Everything about Pinker totally explained
Steven Arthur Pinker (born
September 18 1954) is a prominent
Canadian-
American experimental psychologist,
cognitive scientist, and author of
popular science. Pinker is known for his wide-ranging advocacy of
evolutionary psychology and the
computational theory of mind.
Pinker’s academic specializations are
visual cognition and
language development in children, and he's most famous for popularizing the idea that language is an "instinct" or
biological adaptation shaped by
natural selection. On this point, he opposes
Noam Chomsky and others who regard the human capacity for language to be the by-product of other adaptations. He is the author of five books for a general audience, which include
The Language Instinct (1994),
How the Mind Works (1999),
Words and Rules (2000),
The Blank Slate (2002), and
The Stuff of Thought (2007). Pinker's books have won numerous awards and been
New York Times best-sellers.
Biography
Career
Pinker was born in
Canada and graduated from
Montreal's
Dawson College in 1973, received a
bachelor's degree in
experimental psychology from
McGill University in 1976, then went on to earn his
doctorate in the same discipline at
Harvard in 1979. He did research at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for a year, then became an
assistant professor at Harvard and then
Stanford University. From 1982 until 2003, Pinker taught in the Department of Brain and
Cognitive Sciences at MIT, and eventually became the director of the Center for
Cognitive Neuroscience. (Except for a one-year sabbatical at the
University of California, Santa Barbara in 1995-6.) As of 2007, he's the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard.
Pinker was named one of
Time Magazine's 100 most influential people in the world in 2004 and one of Prospect and Foreign Policy's 100 top public intellectuals in 2005. He has also received honorary doctorates from the universities of
Newcastle,
Surrey,
Tel Aviv,
McGill, and the
University of Tromsø, Norway.
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.
Pinker addresses the criticisms of scholars like
Geoffrey Sampson (as outlined in his "Educating Eve", a biting criticism of the language "instinct" Pinker advocates) and
Suren Naicker (as outlined in his "Rationalism vs. Empiricism: a critique of the Chomskyan paradigm").
In 2007, he was invited on
The Colbert Report and asked under pressure to sum up how the brain works in five words – Pinker answered "Brain cells fire in patterns."
Personal
Pinker was born into the English-speaking
Jewish community of
Montreal. He has said, "I was never religious in the theological sense... I never outgrew my conversion to
atheism at 13, but at various times was a serious
cultural Jew." As a teenager, he says he considered himself an
anarchist until he witnessed
civil unrest following a police strike in 1969. His father, a trained lawyer, first worked as a traveling salesman, while his mother was first a home-maker then a guidance counselor and high-school vice-principal. He has two younger siblings. His brother is a policy analyst for the
Canadian government. His sister,
Susan Pinker, is a school
psychologist and writer, author of
The Sexual Paradox. Pinker married Nancy Etcoff in 1980 and they divorced 1992; he married Ilavenil Subbiah in 1995 and they, too, divorced. His partner is the novelist and philosopher
Rebecca Goldstein. He has no children.
Theories of language and mind
Pinker is most famous for his work — popularized in
The Language Instinct (1994) — on how children
acquire language, and for his 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. Additionally Pinker argues that many other human mental faculties are
adaptive (and is an ally of
Daniel Dennett and
Richard Dawkins in many evolutionary disputes).
Written work
Pinker's books,
How the Mind Works and
The Blank Slate, are from the
evolutionary psychology tradition, which views the mind as a kind of Swiss-army knife equipped with a set of specialized tools (or modules) to deal with problems faced by our
Pleistocene ancestors. Pinker and other
evolutionary psychologists believe that these tools evolved by
natural selection, just like other body parts. The field of
evolutionary psychology was pioneered by
E. O. Wilson,
Leda Cosmides and
John Tooby.
The Language Instinct has been criticized by
Geoffrey Sampson in his book,
The 'Language Instinct' Debate (External Link
). The assumptions underlying the
nativist view have also been subject to sustained criticism in
Jeffrey Elman's
Rethinking Innateness: A Connectionist Perspective on Development (Neural Networks and Connectionist Modeling).
Selected publications
Books
Articles and essays
Pinker, S. (1991) Rules of Language. Science, 253, 530–535.
Ullman, M., Corkin, S., Coppola, M., Hickok, G., Growdon, J. H., Koroshetz, W. J., & Pinker, S. (1997) A neural dissociation within language: Evidence that the mental dictionary is part of declarative memory, and that grammatical rules are processed by the procedural system. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 9, 289–299.
Pinker, S. (2003) Language as an adaptation to the cognitive niche. In M. Christiansen & S. Kirby (Eds.), Language evolution: States of the Art. New York: Oxford University Press.
Pinker, S. (2005) So How Does the Mind Work? Mind and Language, 20(1), 1–24.
Jackendoff, R. & Pinker, S. (2005) The nature of the language faculty and its implications for evolution of language (Reply to Fitch, Hauser, & Chomsky) Cognition, 97(2), 211–225.
S. Pinker (2007), "In Defense of Dangerous Ideas" (Chicago Sun-Times, July 15, 2007, http://richarddawkins.net/article,1449,In-defense-of-dangerous-ideas,Steven-Pinker)
a great number of Pinker's articles in http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/Further Information
Get more info on 'Pinker'.
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