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{{Short description|Canadian-American psycholinguist (born 1954)}}
{{Use mdy dates|date=July 2020}}
{{Use Canadian English|date=July 2020}}
{{Good article}}
{{Infobox person
| name = Steven Pinker
| image = Steven Pinker in 2023.jpg
| caption = Pinker in 2023
| birth_name = Steven Arthur Pinker
| birth_date = {{birth date and age|mf=yes|1954|09|18}}
| birth_place = [[Montreal]], Quebec, Canada
| nationality = {{hlist|Canadian|American}}
| spouse = {{plainlist|
*{{marriage|[[Nancy Etcoff (psychologist)|Nancy Etcoff]]|1980|1992|end=divorced}}
*{{marriage|Ilavenil Subbiah|1995|2006|end=divorced}}
*{{marriage|[[Rebecca Goldstein]]|2007}}
}}
| notable_works = {{plainlist|
*''[[The Language Instinct]]'' (1994)
*''[[How the Mind Works]]'' (1997)
*''[[The Blank Slate]]'' (2002)
*''[[The Better Angels of Our Nature]]'' (2011)
*''[[Enlightenment Now]]'' (2018)
*''[[Rationality (book)|Rationality]]'' (2021)
}}
| education = {{ubl|[[McGill University]] ([[B. A.|BA]])|[[Harvard University]] ([[PhD]])}}
| relatives = [[Susan Pinker]] (sister)
| website = {{URL|stevenpinker.com}}
| module = {{Infobox scientist
| embed = yes
| field = {{plainlist|
*[[Evolutionary psychology]]
*[[Experimental psychology]]
*[[Cognitive science]]
*[[Psycholinguistics]]
}}
| workplaces = {{plainlist|
*[[Harvard University]]
*[[Stanford University]]
*[[Massachusetts Institute of Technology]]
*[[New College of the Humanities]]
}}
| thesis_title = The Representation of Three-dimensional Space in Mental Images
| thesis_year = 1979
| thesis_url = https://www.academia.edu/2794556/The_representation_and_manipulation_of_three-dimensional_space_in_mental_images
| doctoral_advisor = [[Stephen Kosslyn]]
| prizes = {{plainlist|
*[[Troland Research Awards|Troland Award]] (1993)
*Henry Dale Prize (2004, [[Royal Institution]])
*[[Walter P. Kistler Book Award]] (2005)
*[[American Humanist Association#AHA's Humanists of the Year|Humanist of the Year Award]] (2006)
*[[Cognitive Neuroscience Society|CNS]] George Miller Prize (2010)
*[[Richard Dawkins Award]] (2013)
*[[Carl Sagan Award for Public Appreciation of Science]] (2018)
*[[BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award]] (2022)
}}
}}
| module2 = {{Listen
| embed = yes
| filename = Steven Pinker BBC Radio4 Desert Island Discs 30 June 2013 b0366xsb.flac
| title = Steven Pinker's voice
| type = speech
| description = from the BBC program Desert Island Discs, June 30, 2013<ref name="b0366xsb">{{Cite episode |title= Steven Pinker |series= Desert Island Discs |series-link= Desert Island Discs |url= http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0366xsb |access-date= January 18, 2014 |station= BBC Radio 4 |date= June 30, 2013}}</ref>
}}
}}
'''Steven Arthur Pinker''' (born September 18, 1954)<ref name="kfzKZ">{{cite web|url=https://www.britannica.com/biography/Steven-Pinker|title=Steven Pinker Biography|website=Encyclopædia Britannica|access-date=October 12, 2019|archive-date=June 29, 2015|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150629134348/https://www.britannica.com/biography/Steven-Pinker|url-status=live}}</ref><ref name="xcJv5">{{cite web|url=https://www.theguardian.com/books/1999/nov/06/1|title=Steven Pinker: the mind reader|website=The Guardian|date=November 6, 1991|access-date=September 11, 2019|archive-date=December 19, 2013|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20131219150715/https://www.theguardian.com/books/1999/nov/06/1|url-status=live}}</ref> is a Canadian-American [[cognitive psychology|cognitive psychologist]], [[psycholinguistics|psycholinguist]], [[popular science]] [[author]], and [[public intellectual]]. He is an advocate of [[evolutionary psychology]] and the [[computational theory of mind]].{{refn|<ref name="BL9TD">{{cite book |last1=Pinker |first1=Steven |title=How the Mind Works |date=1997 |publisher=W. W. Norton & Company |isbn=978-0-393-06973-0 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=5cXKQUh6bVQC |language=en |access-date=September 17, 2020 |archive-date=June 30, 2023 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230630210705/https://books.google.com/books?id=5cXKQUh6bVQC |url-status=live }}</ref><ref name="jH1we">{{cite book |last1=Pinker |first1=Steven |title=The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature |date=2016 |publisher=Penguin |isbn=978-1-101-20032-2 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=ePNi4ZqYdVQC |language=en |access-date=September 17, 2020 |archive-date=June 30, 2023 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230630210705/https://books.google.com/books?id=ePNi4ZqYdVQC |url-status=live }}</ref><ref name="5ZIRR">{{Cite web|url=https://www.online-psychology-degrees.org/study/steven-pinker-cognitive-psychology-computational-theory-conversation/|title=Steven Pinker on Cognitive Psychology, Computational Theory, and Conversation|first=John|last=Sherk|date=October 4, 2019 |access-date=July 22, 2020|archive-date=July 16, 2020|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200716214811/https://www.online-psychology-degrees.org/study/steven-pinker-cognitive-psychology-computational-theory-conversation/|url-status=live}}</ref><ref name="2Jg3B">{{Cite web|url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfGJGXJ2xtI| archive-url=https://ghostarchive.org/varchive/youtube/20211030/WfGJGXJ2xtI| archive-date=2021-10-30|title=YouTube| website=[[YouTube]]}}{{cbignore}}</ref>}}
Pinker is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at [[Harvard University]]. He specializes in visual cognition and [[developmental linguistics]], and his experimental topics include mental imagery, shape recognition, visual attention, regularity and irregularity in language, the neural basis of words and grammar, and childhood language development. Other experimental topics he works on are the psychology of cooperation and of communication, including emotional expression, [[euphemism]], [[innuendo]], and how people use "common knowledge", a term of art meaning the shared understanding in which two or more people know something, know that the other one knows, know the other one knows that they know, and so on.<ref>{{cite web |title=Understanding common knowledge |url=https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2015/03/understanding-common-knowledge/ |website=The Harvard Gazette |date=March 20, 2015 |access-date=October 9, 2023}}</ref>
Pinker has written two technical books that proposed a general theory of [[language acquisition]] and applied it to children's learning of verbs. In particular, his work with [[Alan Prince]] published in 1989 critiqued the [[connectionist]] model of how children acquire the past tense of English verbs, positing that children use default rules, such as adding ''-ed'' to make regular forms, 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) describe aspects of psycholinguistics and cognitive science, and include accounts of his own research, positing that language is an innate behavior shaped by [[natural selection]] and [[Adaptation|adapted]] to our communication needs. Pinker's ''[[The Sense of Style]]'' (2014) is a general language-oriented [[style guide]].<ref name="RgfOf">The Sense of Style</ref> Pinker's book ''[[The Better Angels of Our Nature]]'' (2011) posits that violence in human societies has generally declined over time, and identifies six major trends and five historical forces of this decline, the most important being the humanitarian revolution brought by the Enlightenment and its associated cultivation of reason. ''[[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 next book ''[[Rationality (book)|Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters]]'' (2021).
