Steven Pinker | |
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 Pinker in 2023 | |
| Born | Steven Arthur Pinker (1954-09-18)September 18, 1954 (age 71) Montreal, Quebec, Canada |
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| Relatives | Susan Pinker (sister) |
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| Thesis | The representation and manipulation of three-dimensional space in mental images (1979) |
| Doctoral advisor | Stephen Kosslyn |
| Website | stevenpinker |
Steven Arthur Pinker (born September 18, 1954)[2][3] is a Canadiancognitive psychologist,psycholinguist,popular scienceauthor, andpublic intellectual. He is an advocate ofevolutionary psychology and thecomputational theory of mind.[8] Pinker is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology atHarvard University.
Steven Pinker specializes in visual cognition anddevelopmental linguistics, as well as a number of experimental topics.[9] Pinker has written two technical books that proposed a general theory oflanguage acquisition. In particular, his work withAlan Prince posited 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), andThe Stuff of Thought (2007) posit that language is an innate behavior shaped bynatural selection andadapted to our communication needs. Pinker'sThe Sense of Style (2014) is a general language-orientedstyle guide.[10] Pinker's bookThe 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, andhumanism. The nature and importance of reason is also discussed in his bookRationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters (2021).
In 2004, Pinker was named inTime's "The 100 Most Influential People in the World Today", and in 2005, 2008, 2010, and 2011 inForeign Policy's list of "Top 100 Global Thinkers".[11] He was also included inProspect Magazine's top 10 "World Thinkers" in 2013.[12] He has won awards from theAmerican Psychological Association, theNational Academy of Sciences, theRoyal Institution, theCognitive Neuroscience Society, and theAmerican Humanist Association.[13][14][15][16][17] He has served on the editorial boards of a variety of journals and on the advisory boards of several institutions.[18] Pinker was also the chair of the Usage Panel of theAmerican Heritage Dictionary from 2008 to 2018.[19]
Pinker was born on September 18, 1954,Montreal, Quebec, to an upper-middle classsecular Jewish family in an English-speaking community.[20][21][22] He adoptedatheism at 13 and at various times has identified as a "cultural Jew".[23][24]
His grandparents had immigrated to Canada fromPoland andRomania in 1926,[25][26] and owned a small necktie factory in Montreal.[27] 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. In an interview, Pinker described his mother as "very intellectual" and "an intense reader [who] knows everything".
His brother, Robert, worked for theCanadian government for several decades as an administrator and a policy analyst, while his sister,Susan Pinker, is apsychologist and writer who authoredThe Sexual Paradox andThe Village Effect. Susan is also a columnist forThe Wall Street Journal.[22][28][29]
Pinker graduated fromDawson College in 1971 with aDiploma of College Studies. He graduated fromMcGill University in 1976 with aBachelor of Arts in psychology, then did doctoral studies inexperimental psychology at Harvard University underStephen Kosslyn, receiving aPhD in 1979. He did research at theMassachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for a year, then became a professor at Harvard and later,Stanford University.[30]
From 1982 until 2003, Pinker taught at theDepartment of Brain and Cognitive Sciences atMIT, was the co-director of the Center forCognitive Science (1985–1994), and eventually became the director of the Center forCognitive Neuroscience (1994–1999),[31] taking a one-year sabbatical at theUniversity of California, Santa Barbara, in 1995–96.
Since 2003, he has served as the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard,[32] and between 2008 and 2013 he also held the title of Harvard College Professor in recognition of his dedication to teaching.[33] In the early 2010s, he gave lectures as a visiting professor at theNew College of the Humanities, a private college in London.[34][35]
Pinker marriedNancy Etcoff in 1980 and they divorced in 1992; he married again in 1995 and they divorced.[36] His third wife, whom he married in 2007, is the novelist and philosopherRebecca Goldstein.[37] He has two stepdaughters, the novelistYael Goldstein Love and the poet Danielle Blau.
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 neuroscientistDavid Marr's theory of a "two-and-a-half-dimensional sketch."[39] He also showed that this level of representation is used in visual attention, and inobject 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 promotingcomputational learning theory as a way to understandlanguage 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 wereLanguage 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",[40] andLearnability 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".[40] 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 theirregular verb[41] "bring", namely "brought"; and using rules to combine (parts of) words, like the past form of the regular verb "walk", namely "walked".[40]
In 1988 Pinker andAlan 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'sregularization 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 bygenerative 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[42] 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.[42]
In 1990 Pinker, withPaul Bloom, published a paper arguing that the human language faculty must have evolved throughnatural selection.[43] The article provided arguments for a continuity-based view of language evolution, contrary to then-current discontinuity-based theories that see language as suddenly appearing with the advent ofHomo sapiens as a kind of evolutionary accident. This discontinuity-based view was prominently argued by two main authorities, linguistNoam Chomsky andStephen Jay Gould.[44] The paper became widely cited and created renewed interest in the evolutionary prehistory of language, and has been credited with shifting the central question of the debate from "did language evolve?" to "how did language evolve?"[44][45] The article also presaged Pinker's argument inThe Language Instinct.
