Steven Pinker

Steven Arthur Pinker (born September 18, 1954) is a Canadian cognitive psychologist, psycholinguist, popular science author, and public intellectual. He is an advocate of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind. Pinker is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. Pinker specializes in visual cognition and developmental linguistics, as well as a number of experimental topics. He has written two technical books that propose a general theory of language acquisition. In particular, his work with Alan Prince posits that children use default rules sometimes in error but are obliged to learn irregular forms one by one. Pinker is the author of nine books for general audiences. The Language Instinct (1994), How the Mind Works (1997), Words and Rules (2000), The Blank Slate (2002), and The Stuff of Thought (2007) posit that language is an innate behavior shaped by natural selection and adapted to our communication needs. The Sense of Style (2014) is a general language-oriented style guide. The Better Angels of Our Nature (2010) posits that violence in human societies has generally declined over time, and identifies six major trends and five historical forces of this decline. Enlightenment Now (2018) further argues that the human condition has generally improved over recent history because of reason, science, and humanism. The nature and importance of reason is also discussed in his book Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters (2021). In 2004, Pinker was named in Time's "The 100 Most Influential People in the World Today", and in 2005, 2008, 2010, and 2011 in Foreign Policy's list of "Top 100 Global Thinkers". He was also included in Prospect Magazine's top 10 "World Thinkers" in 2013. He has won awards from the American Psychological Association, the National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Institution, the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, and the American Humanist Association. He has served on the editorial boards of various journals and the advisory boards of several institutions. Pinker chaired the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary from 2008 to 2018.

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. Pinker is an avid cyclist. He is an advocate of effective altruism, which he calls "one of the great new ideas of the 21st century".

Linguistic career

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