In 2004, Pinker was named in ''[[Time (magazine)|Time]]''{{'}}s "The 100 Most Influential People in the World Today", and in the years 2005, 2008, 2010, and 2011 in ''[[Foreign Policy]]''{{'}}s list of "Top 100 Global Thinkers".<ref name="ojMWA">{{cite magazine|url=https://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1970858_1970909_1971671,00.html|title=The 2004 Time 100|first=Robert|last=Wright|date=April 26, 2004|magazine=Time}}</ref> Pinker was also included in ''[[Prospect (magazine)|Prospect Magazine's]]'' top 10 "World Thinkers" in 2013.<ref name="jyYbj">{{Cite web|url=https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/world-thinkers-2013|title=World Thinkers 2013|access-date=July 14, 2020|archive-date=August 24, 2020|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200824153242/http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/world-thinkers-2013|url-status=live}}</ref> He has won awards from the [[American Psychological Association]], the [[United States National Academy of Sciences|National Academy of Sciences]], the [[Royal Institution of Great Britain|Royal Institution]], the [[Cognitive Neuroscience Society]], and the [[American Humanist Association]].<ref name="hJbcz">{{Cite web|url=https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2009-12369-001|title=APA PsycNet|website=psycnet.apa.org|access-date=July 14, 2020|archive-date=April 15, 2021|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210415032539/https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2009-12369-001|url-status=live}}</ref><ref name="woHAD">{{Cite web|url=http://www.nasonline.org/member-directory/members/20038978.html|title=Steven Pinker|website=www.nasonline.org|access-date=July 14, 2020|archive-date=October 13, 2018|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20181013172448/http://www.nasonline.org/member-directory/members/20038978.html|url-status=live}}</ref><ref name="qrrWj">{{Cite web|url=https://americanhumanist.org/what-is-humanism/humanist-of-the-year-awards/|title=Humanist of the Year Award|website=American Humanist Association|access-date=July 14, 2020|archive-date=June 7, 2020|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200607163248/https://americanhumanist.org/what-is-humanism/humanist-of-the-year-awards/|url-status=live}}</ref><ref name="4lImB">{{Cite web|url=https://www.cogneurosociety.org/george-a-miller-award/|title=George A. Miller Award|access-date=July 14, 2020|archive-date=February 13, 2020|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200213222747/https://www.cogneurosociety.org/george-a-miller-award/|url-status=live}}</ref><ref name="fEl76">{{Cite web|url=https://stevenpinker.com/files/pinker/files/cv_steven_pinker_jan_2019.pdf|title=Curriculum Vitae of Steven Pinker|access-date=July 14, 2020|archive-date=August 7, 2020|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200807185916/https://stevenpinker.com/files/pinker/files/cv_steven_pinker_jan_2019.pdf|url-status=dead}}</ref> He delivered the [[Gifford Lectures]] at the [[University of Edinburgh]] in 2013. He has served on the editorial boards of a variety of journals, and on the advisory boards of several institutions.<ref name="z2kdo">{{Cite web|url=https://www.journals.elsevier.com/developmental-review/editorial-board|title=Developmental Review Editorial Board|publisher=Elsevier|access-date=July 13, 2020|archive-date=July 14, 2020|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200714025334/https://www.journals.elsevier.com/developmental-review/editorial-board|url-status=live}}</ref> Pinker was the chair of the Usage Panel of the ''[[American Heritage Dictionary]]'' from 2008 to 2018.<ref name="nlhpE">{{Cite book|url=https://stevenpinker.com/publications/sense-style-thinking-persons-guide-writing-21st-century|title=The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century|first=Steven|last=Pinker|year=2014|location=New York|publisher=Penguin|access-date=July 14, 2020|archive-date=August 5, 2020|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200805080232/https://stevenpinker.com/publications/sense-style-thinking-persons-guide-writing-21st-century|url-status=live}}</ref>
==Biography==
Pinker was born in [[Montreal]], Quebec, in 1954, to a middle-class [[Jewish culture|secular Jewish]] family in an English-speaking community.<ref name="google">{{cite book|title=Language Learnability and Language Development, With New Commentary by the Author|author=Pinker, S.|date=2009|publisher=Harvard University Press|isbn=9780674042179|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=P7iEJGLESOMC|access-date=October 10, 2014}}</ref><ref name="fIzy8">{{cite web|url=https://twitter.com/sapinker/status/990944371578109952|title=A Montreal pilgrimage in the footsteps of Leonard Cohen (the girl standing next to the young Cohen in the group photo is my mother, Roslyn Wiesenfeld Pinker).https://www.jta.org/2018/04/24/news-opinion/montreal-pilgrimage-footsteps-leonard-cohen#.WucYP-F0APc.twitter …|first=Steven|last=Pinker|date=April 30, 2018|access-date=May 30, 2019|archive-date=April 30, 2019|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190430232246/https://twitter.com/sapinker/status/990944371578109952|url-status=live}}</ref><ref name=":0">{{Citation |title=Sex Differences, Human Nature, & Identity Politics (Pt. 1) {{!}} Steven Pinker {{!}} ACADEMIA {{!}} Rubin Report | date=March 21, 2018 |url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYf6dD4N86E |access-date=2023-06-22 |language=en |archive-date=June 22, 2023 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230622183109/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYf6dD4N86E |url-status=live }}</ref> His grandparents immigrated to Canada from [[Poland]] and [[Romania]] in 1926,<ref name="4e2et">{{cite news|url=https://www.ft.com/content/a96b18bc-3ec6-11e2-87bc-00144feabdc0 |archive-url=https://ghostarchive.org/archive/20221210/https://www.ft.com/content/a96b18bc-3ec6-11e2-87bc-00144feabdc0 |archive-date=December 10, 2022 |url-access=subscription |url-status=live|title=At home: Steven Pinker |website=[[Financial Times]]|date=December 14, 2012 }}</ref><ref name="BypAx">{{cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=zCZUpYlozycC&pg=PA87|title=Curious Minds: How a Child Becomes a Scientist|first=John|last=Brockman|date=January 7, 2019|publisher=Vintage Books|via=Google Books|isbn=9781400076864|access-date=October 16, 2015|archive-date=June 30, 2023|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230630210707/https://books.google.com/books?id=zCZUpYlozycC&pg=PA87|url-status=live}}</ref> and owned a small necktie factory in Montreal.<ref name="RYbHm">{{cite news|last=Pinker|first=Steven|title=Groups and Genes|url=https://newrepublic.com/article/77727/groups-and-genes|magazine=[[The New Republic]]|date=June 26, 2006|access-date=October 25, 2017|archive-date=May 8, 2019|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190508053654/https://newrepublic.com/article/77727/groups-and-genes|url-status=live}}</ref> 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 the [[Government of Canada|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]]''.<ref name=":0" /><ref name="siblings">{{Cite book | author=Shermer, Michael | author-link=Michael Shermer | date=March 1, 2001 | title=The Pinker Instinct | location=Altadena, CA | publisher=Skeptics Society & Skeptic Magazine | url=http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-10144194_ITM | access-date=September 11, 2007 | archive-date=October 10, 2008 | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20081010125240/http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-10144194_ITM | url-status=live }}</ref><ref name="9N2qu">[https://www.theguardian.com/Archive/Article/0,4273,3926387,00.html Steven Pinker: the mind reader] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200217233149/https://www.theguardian.com/books/1999/nov/06/1 |date=February 17, 2020 }} ''[[The Guardian]]'' Accessed November 25, 2006.</ref>
Pinker graduated from [[Dawson College]] in 1973. 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]].<ref name="dZnLj">{{cite web|url=https://www.britannica.com/biography/Steven-Pinker|title=Britannica Encyclopedia|access-date=October 12, 2019|archive-date=June 29, 2015|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150629134348/https://www.britannica.com/biography/Steven-Pinker|url-status=live}}</ref>