In 2006 Pinker provided toAlan Dershowitz, a personal friend of Pinker's who wasJeffrey Epstein's defense attorney, Pinker's own interpretation of the wording of a federal law pertaining to the enticement of minors into illegal sex acts via the internet. Dershowitz included Pinker's opinion in a letter to the court during proceedings that resulted in a plea deal in which all federal sex trafficking charges against Epstein were dropped.[46] In 2019, Pinker stated that he was unaware of the nature of the charges against Epstein, and that he engaged in an unpaid favor for his Harvard colleague Dershowitz, as he had regularly done. He stated in an interview withBuzzFeed News that he regrets writing the letter.[46] Pinker says he never received money from Epstein and met with him three times over more than a dozen years,[47] and said he could never stand Epstein and tried to keep his distance.[46]
Pinker's 1994The Language Instinct was the first of several books to combinecognitive science withbehavioral genetics andevolutionary psychology. It introduces the science of language and popularizesNoam 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, theSapir–Whorf hypothesis that language limits the kinds of thoughts a person can have, and thatother 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"[48] 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"[48] –Eric Lenneberg,George Miller,Roger Brown,Morris Halle andAlvin Liberman.[48] Brown mentored Pinker through his thesis; Pinker stated that Brown's "funny and instructive"[49] bookWords and Things (1958) was one of the inspirations forThe Language Instinct.[49][50]
There has been debate about the explanatory adequacy of the theory. By 2015, the linguisticnativist 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 frompsycholinguistics andchild language acquisition.[51] 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 asGeoffrey Sampson in his 1997 book,Educating Eve: The 'Language Instinct' Debate.[52][53] 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.[53] Others have sought a middle ground between Pinker's nativism and Sampson's culturalism.[54]
The assumptions underlying thenativist view have also been questioned inJeffrey Elman'sRethinking Innateness: A Connectionist Perspective on Development, which defends the connectionist approach that Pinker attacked. In his 1996 bookImpossible Minds, themachine intelligence researcherIgor Aleksander callsThe 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), which supposes that 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 iconicstate machine to play."[55]
Two other books,How the Mind Works (1997) andThe Blank Slate (2002), broadly surveyed the mind and defended the idea of a complex human nature with many mental faculties that are genetically adaptive (Pinker is an ally ofDaniel Dennett andRichard Dawkins in many disputes surroundingadaptationism). Another major theme in Pinker's theories is that human cognition works, in part, by combinatorial symbol-manipulation, not just associations among sensory features, as in many connectionist models. On the debate aroundThe Blank Slate, Pinker calledThomas Sowell's bookA Conflict of Visions "wonderful",[56] and explained that "The Tragic Vision" and the "Utopian Vision" are the views of human nature behindright- and left-wing ideologies.[56]
InWords and Rules: the Ingredients of Language (1999), Pinker argues from his own research that regular and irregular phenomena are products of computation and memory lookup, respectively, and that language can be understood as an interaction between the two.[57] "Words and Rules" is also the title of an essay by Pinker outlining many of the topics discussed in the book.[42] Critiqueing the book from the perspective ofgenerative linguisticsCharles Yang, in theLondon Review of Books, writes that "this book never runs low on hubris or hyperbole".[58] The book's topic, the English past tense, is in Yang's view unglamorous, and Pinker's attempts at compromise risk being in no man's land between rival theories. Giving the example of German, Yang argues that irregular nouns in that language at least all belong to classes, governed by rules, and that things get even worse in languages that attach prefixes and suffixes to make up long 'words': they can't be learnt individually, as there are untold numbers of combinations. "All Pinker (and the connectionists) are doing is turning over the rocks at the base of the intellectual landslide caused by the Chomskian revolution."[58]
InThe Stuff of Thought (2007), Pinker looks at a wide range of issues around the way words related to thoughts on the one hand, and to the world outside ourselves on the other. Given his evolutionary perspective, a central question is how an intelligent mind capable of abstract thought evolved: how a mind adapted toStone Age life could work in the modern world. Many quirks of language are the result.[59]
Pinker is critical of theories about theevolutionary origins of language that argue that linguistic cognition might have evolved from earlier musical cognition. He sees language as being tied primarily to the capacity for logical reasoning, and speculates that human proclivity for music may be aspandrel – a feature not adaptive in its own right, but that has persisted through other traits that are more broadly practical, and thus selected for. InHow the Mind Works, Pinker reiteratesImmanuel Kant's view that music is not in itself an important cognitive phenomenon, but that it happens to stimulate important auditory and spatio-motor cognitive functions. Pinker compares music to "auditory cheesecake", stating that "As far as biological cause and effect is concerned, music is useless".[citation needed] This argument has been rejected byDaniel Levitin andJoseph Carroll, experts inmusic cognition, who argue that music has had an important role in the evolution of human cognition.[60][61][62][63][64][65] In his bookThis Is Your Brain On Music, Levitin argues that music could provide adaptive advantage throughsexual selection, social bonding, andcognitive development; he questions the assumption that music is the antecedent to language, as opposed to its progenitor, noting that many species display music-like habits that could be seen as precursors to human music.[66]
