Author

photo credits: Wikimedia Commons
Steven Pinker
psychologist, linguist, author
wd:Q2127301954 -
movement: atheism
country of citizenship: United States of America, Canada
languages spoken, written or signed: English
educated at: McGill University, Harvard University, Dawson College
occupation: psychologist, linguist, anthropologist, philosopher, university teacher, non-fiction writer
award received: Richard Dawkins Award, Humanist of the Year, William James Fellow Award, Walter P. Kistler Book Award, CSS Fellow, Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, Troland Research Awards, Kistler Prize, Emperor Has No Clothes Award, honorary doctor of the University of Tromsø
influenced by: Noam Chomsky
stevenpinker.com
@sapinker
Stevenpinkerpage
Steven Arthur Pinker (born September 18, 1954) is a Canadian-American cognitive psychologist, psycholinguist, popular science author and public intellectual. He is an advocate of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind.Pinker is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, and his academic specializations are visual cognition and developmental linguistics. His experimental subjects include mental imagery, shape recognition, visual attention, children's language development, regular and irregular phenomena in language, the neural bases of words and grammar, as well as the psychology of cooperation and communication, including euphemism, innuendo, emotional expression, and common knowledge. He 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 also 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 adapted to our communication needs. Pinker's The Sense of Style (2014) is a general language-oriented style guide. Pinker's book The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011) posits that violence in human societies has generally steadily 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) elaborates this argument by using social science data to show a general improvement of the human condition over recent history brought by reason, science and humanism. The nature and importance of reason is further explored in his next book Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters (2021).
In 2004, Pinker was named in Time's "The 100 Most Influential People in the World Today", and in the years 2005, 2008, 2010, and 2011 in Foreign Policy's list of "Top 100 Global Thinkers". Pinker was also included in Prospect Magazine's top 10 "World Thinkers" in 2013. He has won awards from the American Psychological Association, the National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Institution, the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, and the American Humanist Association. He 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. Pinker was the chair of the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary from 2008 to 2018.
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Series
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The Language Instinct: The New Science of Language and Mind (Penguin Science)
inv:0a68df5f187729a463e3b74ee8e236ecauthor: Steven Pinker
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Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress
inv:102053ad175a57aa89eab748be4da1f9author: Steven Pinker
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The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century
inv:874d8c56de3a0763ba543098cf7e8455author: Steven Pinker
Articles
47Natural language and natural selection ( 1990 )
scientific article
author: Paul Bloom, Steven Pinker
Quantitative analysis of culture using millions of digitized books ( 2011 )
scientific article
author: Peter Norvig, Martin A. Nowak, Steven Pinker, Erez Lieberman Aiden, Adrian Veres Jean-Baptiste Michel, Yuan Kui Shen, Aviva Presser Aiden, Matthew K Gray, Joseph P Pickett, Dale Hoiberg, Dan Clancy, Jon Orwant
Reply to Biersteker: When methods matter ( 2015 )
scientific article
author: Alessandro Vespignani, Bruno Gonçalves, Steven Pinker, César A. Hidalgo Shahar Ronen, Bruno Gonçalves, Kevin Z Hu
Links that speak: the global language network and its association with global fame ( 2014 )
scientific article
author: Alessandro Vespignani, Bruno Gonçalves, Steven Pinker, César A. Hidalgo Shahar Ronen, Bruno Gonçalves, Kevin Z Hu
Colloquium paper: the cognitive niche: coevolution of intelligence, sociality, and language ( 2010 )
scientific article (publication date: 11 May 2010)
author: Steven Pinker