From 1982 until 2003 Pinker taught at the [[MIT Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences|Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences]] at [[MIT]], was the co-director of the Center for [[Cognitive science|Cognitive Science]] (1985–1994), and eventually became the director of the Center for [[Cognitive neuroscience|Cognitive Neuroscience]] (1994–1999),<ref name="BwnYE">{{Citation|title=Curriculum Vitae|publisher=[[Harvard University]]|url=http://stevenpinker.com/files/pinker/files/cv_steven_pinker_1.pdf|access-date=June 23, 2017|archive-date=July 15, 2017|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170715191847/http://stevenpinker.com/files/pinker/files/cv_steven_pinker_1.pdf|url-status=dead}}</ref> taking a one-year sabbatical at the [[University of California, Santa Barbara]], in 1995–96. Since 2003 he has been serving 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.<ref name="LWeeA">{{cite web |author=Pinker, Steven |url=http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/about/longbio.html |title=Official Biography. Harvard University |publisher=Pinker.wjh.harvard.edu |access-date=January 20, 2012 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20051229054325/http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/about/longbio.html |archive-date=December 29, 2005}}</ref> He currently gives lectures as a visiting professor at the [[New College of the Humanities]], a private college in London.<ref name="haFwX">[http://www.nchum.org/who-we-are/the-professoriate "The professoriate"] {{webarchive |url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110608234526/http://www.nchum.org/who-we-are/the-professoriate |date=June 8, 2011}}, New College of the Humanities. Retrieved June 8, 2011.</ref><ref name="0hbEQ">[https://web.archive.org/web/20121130052357/http://www.nchum.org/faculty/professor-steven-pinker "Professor Steven Pinker"], New College of the Humanities. Retrieved November 4, 2014.</ref>
Pinker married [[Nancy Etcoff (psychologist)|Nancy Etcoff]] in 1980 and they divorced in 1992; he married again in 1995 and again divorced.<ref name="wives">[https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0684348/bio Biography for Steven Pinker at imdb] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20151212032424/http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0684348/bio |date=December 12, 2015 }}. Retrieved September 12, 2007.</ref> His third wife, whom he married in 2007, is the novelist and philosopher [[Rebecca Goldstein]].<ref name="Blagg">[http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/about/media/2005_11_04_harvardcrimson.html "How Steven Pinker Works" by Kristin E. Blagg] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20141017070050/http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/about/media/2005_11_04_harvardcrimson.html |date=October 17, 2014}} ''[[The Harvard Crimson]]'' Accessed February 3, 2006.</ref> He has two stepdaughters, the novelist [[Yael Goldstein Love]] and the poet Danielle Blau. Pinker adopted [[atheism]] at 13, but at various times was a "cultural Jew".<ref name="Dougla">[https://www.theguardian.com/Archive/Article/0,4273,3926387,00.html "Steven Pinker: the mind reader" by Ed Douglas] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200217233149/https://www.theguardian.com/books/1999/nov/06/1 |date=February 17, 2020 }} ''[[The Guardian]]'' Accessed February 3, 2006.</ref><ref name="Point of Inquiry Interview">{{cite web | url=http://www.pointofinquiry.org/steven_pinker_evolutionary_psychology_and_human_nature/ | title=Podcast:Steven Pinker - Evolutionary Psychology and Human Nature | publisher=Point of Inquiry with D.J. Grothe | date=February 23, 2007 | first=D.J. | last=Grothe | author-link=D. J. Grothe | access-date=December 29, 2014 | archive-date=July 24, 2018 | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180724031847/http://www.pointofinquiry.org/steven_pinker_evolutionary_psychology_and_human_nature/ | url-status=dead }}</ref><!-- In 2007, Pinker lent his name and expertise to the criminal defense of [[Jeffrey Epstein]].<ref name="nvcIO">{{Cite web|title=Steven Pinker's aid in Jeffrey Epstein's legal defense renews criticism of the increasingly divisive public intellectual|url=https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/07/17/steven-pinkers-aid-jeffrey-epsteins-legal-defense-renews-criticism-increasingly|website=www.insidehighered.com|language=en|access-date=May 31, 2020}}</ref><ref name="6YwW8">{{Cite web|title=Jeffrey Epstein's First Criminal Case Was Helped By A Famous Harvard Language Expert|url=https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/jeffrey-epstein-alan-dershowitz-steven-pinker|website=BuzzFeed News|language=en|access-date=May 31, 2020}}</ref> --> Pinker is an avid [[Cycling|cyclist]].<ref name="bike">{{cite web | url=https://www.bicycling.com/health-nutrition/a39503784/steven-pinker-scientist-cycling-profile/ | title=This Harvard Cognitive Psychologist Can't Stop Thinking Deeply About Cycling | date=April 2022 | access-date=September 2, 2022 | archive-date=July 7, 2022 | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220707171616/https://www.bicycling.com/health-nutrition/a39503784/steven-pinker-scientist-cycling-profile/ | url-status=live }}</ref>
==Linguistic career==
[[File:Steven Pinker 2011.jpg|thumb|Pinker in 2011]]
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 (neuroscientist)|David Marr]]'s theory of a "two-and-a-half-dimensional sketch."<ref name="GjI4r">The nature of the language faculty and its implications for evolution of language</ref> 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",<ref name="LongBiog">{{cite web | url=http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/about/longbio.html | title=Steven Pinker: Long Biography | publisher=Harvard University | access-date=May 18, 2014 | author=Pinker, Steven | url-status=dead | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20051229054325/http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/about/longbio.html | archive-date=December 29, 2005}}</ref> 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".<ref name="LongBiog" /> 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 [[Regular and irregular verbs|irregular verb]]<ref name="YxzxZ">Pinker has written a piece on [http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/media/2000_03_landfall.html The Irregular Verbs] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140606015902/http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/media/2000_03_landfall.html |date=June 6, 2014}}, stating that "I like the Irregular verbs of English, all 180 of them, because of what they tell us about the history of the language and the human minds that have perpetuated it.</ref> "bring", namely "brought"; and using rules to combine (parts of) words, like the past form of the regular verb "walk", namely "walked".<ref name="LongBiog" />
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 (linguistics)|regularization]] of irregular forms and his popular 1999 book, ''[[Words and Rules|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<ref name="WRessay">{{cite web | url=http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/papers/Edinburgh.pdf | title=Words and rules (essay) | publisher=Harvard University | access-date=May 24, 2014 | author=Pinker, Steven | url-status=dead | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140830145603/http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/papers/Edinburgh.pdf | archive-date=August 30, 2014}}</ref> V<sub>past</sub> → V<sub>stem</sub> + 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.<ref name="WRessay" />
In 1990 Pinker, with [[Paul Bloom (psychologist)|Paul Bloom]], published a paper arguing that the human language faculty must have evolved through [[natural selection]].<ref name="vmLIS">Pinker, S. & Bloom, P. (1990). Natural language and natural selection. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13 (4): 707‐784</ref> 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 of ''Homo sapiens'' as a kind of evolutionary accident. This discontinuity-based view was prominently argued by two main authorities, linguist [[Noam Chomsky]] and [[Stephen Jay Gould]].<ref name="journey">{{cite web | url=http://www.humanjourney.us/firstWord3.html | title=Language Development:The First Word. The Search for the Origins of Language | first=Christine | last=Kenneally | author-link=Christine Kenneally | url-status=dead | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140714214704/http://www.humanjourney.us/firstWord3.html | archive-date=July 14, 2014}}</ref> 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?"<ref name="journey" /><ref name="PDAvj">{{cite journal | url=http://www.replicatedtypo.com/2612/2612.html | publisher=Replicatedtypo.com | title=The 20th Anniversary of Steven Pinker & Paul Bloom: Natural Language and Natural Selection (1990) | journal=Behavioral and Brain Sciences | year=1990 | volume=13 | issue=4 | pages=707–726 | last1=Pinker | first1=Steven | last2=Bloom | first2=Paul | doi=10.1017/S0140525X00081061 | s2cid=6167614 | access-date=June 9, 2014 | archive-date=July 14, 2014 | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140714140204/http://www.replicatedtypo.com/2612/2612.html | url-status=live }}</ref> The article also presaged Pinker's argument in ''The Language Instinct''.