Pinker has also been critical of "whole language" reading instruction techniques, stating inHow the Mind Works, "... the dominant technique, called 'whole language,' the insight that [spoken] language is a naturally developing human instinct has been garbled into the evolutionarily improbable claim thatreading is a naturally developing human instinct."[67] In the appendix to the 2007 reprinted edition ofThe Language Instinct, Pinker citedWhy Our Children Can't Read by cognitive psychologistDiane McGuinness as his favorite book on the subject and noted:
One raging public debate involving language went unmentioned inThe Language Instinct: the "reading wars," or dispute over whether children should be explicitly taught to read by decoding the sounds of words from their spelling (loosely known as "phonics") or whether they can develop it instinctively by being immersed in a text-rich environment (often called "whole language"). I tipped my hand in the paragraph in [the sixth chapter of the book] which said that language is an instinct but reading is not.[68] Like most psycholinguists (but apparently unlike many school boards), I think it's essential for children to be taught to become aware of speech sounds and how they are coded in strings of letters.[69]
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InThe 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.[71]
Response to the book was divided. Many critics found its arguments convincing and its synthesis of a large volume of historical evidence compelling.[72][73][74] 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.[75][76][77][78] ArchaeologistDavid Wengrow summarized Pinker's approach toarchaeological science as "a modern psychologist making it up as he goes along".[79]
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 existingstyle guides such asStrunk andWhite'sElements of Style as outdated and dogmatic.[80]
Pinker identifies as aliberal[81] who is critical of some aspects of thepolitical left.[82] He supportssame-sex marriage, auniversal basic income, the legalization ofdrugs, thetaxation of carbon, and the abolition ofcapital punishment.[83] Pinker is a strong supporter of theDemocratic Party.[84] However, Pinker has argued that thefar-left has created an atmosphere ofintellectual intolerance on college campuses and elsewhere, and helped form the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard to combat what he described as an epidemic ofcensorship at universities.[85] He was a signatory of theLetter 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."[86]
Pinker has sharply criticizedsocial conservatives, such as former chairman of thePresident's Council on BioethicsLeon Kass, for opposingstem cell research, arguing that their moral views were mere expressions of disgust that were obstructing treatments that could save millions of lives.[87]
Pinker is a frequent participant in public debates surrounding the contributions of science to contemporary society. Social commentators such as Ed West, author ofThe Diversity Illusion, consider Pinker important and daring in his willingness to confront taboos, as inThe Blank Slate. According to West, the doctrine oftabula rasa remained accepted "as fact, rather than fantasy"[88] a decade after the book's publication. West describes Pinker as "nopolemicist, and he leaves readers to draw their own conclusions".[88]
In January 2005 Pinker defended comments by then-President of Harvard UniversityLawrence Summers. Summers had speculated that in addition to differing societal demands and discrimination, "different availability of aptitude at the high end" may contribute togender gaps in mathematics and science.[89][90][91] In a debate between Pinker andElizabeth Spelke on gender and science, Pinker argued in favor 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".[92]
In January 2009 Pinker wrote an article about thePersonal Genome Project and its possible impact on the understanding of human nature inThe New York Times.[93] He discussed the new developments inepigenetics and gene-environment interactions in the afterword to the 2016 edition of his bookThe Blank Slate.[94] Pinker has been criticised for being associated with,[95] as well as using the data ofscientific racists[96] (on subjects unrelated to race), such as the bloggerSteven Sailer, with journalistAngela Saini stating that "for many people, Pinker's willingness to entertain the work of individuals who are on the far right and white supremacists has gone beyond the pale". Pinker has stated that he condemns racism.[97] In June 2025, Pinker was criticised after he appeared on the podcast of the far-right scientific racism-associatedAporia Magazine.[95]
