite universities was "explainable by some combination of biological differences in average temperaments and talents interacting with socialization and bias".

Awards and distinctions

Pinker was named one of Time's 100 most influential people in the world in 2004 and one of Prospect and Foreign Policy's 100 top public intellectuals in both years the poll was carried out, 2005 and 2008; in 2010 and 2011 he was named by Foreign Policy to its list of top global thinkers. In 2016, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

His research in cognitive psychology has won the Early Career Award (1984) and Boyd McCandless Award (1986) from the American Psychological Association, the Troland Research Award (1993) from the National Academy of Sciences, the Henry Dale Prize (2004) from the Royal Institution of Great Britain, and the George Miller Prize (2010) from the Cognitive Neuroscience Society. He has also received honorary doctorates from the universities of Newcastle, Surrey, Tel Aviv, McGill, Simon Fraser University and the University of Tromsø. He was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, in 1998 and in 2003. Pinker received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement in 1999. On May 13, 2006, he received the American Humanist Association's Humanist of the Year award for his contributions to public understanding of human evolution. For 2022 he was awarded the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the category of "Humanities and Social Sciences".

From 2008 to 2018, Pinker chaired the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary. He wrote the essay on usage for the fifth edition of the Dictionary, published in 2011. In February 2001, Pinker, "whose hair has long been the object of admiration, and envy, and intense study", was nominated by acclamation as the first member of the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists (LFHCfS) organized by the Annals of Improbable Research.

Ian McEwan included The Language Instinct in his canon of science writing: "Steven Pinker's application of Darwinian thought to Chomskyan linguistics in The Language Instinct is one of the finest celebrations of language I know."