In 2006 Pinker provided to [[Alan Dershowitz]], a personal friend of Pinker's who was [[Jeffrey 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.<ref name="auto1">{{Cite web|url=https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/jeffrey-epstein-alan-dershowitz-steven-pinker|title=Jeffrey Epstein's First Criminal Case Was Helped By A Famous Harvard Language Expert|website=BuzzFeed News|date=July 12, 2019 |access-date=July 9, 2020|archive-date=June 15, 2020|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200615004817/https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/jeffrey-epstein-alan-dershowitz-steven-pinker|url-status=live}}</ref> 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 with [[BuzzFeed News]] that he regrets writing the letter.<ref name="auto1" /> Pinker says he never received money from Epstein and met with him three times over more than a dozen years,<ref name="xGqbx">{{Cite news|url=https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/jeffrey-epstein-the-academy-and-questions-about-male-dominance-in-science/2019/09/17/0b546dd6-d965-11e9-bfb1-849887369476_story.html|title=Jeffrey Epstein, the academy and questions about male dominance in science|first1=Carolyn Y.|last1=Johnson|first2=Susan|last2=Svrluga|date=September 17, 2019|newspaper=Washington Post|access-date=July 13, 2020|archive-date=June 4, 2020|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200604005029/https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/jeffrey-epstein-the-academy-and-questions-about-male-dominance-in-science/2019/09/17/0b546dd6-d965-11e9-bfb1-849887369476_story.html|url-status=live}}</ref> and said he could never stand Epstein and tried to keep his distance.<ref name="auto1" />
==Popularization of science==
===Human cognition and natural language===
{{main|The Language Instinct|Words and Rules|How the Mind Works|The Blank Slate|The Stuff of Thought}}
<!--[[File:AmericanBeaver.JPG|thumb|upright=1.3|Pinker argues that the human faculty for [[language]] is as much an instinct as a beaver's ability to build dams.]]-->[[File:Steven Pinker CSICon 2018 Enlightenment Now- The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.jpg|thumb|283x283px|Pinker at [[CSICon]] in 2018, hosted by the [[Committee for Skeptical Inquiry]]]]
Pinker's 1994 ''[[The Language Instinct]]'' was the first of several books to combine [[cognitive science]] with [[behavioral genetics]] and [[evolutionary psychology]]. It introduces the science of language and 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 [[Linguistic relativity|Sapir–Whorf hypothesis]] that language limits the kinds of thoughts a person can have, and that [[Great Ape language|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"<ref name="LIintro" /> 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"<ref name="LIintro" /> – [[Eric Lenneberg]], [[George Armitage Miller|George Miller]], [[Roger William Brown|Roger Brown]], [[Morris Halle]] and [[Alvin Liberman]].<ref name="LIintro">{{cite book | title=The Language Instinct | publisher=Penguin | author=Pinker, Steven | year=1994 | pages=23–24}}</ref> Brown mentored Pinker through his thesis; Pinker stated that Brown's "funny and instructive"<ref name="BrownObit">{{cite journal | url=http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/papers/Brown_obituary.pdf | title=Obituary: Roger Brown | author=Pinker, Steven | journal=Cognition | year=1998 | pages=199–213 (see page 205) | doi=10.1016/s0010-0277(98)00027-4 | volume=66 | issue=3 | url-status=dead | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150518180224/http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/papers/Brown_obituary.pdf | archive-date=May 18, 2015 | pmid=9689769 | s2cid=6858457}}</ref> book ''Words and Things'' (1958) was one of the inspirations for ''The Language Instinct''.<ref name="BrownObit" /><ref name="uNNJp">{{cite journal | url=http://www.nasonline.org/publications/biographical-memoirs/memoir-pdfs/brown-roger-w.pdf | title=Roger William Brown 1925–1997 | author=Kagan, Jerome | journal=Biographical Memoirs | year=1999 | volume=77 | pages=7 | access-date=May 17, 2014 | archive-date=May 18, 2015 | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150518093955/http://www.nasonline.org/publications/biographical-memoirs/memoir-pdfs/brown-roger-w.pdf | url-status=live }}</ref>
There has been debate about the explanatory adequacy of the theory. By 2015, the linguistic [[Linguistic nativism|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]].<ref name="rejection">* {{cite book | last1=Fernald | first1=Anne | title=Handbook of Psycholinguistics | last2=Marchman | first2=Virginia A. | date=2006| publisher=Academic Press | isbn=9780080466415 | editor-last=Traxler and Gernsbacher | pages=1027–1071 | chapter=27: Language learning in infancy}}, quote p. 1030: "Some critiques directly challenge the logic of arguments made by Chomsky, Pinker, and like-minded theorists, questioning such core assumptions as the universality of generative grammar, the autonomy of syntax in language processing, and the fundamental unlearnability of language (e.g., Bates & Goodman, 1999; Braine, 1994; Pullum & Scholz, 2002; Tomasello, 1995). Other critiques focus on empirical evidence inconsistent with particular nativist assertions. For example, the claim that negative evidence is not available when children make grammatical errors, an assumption central to the "poverty of the stimulus" argument at the heart of Chomsky’s theory, is not supported by a recent analysis of parents’ reformulations in speech to children (Chouinard & Clark, 2003). These diverse challenges, both philosophical and data-driven, have fueled debate over four decades about the explanatory adequacy of nativist theories of language learning." * {{cite book | last=de Bot | first=Kees | year=2015 | title=A History of Applied Linguistics: From 1980 to the Present | publisher=Routledge | isbn= 9781138820654}}, quote pp. 58–60: "GG is generally seen as a declining paradigm and its proponents now tend to stay away from conferences like AAAL (the American Association of Applied Linguistics) and University of Boston Child Language Development conferences, as a cursory count of papers on the basis of abstracts shows [...] In the psycholinguistic community, the idea of innateness and a Language Acquisition Device (LAD) were seen as problematic [...] Now that generation of GG linguists is retiring and there is a tendency in many universities not to replace them with younger scholars of that school, but rather appoint UB oriented linguists. There is almost a euphoria that the grip of the nativists on what constitutes linguistics is gone and that other approaches and more social orientations are seen as meaningful alternatives. Others try to explain the reasons for the decline of GG [...] Some informants are quite outspoken about the role of GG in AL. William Grabe states: "Fundamentally Chomsky is wrong and we wasted a lot of time. In 1964 Chomsky’s Aspects was published. Now, in 2014, we are 50 years later. What impact has all of that had in real world language use? This is an overstated theoretical direction." Jan Hulstijn summarizes: "Generative linguistics has had no noticeable (or durable) impact.""</ref> 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|Educating Eve: The 'Language Instinct' Debate]]''.<ref name="jcIP5">{{cite book|url=http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/1449/|title=The 'Language Instinct' Debate|year=2005|publisher=University of Sussex|isbn=9780826473851|access-date=June 8, 2014|archive-date=July 14, 2014|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140714150640/http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/1449/|url-status=live}}</ref><ref name="Sampson">{{cite web | url=http://www.grsampson.net/REmpNat.html | title=Empiricism v. Nativism: Nature or Nurture? | publisher=GRSampson.net | access-date=June 8, 2014 | archive-date=August 24, 2013 | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130824045728/http://www.grsampson.net/REmpNat.html | url-status=live }}. More at [http://www.grsampson.net/BLID.html The 'Language Instinct' Debate] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20181008182932/https://www.grsampson.net/BLID.html |date=October 8, 2018 }}</ref> 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.<ref name="Sampson" /> Others have sought a middle ground between Pinker's nativism and Sampson's culturalism.<ref name="Cowley">{{cite journal | last1 = Cowley | first1 = S. J. | year = 2001 | title = The baby, the bathwater and the 'language instinct' debate | journal = Language Sciences | volume = 23 | issue = 1| pages = 69–91 | doi = 10.1016/s0388-0001(00)00017-6}}</ref>
The assumptions underlying the [[Psychological nativism|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), 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 iconic [[state machine]] to play."<ref name="Aleksander">{{cite book | title=Impossible Minds | author=Aleksander, Igor | year=1996 | pages=228–234 | publisher=Imperial College Press | isbn=1-86094-030-7}}</ref>
[[File:Steven Pinker giving a lecture for Humanists UK.jpg|left|thumb|Pinker lecturing to humanists in the United Kingdom (2018)]]
Two other books, ''[[How the Mind Works]]'' (1997) and ''[[The 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 of [[Daniel Dennett]] and [[Richard Dawkins]] in many disputes surrounding [[adaptationism]]). 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 around ''The Blank Slate'', Pinker called [[Thomas Sowell]]'s book ''[[A Conflict of Visions]]'' "wonderful",<ref name="Sailer">{{cite web | url=http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/books/tbs/media_articles/2002_10_30_upi.html | title=Q&A: Steven Pinker of 'Blank Slate' | agency=United Press International | date=October 30, 2002 | access-date=May 10, 2014 | author=Sailer, Steve | url-status=dead | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150316221651/http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/books/tbs/media_articles/2002_10_30_upi.html |archive-date=March 16, 2015}}</ref> and explained that "The Tragic Vision" and the "Utopian Vision" are the views of human nature behind [[right-wing|right-]] and left-wing ideologies.<ref name="Sailer" />