In a November 2009 article forThe New York Times, Pinker wrote a mixed review ofMalcolm Gladwell's essays, criticizing his analytical methods.[98] Gladwell replied, disputing Pinker's comments about the importance ofIQ on teaching performance and by analogy the effect, if any, of draft order on quarterback performance in theNational Football League.[99]Advanced NFL Stats addressed the issue statistically, siding with Pinker and showing that differences in methodology could explain the two men's differing opinions.[100] However, while Pinker has acknowledged theconsensus withinpsychometrics anddifferential psychology about theg factor inThe Blank Slate andThe Better Angels of Our Nature,[101][102] Pinker argued against theconstruct validity of general intelligence inHow the Mind Works in favor ofmodularity of mind as proposed by evolutionary psychologistsJohn Tooby andLeda Cosmides and has reiterated his skepticism of the theoretical coherence ofg when discussingartificial general intelligence.[103][104][105]
In an appearance forBBC World Service'sExchanges At The Frontier programme, an audience member questioned whether the virtuous developments in culture and human nature (documented inThe Better Angels of Our Nature) could have expressed in our biology either through genetic or epigenetic expression. Pinker responded that it was unlikely since "some of the declines have occurred far too rapidly for them to be explicable by biological evolution, which has a speed limit measured in generations, but crime can plummet in a span of 15 years and some of these humanitarian reforms like eliminating slavery and torture occurred in, say, 50 years".[106] Helga Vierich and Cathryn Townsend wrote a critical review of Pinker's sweeping "civilizational" explanations for patterns of human violence and warfare in response to a lecture he gave atCambridge University in September 2015.[107]
In his 2018 bookEnlightenment Now, Pinker posited thatEnlightenment rationality should be defended against attacks from both the political left and political right.[108] In a debate with Pinker, post-colonial theoristHomi Bhabha said that Enlightenment philosophy had immoral consequences such as inequality, slavery, imperialism, world wars, and genocide, and that Pinker downplayed them. Pinker argued that Bhabha had perceived the causal relationship between Enlightenment thinking and these sources of suffering "backwards", responding in part that "The natural state of humanity, at least since the dawn of civilization, is poverty, disease, ignorance, exploitation, and violence (including slavery and imperial conquest). It is knowledge, mobilised to improve human welfare, that allows anyone to rise above this state."[109]
In 2020, an open letter to theLinguistic Society of America requesting the removal of Pinker from its list of LSA Fellows and its list of media experts was signed by hundreds of academics.[110] The letter accused Pinker of a "pattern of drowning out the voices of people suffering from racist and sexist violence, in particular in the immediate aftermath of violent acts and/or protests against the systems that created them", citing as examples six of Pinker's tweets.[111] Pinker said in reply that through this letter, he, and more importantly, younger academics with less protection, were being threatened by "a regime of intimidation that constricts the theatre of ideas."[111][112][113][114][115] Several academics criticized the letter and expressed support for Pinker.[110] The executive committee of the Linguistic Society of America declined to strike Pinker from its lists and issued a response letter stating that "It is not the mission of the Society to control the opinions of its members, nor their expression."[116]
In December 2024, Pinker resigned from the board of honorary members of theFreedom from Religion Foundation over what he and several colleagues viewed as the Foundation's "quasi-religious" approach to defining gender. His resignation was followed by those ofJerry Coyne andRichard Dawkins.[117]
On May 23, 2025, in the wake of the Trump administration's announcement that it wouldhalt Harvard University's ability to enroll international students, Pinker hit back with a guest essay forThe New York Times entitled "Harvard Derangement Syndrome",[118][119] and his article elicited many responses from readers that were published under the title, "Harvard as Symbol and Target".[120]
Pinker was named one ofTime's 100 most influential people in the world in 2004[121] and one ofProspect andForeign Policy's 100 top public intellectuals in both years the poll was carried out, 2005[122] and 2008;[123] in 2010 and 2011 he was named byForeign Policy to its list of top global thinkers.[124][125] In 2016, he was elected to theNational Academy of Sciences.[126]
His research in cognitive psychology has won the Early Career Award (1984) and Boyd McCandless Award (1986) from theAmerican Psychological Association, theTroland Research Award (1993) from theNational Academy of Sciences, the Henry Dale Prize (2004) from theRoyal Institution of Great Britain, and the George Miller Prize (2010) from theCognitive Neuroscience Society. He has also received honorary doctorates from the universities ofNewcastle,Surrey,Tel Aviv,McGill,Simon Fraser University and theUniversity of Tromsø. He was twice a finalist for thePulitzer Prize, in 1998 and in 2003. Pinker received the Golden Plate Award of theAmerican Academy of Achievement in 1999.[127] On May 13, 2006, he received theAmerican Humanist Association's Humanist of the Year award for his contributions to public understanding of human evolution.[128] For 2022 he was awarded theBBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the category of "Humanities and Social Sciences".[129]
From 2008 to 2018, Pinker chaired the Usage Panel of theAmerican Heritage Dictionary.[130] 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",[131] was nominated by acclamation as the first member of the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists (LFHCfS) organized by theAnnals of Improbable Research.
69. Steven Pinker
48. Steven Pinker: For Looking on Bright Side
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