In ''[[Words and Rules|Words 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.<ref name="jjaWI">{{cite web|url=http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/books/wr/index.html |title=Words and Rules (book) |publisher=Harvard University |access-date=May 24, 2014 |author=Pinker, Steven |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140330020838/http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/books/wr/index.html |archive-date=March 30, 2014}}</ref> "Words and Rules" is also the title of an essay by Pinker outlining many of the topics discussed in the book.<ref name="WRessay" /> Critiqueing the book from the perspective of [[generative linguistics]] [[Charles Yang (linguist)|Charles Yang]], in the ''[[London Review of Books]]'', writes that "this book never runs low on hubris or hyperbole".<ref name="LRB">{{cite journal | url=http://www.lrb.co.uk/v22/n16/charles-yang/dig-dug-think-thunk | title=Dig-dug, think-thunk (review of ''Words and Rules'' by Steven Pinker) | author=Yang, Charles | journal=London Review of Books | date=August 24, 2000 | volume=22 | issue=6 | page=33 | access-date=June 1, 2014 | archive-date=June 2, 2014 | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140602201025/http://www.lrb.co.uk/v22/n16/charles-yang/dig-dug-think-thunk | url-status=live }}</ref> 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."<ref name="LRB" />
In ''[[The 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 to [[Stone Age]] life could work in the modern world. Many quirks of language are the result.<ref name="5kW5k">{{cite web | url=http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/books/stuff/index.html | title=The Stuff of Thought | publisher=Harvard University | access-date=May 30, 2014 | author=Pinker, Steven | url-status=dead | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080509163145/http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/books/stuff/index.html | archive-date=May 9, 2008}}</ref>
Pinker is critical of theories about the [[Evolution of language|evolutionary 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 a [[Spandrel (biology)|spandrel]] – a feature not adaptive in its own right, but that has persisted through other traits that are more broadly practical, and thus selected for. In ''How the Mind Works'', Pinker reiterates [[Immanuel 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 |date=August 2024 |reason=If we're going to quote somebody, we should provide a citation to verify the accuracy of the quote.}} This argument has been rejected by [[Daniel Levitin]] and [[Joseph Carroll (scholar)|Joseph Carroll]], experts in [[music cognition]], who argue that music has had an important role in the evolution of human cognition.<ref name="nhl5X">{{cite journal | last1 = Levitin | first1 = D. J. | last2 = Tirovolas | first2 = A. K. | year = 2009 | title = Current Advances in the Cognitive Neuroscience of Music | journal = Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences | volume = 1156 | issue = 1 | pages = 211–231 | doi = 10.1111/j.1749-6632.2009.04417.x | pmid = 19338510 | bibcode = 2009NYASA1156..211L | s2cid = 2856561 | url = http://digitool.library.mcgill.ca/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=145070 | access-date = August 16, 2019 | archive-date = June 30, 2023 | archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20230630210714/https://escholarship.mcgill.ca/concern/articles/hq37vs36p?locale=en | url-status = live }}</ref><ref name="Tqxkv">{{cite journal | last1 = Perlovsky | first1 = L | year = 2011 | title = Music. Cognitive Function, Origin, And Evolution Of Musical Emotions | journal = WebmedCentral Psychology | volume = 2 | issue = 2| page = WMC001494}}</ref><ref name="YAPpr">{{cite journal | last1 = Abbott | first1 = Alison | year = 2002 | title = Neurobiology: Music, maestro, please! | journal = Nature | volume = 416 | issue = 6876 | pages = 12–14 | doi = 10.1038/416012a | pmid = 11882864 | bibcode = 2002Natur.416...12A | s2cid = 4420891| doi-access = free }}</ref><ref name="xjo3b">Cross, I. (1999). Is music the most important thing we ever did? Music, development and evolution. [preprint (html)] [preprint (pdf)] In Suk Won Yi (Ed.), Music, mind and science (pp 10–39), Seoul: Seoul National University Press.</ref><ref name="Interview with Daniel Levitin">{{cite web | url=https://www.pbs.org/wnet/musicinstinct/blog/interview-with-daniel-levitin/part-two/27/ | title=Interview with Daniel Levitin | publisher=Pbs.org | date=May 20, 2009 | access-date=December 29, 2012 | archive-date=October 18, 2014 | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20141018095915/http://www.pbs.org/wnet/musicinstinct/blog/interview-with-daniel-levitin/part-two/27/ | url-status=live }}</ref><ref name="Steven Pinker's Cheesecake For The Mind">{{cite web | url=http://cogweb.ucla.edu/Abstracts/Carroll_C98.html | title=Steven Pinker's Cheesecake For The Mind | publisher=Cogweb.ucla.edu | year=1998 | access-date=December 29, 2012 | author=Carroll, Joseph | archive-date=January 29, 2013 | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130129122654/http://cogweb.ucla.edu/Abstracts/Carroll_C98.html | url-status=live }}</ref> In his book ''[[This Is Your Brain On Music]]'', Levitin argues that music could provide adaptive advantage through [[sexual selection]], social bonding, and [[cognitive 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.<ref name="lfmjT">Levitin, Daniel. 2006. ''[[This Is Your Brain On Music|This Is Your Brain On Music: The Science of a Human Obsession]]'', New York: Dutton/Penguin.</ref>
Pinker has also been critical of "[[whole language]]" reading instruction techniques, stating in ''[[How the Mind Works]]'', "...{{nbsp}}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 that ''reading'' is a naturally developing human instinct."<ref name="HnL6i">{{Citation|last1=Pinker|first1=Steven|title=How the Mind Works|publisher=[[W. W. Norton & Company]]|place=New York|pages=342|year=1997|title-link=How the Mind Works}}</ref> In the appendix to the 2007 reprinted edition of ''[[The Language Instinct]]'', Pinker cited ''Why Our Children Can't Read'' by cognitive psychologist [[Diane McGuinness]] as his favorite book on the subject and noted:
<blockquote>One raging public debate involving language went unmentioned in ''[[The 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.<ref name="KILwu">{{Citation|last1=Pinker|first1=Steven|title=The Language Instinct|publisher=[[Harper Perennial]]|place=New York|pages=186|edition=3rd|year=2007|title-link=The Language Instinct}}</ref> 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.<ref name="DN9iV">{{Citation|last1=Pinker|first1=Steven|title=The Language Instinct|publisher=[[Harper Perennial]]|place=New York|pages=PS14|edition=3rd|year=2007|title-link=The Language Instinct}}</ref>
</blockquote>
===''The Better Angels of Our Nature''===
{{main|The Better Angels of Our Nature}}
[[File:Mars (Hausbuch 1480).png|thumb|upright=1.5|Detail from "Mars" in ''Das Mittelalterliche Hausbuch'', c. 1475 – 1480. Pinker used the image in ''[[The Better Angels of Our Nature]]'' to illustrate violence in the [[Middle Ages]].<ref name="u14hW">Pinker, Steven (2011). ''The Better Angels of Our Nature''. Allen Lane. p. 66</ref>]]
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.<ref name="http://iai.tv/video/the-decline-of-violence">{{cite web|last=Pinker|first=Steven|title=The Decline of Violence|url=http://iai.tv/video/the-decline-of-violence|publisher=IAI|access-date=January 3, 2014|archive-date=April 1, 2016|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160401071018/http://iai.tv/video/the-decline-of-violence|url-status=live}}</ref>
Response to the book was divided. Many critics found its arguments convincing and its synthesis of a large volume of historical evidence compelling.<ref name="30elX">{{cite web |author=Coffman, Scott |date=September 28, 2012 |title=Book Review: 'The Better Angels of Our Nature' |url=http://www.courier-journal.com/article/20120929/FEATURES06/309290026/Book-review-Better-Angels-Our-Nature-?nclick_check=1 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://archive.today/20130119173706/http://www.courier-journal.com/article/20120929/FEATURES06/309290026/Book-review-Better-Angels-Our-Nature-?nclick_check=1 |archive-date=January 19, 2013 |work=Courier Journal}}</ref><ref name="eFKhU">{{cite news |last=Kohn |first=Marek |date=October 7, 2011 |title=Book Review: 'The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence in History and its Causes', By Steven Pinker |work=The Independent |location=UK |url=https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/the-better-angels-of-our-nature-the-decline-of-violence-in-history-and-its-causes-by-steven-pinker-2366392.html |url-status=live |url-access=subscription |archive-url=https://ghostarchive.org/archive/20220525/https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/the-better-angels-of-our-nature-the-decline-of-violence-in-history-and-its-causes-by-steven-pinker-2366392.html |archive-date=May 25, 2022}}</ref><ref name="jsIpE">{{cite web |last=Brittan |first=Samuel |date=October 22, 2011 |title=The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence in History and its Causes by Stephen Pinker |url=http://www.spectator.co.uk/books/7325058/the-better-angels-of-our-nature-the-decline-of-violence-in-history-and-its-causes-by-stephen-pinker/ |work=The Spectator |access-date=May 30, 2014 |archive-date=2013-06-15 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130615222059/https://www.spectator.co.uk/books/7325058/the-better-angels-of-our-nature-the-decline-of-violence-in-history-and-its-causes-by-stephen-pinker/ |url-status=dead }}</ref> 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.<ref name="fry2013">{{cite book | url=https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199858996.001.0001/acprof-9780199858996 | title=War, Peace and Human Nature: The Convergence of Evolutionary and Cultural Views | first=D.P. | last=Fry | editor-first1=Douglas P | editor-last1=Fry | publisher=Oxford University Press | date=2013 | doi=10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199858996.001.0001 | isbn=978-0-19-985899-6 | access-date=April 19, 2022 | archive-date=May 7, 2022 | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220507094813/https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199858996.001.0001/acprof-9780199858996 | url-status=live }}</ref><ref name="QikDS">{{cite web | url=http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=bookreview-steven-pinker-the-better-angels-of-our-nature-why-violence-has-declined | title=Book Review | first=R. | last=Epstein | work=Scientific American | date=October 2011 | access-date=May 30, 2014 | archive-date=September 14, 2016 | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160914140139/http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=bookreview-steven-pinker-the-better-angels-of-our-nature-why-violence-has-declined | url-status=live }}</ref><ref name="3EtoZ">{{Cite magazine | url=https://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2011/10/03/111003crbo_books_kolbert | magazine=The New Yorker | title=Peace In Our Time: Steven Pinker's History of Violence in Decline | first=Elizabeth | last=Kolbert |date=October 3, 2011}}</ref><ref name="eE51i">{{cite web | url=http://assets.survivalinternational.org/documents/1081/corry-on-pinker.pdf | title=The case of the 'Brutal Savage': Poirot or Clouseau?: Why Steven Pinker, like Jared Diamond, is wrong | author=Corry, Stephen | publisher=Survival International | access-date=May 30, 2014 | archive-date=March 3, 2016 | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160303182324/http://assets.survivalinternational.org/documents/1081/corry-on-pinker.pdf | url-status=live }} (Summary at [http://www.survivalinternational.org/articles/3289-brutal-savages The myth of the ‘Brutal Savage’] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140418180905/http://www.survivalinternational.org/articles/3289-brutal-savages |date=April 18, 2014 }})</ref> Archaeologist [[David Wengrow]] summarized Pinker's approach to [[archaeological science]] as "a modern psychologist making it up as he goes along".<ref>{{Cite book |last1=Graeber |first1=David |title=[[The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity]] |date=2021 |first2=David |last2=Wengrow |author-link2=David Wengrow |isbn=978-0-374-72110-7 |location=New York |oclc=1284998482 |section=On the pursuit of happiness}}</ref>
===English writing style in the 21st century===
In his seventh popular book, ''[[The Sense of Style|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 science and psychology, given that [[William Strunk Jr.|William Strunk]] wrote ''[[The Elements of Style]]'' in 1918, nearly a full century prior to Pinker’s publication.<ref name="SofS01">{{cite web|title=Steven Pinker: Using Grammar as a Tool, Not as a Weapon|url=http://www.pointofinquiry.org/steven_pinker_using_grammar_as_a_tool_not_as_a_weapon/|website=[[Point of Inquiry]]|publisher=[[Center for Inquiry]]|access-date=January 9, 2017|date=November 10, 2014|archive-date=May 19, 2018|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180519042143/http://www.pointofinquiry.org/steven_pinker_using_grammar_as_a_tool_not_as_a_weapon|url-status=dead}}</ref>
==Views==
{{Liberalism US|intellectuals}}
[[File:Steven Pinker and Nils Brose G%C3%B6ttingen 10102010.JPG|thumb|300px |Pinker and Nils Brose speaking at a neuroscience conference]]
Pinker identifies as a [[Liberalism|liberal]]<ref>{{cite book |last1=Pinker |first1=Steven |title=The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined |date=September 25, 2012 |publisher=Penguin |isbn=9780143122012 |page=180 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=8-vYCwAAQBAJ |access-date=17 December 2023}}</ref> who is critical of some aspects of the [[Left-wing politics|political left]].<ref>{{cite news |last1=Blasdel |first1=Alex |title=Pinker's Progress: The Celebrity Scientist at the Center of the Culture Wars |url=https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/sep/28/steven-pinker-celebrity-scientist-at-the-centre-of-the-culture-wars |access-date=17 December 2023 |work=The Guardian |date=28 Sep 2021}}</ref> He supports [[Same-sex marriage|same-sex marriage]], a [[Universal Basic Income|universal basic income]], the legalization of [[Recreational drug use|drugs]], the [[Carbon tax|taxation of carbon]], and the abolition of [[Capital punishment|capital punishment]].<ref>{{cite book |last1=Pinker |first1=Steven |title=Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress |date=February 13, 2018 |publisher=Penguin |isbn=9780143111382 |pages=119–214 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=J6grDwAAQBAJ |access-date=17 December 2023}}</ref> Pinker is a strong supporter of the [[Democratic Party (United States)|Democratic Party]].<ref>{{cite news |last1=Cadenhead |first1=Rebecca |last2=Herszenhorn |first2=Miles |title=Steven Pinker and the Fight Over Academia's Future |url=https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2022/10/27/steven-pinker-scrut/ |access-date=17 December 2023 |publisher=Harvard Crimson |date=27 October 2022}}</ref> However, 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.<ref>{{cite news |last1=Pinker |first1=Steven |last2=Madras |first2=Bertha |title=Why We Created Harvard's Academic Freedom Council |url=https://www.persuasion.community/p/why-we-created-harvards-academic |access-date=17 December 2023 |publisher=Persuasion |date=21 April 2023}}</ref> He was a signatory of the [[A Letter on Justice and Open Debate|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."<ref>{{cite news |title=A Letter on Justice and Open Debate |url=https://harpers.org/a-letter-on-justice-and-open-debate/ |access-date=17 December 2023 |publisher=Harper’s Weekly |date=7 July 2020}}</ref>
Pinker has sharply criticized [[Social conservatism|social conservatives]], such as former chairman of the [[President's Council on Bioethics]] [[Leon Kass]], for opposing [[Embryonic stem cell|stem cell research]], arguing that their moral views were mere expressions of disgust that were obstructing treatments that could save millions of lives.<ref>{{cite news |last1=Pinker |first1=Steven |title=The Stupidity of Dignity |url=https://newrepublic.com/article/64674/the-stupidity-dignity |access-date=17 December 2023 |date=27 May 2008}}</ref>
Pinker is a frequent participant in public debates surrounding 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"<ref name="WestTelegraph">{{cite web | url=http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/edwest/100177038/a-decade-after-steven-pinkers-the-blank-slate-why-is-human-nature-still-taboo/ | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120819195114/http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/edwest/100177038/a-decade-after-steven-pinkers-the-blank-slate-why-is-human-nature-still-taboo/ | url-status=dead | archive-date=August 19, 2012 | title=A decade after Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate, why is human nature still taboo? | work=The Daily Telegraph | date=August 17, 2012 | access-date=May 30, 2014 | author=West, Ed}}</ref> a decade after the book's publication. West describes Pinker as "no [[polemic]]ist, and he leaves readers to draw their own conclusions".<ref name="WestTelegraph" />
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 [[Women in STEM fields#Gender imbalance in STEM fields|gender gaps in mathematics and science]].<ref>{{cite news |title=Full Transcript: President Summers' Remarks at the National Bureau of Economic Research, Jan. 14 2005 |url=https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2005/2/18/full-transcript-president-summers-remarks-at/ |access-date=25 January 2022 |publisher=The Harvard Crimson |date=February 18, 2005 |archive-date=January 25, 2022 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220125154830/https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2005/2/18/full-transcript-president-summers-remarks-at/ |url-status=live }}</ref><ref name="pmid15841161">{{cite journal| author=Marks AR| title=Sex and the university system. | journal=J Clin Invest | year= 2005 | volume= 115 | issue= 4 | pages= 790 | pmid=15841161 | doi=10.1172/JCI24841 | pmc=1070438}}</ref><ref name="4TEEv">[https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2005/1/19/psychoanalysis-q-and-a-steven-pinker-in-an/ "Psychoanalysis Q-and-A: Steven Pinker"] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180420150338/http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2005/1/19/psychoanalysis-q-and-a-steven-pinker-in-an/ |date=April 20, 2018 }} ''[[The Harvard Crimson]]'' Accessed March 7, 2019.</ref> In a debate between Pinker and [[Elizabeth 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".<ref name="M5g0d">{{cite web | url=http://edge.org/3rd_culture/debate05/debate05_index.html | title=The Science of Gender and Science: Pinker Vs. Spelke, A Debate | publisher=Edge.org | date=May 16, 2005 | access-date=May 10, 2014 | archive-date=April 29, 2019 | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190429075811/https://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/debate05/debate05_index.html | url-status=live }}</ref>
In January 2009 Pinker wrote an article about the [[Personal Genome Project]] and its possible impact on the understanding of human nature in ''[[The New York Times]]''.<ref name="n93JH">{{cite news |first=Steven |last=Pinker |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/11/magazine/11Genome-t.html |url-access=registration |title=My Genome, My Self |newspaper=The New York Times |date=January 11, 2009 |access-date=February 25, 2017 |archive-date=March 10, 2017 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170310211950/http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/11/magazine/11Genome-t.html |url-status=live }}</ref> He discussed the new developments in [[epigenetics]] and gene-environment interactions in the afterword to the 2016 edition of his book ''The Blank Slate''.<ref name="uR8aT">{{Cite web|url=https://impakter.com/steven-pinker/|title=A Talk with Professor Steven Pinker|date=August 8, 2017|access-date=July 22, 2020|archive-date=July 15, 2020|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200715150533/https://impakter.com/steven-pinker/|url-status=live}}</ref> Pinker has been criticised for using the data of [[Scientific racism|scientific racists]] (on subjects unrelated to race), such as the blogger [[Steven Sailer]], with journalist [[Angela 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.<ref>{{Cite news |last=Blasdel |first=Alex |date=2021-09-28 |title=Pinker's progress: the celebrity scientist at the centre of the culture wars |language=en-GB |work=The Guardian |url=https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/sep/28/steven-pinker-celebrity-scientist-at-the-centre-of-the-culture-wars |access-date=2023-07-29 |issn=0261-3077}}</ref>
In a November 2009 article for ''The New York Times'', Pinker wrote a mixed review of [[Malcolm Gladwell]]'s essays, criticizing his analytical methods.<ref name="1GVps">{{cite news | url=https://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/books/review/Pinker-t.html | work=The New York Times | first=Steven | last=Pinker | title=Malcolm Gladwell, Eclectic Detective | date=November 15, 2009 | access-date=February 25, 2017 | archive-date=January 12, 2019 | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190112095033/https://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/books/review/Pinker-t.html | url-status=live }}</ref> Gladwell replied, disputing Pinker's comments about the importance of [[Intelligence quotient|IQ]] on teaching performance and by analogy the effect, if any, of draft order on quarterback performance in the [[National Football League]].<ref name="TwwxG">{{cite news | url=https://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/29/books/review/Letters-t-LETSGOTOTHET_LETTERS.html | work=The New York Times | title=Let's Go to the Tape | date=November 29, 2009 | access-date=February 25, 2017 | archive-date=June 13, 2017 | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170613144910/http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/29/books/review/Letters-t-LETSGOTOTHET_LETTERS.html | url-status=live }}</ref> [[Advanced NFL Stats]] addressed the issue statistically, siding with Pinker and showing that differences in methodology could explain the two men's differing opinions.<ref name="C9eDG">{{cite web |last=Burke |first=Brian |url=http://www.advancednflstats.com/2010/04/steven-pinker-vs-malcolm-gladwell-and.html | archive-url= https://web.archive.org/web/20110908140639/http://www.advancednflstats.com/2010/04/steven-pinker-vs-malcolm-gladwell-and.html | archive-date= September 8, 2011 | title=Steven Pinker vs. Malcolm Gladwell and Drafting QBs |publisher=Advanced NFL Stats |date=April 22, 2010 |access-date=January 20, 2012}}</ref>
In an appearance for [[BBC World Service]]'s ''Exchanges At The Frontier'' programme, an audience member questioned whether the virtuous developments in culture and human nature (documented in ''[[The 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".<ref name="F4e6e">"[http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00m98km Exchanges At The Frontier 2011] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20121206221853/http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00m98km |date=December 6, 2012 }}", BBC.</ref> 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 at [[University of Cambridge|Cambridge University]] in September 2015.<ref name="um9e1">Human violence and morality http://online.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/pdf/10.3828/hgr.2015.7 {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20181106184948/https://online.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/pdf/10.3828/hgr.2015.7 |date=November 6, 2018 }}</ref>
In his 2018 book ''[[Enlightenment Now]]'', Pinker posited that [[Age of Enlightenment|Enlightenment]] rationality should be defended against attacks from both the political left and political right.<ref>[https://harvardmagazine.com/2018/03/steven-pinker-enlightenment-now Can Science Justify Itself?] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180816000043/https://harvardmagazine.com/2018/03/steven-pinker-enlightenment-now |date=August 16, 2018 }} Ada Palmer. ''[[Harvard Magazine]]'', March–April 2018.</ref> In a debate with Pinker, post-colonial theorist [[Homi K. Bhabha|Homi 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."<ref name="PQPaB">{{Cite web|url=https://iainews.iai.tv/articles/does-the-enlightenment-need-defending-auid-1149|title=Does the Enlightenment Need Defending?|date=September 13, 2018|website=IAI TV – Philosophy for our times: cutting edge debates and talks from the world's leading thinkers|access-date=December 4, 2018|archive-date=December 5, 2018|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20181205003835/https://iainews.iai.tv/articles/does-the-enlightenment-need-defending-auid-1149|url-status=live}}</ref> In a 2019 story in [[Current Affairs (magazine)|''Current Affairs'']], proprietor [[Nathan J. Robinson|Nathan Robinson]] criticised Pinker, saying that he misrepresents his critics' arguments against his work.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Robinson |first=Nathan J. |title=The World's Most Annoying Man |url=https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2019/05/the-worlds-most-annoying-man |access-date=2023-07-29 |journal=Current Affairs|date=May 29, 2019 }}</ref>
In 2020, an open letter to the [[Linguistic 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.<ref name="atlantic">{{cite news |last1=Friedersdorf |first1=Conor |title=The Chilling Effect of an Attack on a Scholar |url=https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/steven-pinker-will-be-just-fine/614323/ |access-date=10 August 2020 |work=The Atlantic |date=20 July 2020 |archive-date=August 9, 2020 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200809180659/https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/steven-pinker-will-be-just-fine/614323/ |url-status=live }}</ref> 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.<ref name="AKVpm">{{cite news |last1=Powell |first1=Michael |title=How a Famous Harvard Professor Became a Target Over His Tweets |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/15/us/steven-pinker-harvard.html |access-date=16 August 2020 |work=The New York Times |date=15 July 2020 |archive-date=February 10, 2022 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220210201038/https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/15/us/steven-pinker-harvard.html |url-status=live }}</ref> 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."<ref name="AKVpm"/><ref name="JxHzG">{{Cite news|url=https://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thinking-man/man-refused-cancelled/ |archive-url=https://ghostarchive.org/archive/20220111/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thinking-man/man-refused-cancelled/ |archive-date=January 11, 2022 |url-access=subscription |url-status=live|title=Steven Pinker – The man who refused to be cancelled|first=Tim|last=Stanley|newspaper=The Telegraph|date=July 18, 2020|via=www.telegraph.co.uk}}{{cbignore}}</ref><ref name="ss0ny">{{Cite web|url=https://www.fairobserver.com/region/north_america/peter-isackson-steven-pinker-george-orwell-cancel-culture-news-78461/|title=Steven Pinker and the Debate Over 'Cancel Culture'|first=Peter|last=Isackson|date=July 22, 2020|website=Fair Observer|access-date=July 22, 2020|archive-date=July 23, 2020|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200723184459/https://www.fairobserver.com/region/north_america/peter-isackson-steven-pinker-george-orwell-cancel-culture-news-78461/|url-status=live}}</ref><ref name="bj0zX">{{Cite news|url=https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/authors/stink-academic-hypocrisy-steven-pinker-usurps-humanist-values/ |archive-url=https://ghostarchive.org/archive/20220111/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/authors/stink-academic-hypocrisy-steven-pinker-usurps-humanist-values/ |archive-date=January 11, 2022 |url-access=subscription |url-status=live|title=The stink of academic hypocrisy: Steven Pinker usurps the very humanist values he claims to hold|first=Tim|last=Smith-Laing|newspaper=The Telegraph|date=July 20, 2020|via=www.telegraph.co.uk}}{{cbignore}}</ref><ref>{{Cite news |last=Whitworth |first=Damian |date=9 July 2020 |title=Steven Pinker: I had to speak out. Cancel culture is Orwellian |newspaper=[[The Times]] |language=en |url=https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/steven-pinker-i-had-to-speak-out-cancel-culture-is-orwellian-sr2q03nh6 |access-date=2023-03-22 |issn=0140-0460 |archive-date=April 12, 2023 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230412012940/https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/steven-pinker-i-had-to-speak-out-cancel-culture-is-orwellian-sr2q03nh6 |url-status=live }}</ref> Several academics criticized the letter and expressed support for Pinker.<ref name="atlantic" /> 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."<ref name="z7wZA">{{cite news |last1=Bailey |first1=Ronald |title=Steven Pinker Beats Cancel Culture Attack |url=https://reason.com/2020/07/10/steven-pinker-beats-cancel-culture-attack/ |access-date=10 August 2020 |work=Reason.com |date=10 July 2020 |archive-date=August 12, 2020 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200812153619/https://reason.com/2020/07/10/steven-pinker-beats-cancel-culture-attack/ |url-status=live }}</ref>
== Awards and distinctions ==
Pinker was named one of ''[[Time (magazine)|Time]]''{{'}}s 100 most influential people in the world in 2004<ref name="mBNcF">[http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/about/media/2004_04_26_time.htm "Steven Pinker: How Our Minds Evolved" by Robert Wright] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20051230145614/http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/about/media/2004_04_26_time.htm |date=December 30, 2005}} ''[[Time (magazine)|Time]]'' Accessed February 8, 2006.</ref> and one of ''[[Prospect (magazine)|Prospect]]'' and ''[[Foreign Policy]]''{{'}}s 100 top public intellectuals in both years the poll was carried out, 2005<ref name="YDmcP">[https://foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3249 "The Prospect/FP Top 100 Public Intellectuals"] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20091201221925/http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3249 |date=December 1, 2009}} ''[[Foreign Policy]]'' (free registration required) Accessed 2006-02-08</ref> and 2008;<ref name="PTNV9">{{cite web|url=http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/prospect-100-intellectuals/ |title=Intellectuals |work=Prospect |year=2009 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090930143349/http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/prospect-100-intellectuals/ |archive-date=September 30, 2009}}</ref> in 2010 and 2011 he was named by ''Foreign Policy'' to its list of top global thinkers.<ref name="xWJSV">{{cite web | url=https://foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/11/29/the_fp_top_100_global_thinkers?page=0,40 |title=The FP Top 100 Global Thinkers (2010) |year=2010 | work=Foreign Policy |publisher=Foreignpolicy.com |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20101203002250/https://foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/11/29/the_fp_top_100_global_thinkers?page=0,40 |archive-date=December 3, 2010 |quote=69. Steven Pinker}}</ref><ref name="79mX3">{{cite web | url=https://foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/11/28/the_fp_top_100_global_thinkers?page=0,36#thinker48 | title=The FP Top 100 Global Thinkers (2011) |year=2011 | work=Foreign Policy |publisher=Foreignpolicy.com | url-status=dead | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120130074405/http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/11/28/the_fp_top_100_global_thinkers?page=0,36#thinker48 |quote=48. Steven Pinker: For Looking on Bright Side | archive-date=January 30, 2012}}</ref> In 2016, he was elected to the [[National Academy of Sciences]].<ref name="uVLcW">{{citation|url=http://www.nasonline.org/news-and-multimedia/news/may-3-2016-NAS-Election.html|title=National Academy of Sciences Members and Foreign Associates Elected|department=News from the National Academy of Sciences|publisher=[[National Academy of Sciences]]|date=May 3, 2016|access-date=May 14, 2016|archive-date=May 6, 2016|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160506052951/http://www.nasonline.org/news-and-multimedia/news/may-3-2016-NAS-Election.html|url-status=live}}.</ref>
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 Awards|Troland Research Award]] (1993) from the [[United States National Academy of Sciences|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 University|Newcastle]], [[University of Surrey|Surrey]], [[Tel Aviv University|Tel Aviv]], [[McGill University|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 [[Academy of Achievement|American Academy of Achievement]] in 1999.<ref name="7xkxH">{{cite web|title=Golden Plate Awardees of the American Academy of Achievement|website=www.achievement.org|publisher=[[American Academy of Achievement]]|url=https://achievement.org/our-history/golden-plate-awards/#science-exploration|access-date=June 30, 2020|archive-date=June 8, 2020|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200608012051/https://achievement.org/our-history/golden-plate-awards/#science-exploration|url-status=live}}</ref> 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.<ref name="AHA-PressRelease">{{cite news | url=http://www.americanhumanist.org/press/pinker.php | title=Steven Pinker Receives Humanist of the Year Award | publisher=[[American Humanist Association]] | date=May 12, 2006 | url-status=dead | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20060615043739/http://www.americanhumanist.org/press/pinker.php | archive-date=June 15, 2006}}</ref> For 2022 he was awarded the [[BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award]] in the category of "Humanities and Social Sciences".<ref>{{Cite web |url=https://www.frontiersofknowledgeawards-fbbva.es/ |title=BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award 2022 |access-date=March 9, 2023 |archive-date=September 21, 2021 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210921232238/https://www.frontiersofknowledgeawards-fbbva.es/ |url-status=live }}</ref>
From 2008 to 2018, Pinker chaired the Usage Panel of the [[American Heritage Dictionary]].<ref name="AYmIQ">{{cite web |title=Usage Panel |url=https://www.ahdictionary.com/word/usagepanel.html |publisher=American Heritage Dictionary |access-date=5 January 2021 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20201112021722/https://www.ahdictionary.com/word/usagepanel.html |archive-date=12 November 2020}}</ref> 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",<ref name="i5ayv">{{cite web | url=https://www.improbable.com/hair/ | title=The Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists | publisher=[[Annals of Improbable Research]] | access-date=January 14, 2018 | archive-date=January 15, 2018 | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180115001500/https://www.improbable.com/hair/ | url-status=dead }}</ref> was nominated by acclamation as the first member of the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists (LFHCfS) organized by the ''[[Annals of Improbable Research]]''.
==Bibliography==
===Books===
{{refbegin|30em}}
* ''Language Learnability and Language Development'' (1984)
* ''Visual Cognition'' (1985)
Line 12 ⟶ 172:
* ''Learnability and Cognition: The Acquisition of Argument Structure'' (1989)
* ''Lexical and Conceptual Semantics'' (1992)
* ''[[The Language Instinct|The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language]]'' (1994)
* ''[[How the Mind Works]]'' (1997)
* ''[[Words and Rules|Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language]]'' (1999)
* ''[[The Blank Slate|The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
* ''[[The Best American Science and Nature Writing]]'' (editor and introduction author, 2004)
* ''Hotheads'' (an extract from ''How the Mind Works'', 2005) {{ISBN|978-0-14-102238-3}}
* ''[[The Stuff of Thought|The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature]]'' (2007)
* ''The Seven Words You Can't Say on Television'' (2008)
* ''[[The Better Angels of Our Nature|The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined]]'' (2011)
* ''Language, Cognition, and Human Nature: Selected Articles'' (2013)
* ''[[The Sense of Style|The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century]]'' (September 30, 2014)
* ''[[Enlightenment Now|Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress]]'' (February 13, 2018)
* ''[[Rationality (book)|Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters]]'' (September 28, 2021)
{{refend}}
== References ==
{{reflist}}
==External links==
{{commonscat}}
{{wikiquote}}
* {{Official website|http://stevenpinker.com/}}
* {{twitter}}
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20060118201913/http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/ Selective compilation of articles and other works, hosted at Harvard faculty pages]
* {{C-SPAN|51304}}
==
* [http://7thavenueproject.com/post/89583301445/steven-pinker-interview-why-violence-has-declined 7th Avenue interview on "Better Angels"], 2014
* [http://www.cbc.ca/thehour/video.php?id=1918 Steven Pinker on The Hour]
* [http://www.reitstoen.com/pinker.php Steven Pinker Multimedia] audio and video files
* [http://mosaicscience.com/story/conversation-with%E2%80%A6-steven-pinker Mosaic Science (Wellcome) interview] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150703123600/http://mosaicscience.com/story/conversation-with%E2%80%A6-steven-pinker |date=July 3, 2015 }}
=== Filmed talks ===
* {{TED speaker|steven_pinker}}
* [http://richannel.org/steven-pinker-the-better-angels-of-our-nature The Better Angels of our Nature] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160328035415/http://www.richannel.org/steven-pinker-the-better-angels-of-our-nature |date=March 28, 2016 }}, [[Royal Institution]], November 2011
* [http://richannel.org/linguistics-style-and-writing-in-the-21st-century Linguistics, Style and Writing in the 21st Century: With Steven Pinker] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160704135324/http://richannel.org/linguistics-style-and-writing-in-the-21st-century |date=July 4, 2016 }}, [[Royal Institution]], October 2015
** [http://richannel.org/qampa--linguistics-style-and-writing Q&A – Linguistics, style and writing with Steven Pinker] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160703203357/http://richannel.org/qampa--linguistics-style-and-writing |date=July 3, 2016 }}, [[Royal Institution]], October 2015
* [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQgNQhBDcRY&t=515s Steven Pinker & Michael Shermer], Pangburn, September 2018
==
* [http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/pinker_rose/pinker_rose_p1.html The Two Steves] Debate with neurobiologist [[Steven Rose]]
* [http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/debate05/debate05_index.html The Science of Gender and Science] Debate with cognitive psychologist [[Elizabeth Spelke]] ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Hb3oe7-PJ8 Video of the debate on YouTube])
* [http://iai.tv/video/the-decline-of-violence The Decline of Violence] Debate with economist Judith Marquand, [[British Humanist Association|BHA]] chief executive [[Andrew Copson]] and BBC broadcaster Roger Bolton
{{Steven Pinker}}
{{Evolutionary psychologists}}
{{Authority control}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Pinker, Steven}}
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