Steven Pinker (1954-present)

Steven Pinker (1954-present) is a person.

• Context:
  • They can range from being a Cognitive Scientist to being a Linguistic Theorist, depending on their academic focus.
  • They can range from being an Evolutionary Psychologist to being a Popular Science Author, reflecting their intellectual evolution.
  • ...
  • They can be a Cognitive Scientist known for their work on language acquisition and visual cognition.
  • They can be an Experimental Psychologist studying human cognition and mental imagery.
  • They can publish influential works collectively referred to as Steven Pinker Publications, such as "The Language Instinct", "The Better Angels of Our Nature", and "Enlightenment Now".
  • They can advocate for the importance of reason, science, and humanism in modern intellectual discourse.
  • They can critique postmodernist philosophy and defend the value of scientific progress.
  • ...
• Example(s):
  • Pinker, 1980s, when they contributed to the development of models of language acquisition.
  • Pinker, 1990s, as they gained prominence with books like "The Language Instinct" and "How the Mind Works".
  • Pinker, 2000s, focusing on the decline of violence in human history with "The Better Angels of Our Nature".
  • Pinker, 2010s, advocating for Enlightenment ideals in "Enlightenment Now".
  • ...
• Counter-Example(s):
  • B.F. Skinner (1904–1990), who supported behaviorist theories contrasting with Pinker's cognitive approach.
  • Noam Chomsky (1928–present), whose linguistic theories differ from Pinker’s stance on universal grammar.
  • Richard Rorty (1931–2007), who advocated for postmodernist and relativist views opposed by Pinker.
• See: Cognitive Science, Language Acquisition, Evolutionary Psychology, Reason, Humanism, Steven Pinker Publication.

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References

• https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=bUhVerAAAAAJ
• Personal Website: http://stevenpinker.com/
• Professional Website: http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/about/

2018

• (Pinker, 2018) ⇒ Steven Pinker. (2018). “Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.” Penguin. ISBN:0525427570

2013

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Pinker
  • Steven Arthur Pinker (born September 18, 1954) is a Canadian-born experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, linguist and popular science author. He is a Harvard College Professor and the Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, and is known for his advocacy of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind.

    Pinker's academic specializations are visual cognition and psycholinguistics. 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, and the psychology of innuendo and euphemism. He published two technical books which proposed a general theory of language acquisition and applied it to children's learning of verbs. In his popular books, he has argued that language is an "instinct" or biological adaptation shaped by natural selection. He is the author of six books for a general audience: The Language Instinct (1994), How the Mind Works (1997), Words and Rules (2000), The Blank Slate (2002), The Stuff of Thought (2007), and The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011).

2013

• (Pinker, 2013-08-06) ⇒ Steven Pinker. (2013-08-06). “Science Is Not Your Enemy: An impassioned plea to neglected novelists, embattled professors, and tenure-less historians." In: New Republic, 2013-08-06.
  • QUOTE: On the contrary, the defining practices of science, including open debate, peer review, and double-blind methods, are explicitly designed to circumvent the errors and sins to which scientists, being human, are vulnerable.

     Scientists themselves are immersed in the ethereal medium of information, including the truths of mathematics, the logic of their theories, and the values that guide their enterprise. In this conception, science is of a piece with philosophy, reason, and Enlightenment humanism. It is distinguished by an explicit commitment to two ideals, and it is these that scientism seeks to export to the rest of intellectual life.

    The first is that the world is intelligible. The phenomena we experience may be explained by principles that are more general than the phenomena themselves. These principles may in turn be explained by more fundamental principles, and so on. In making sense of our world, there should be few occasions in which we are forced to concede “It just is” or “It’s magic” or “Because I said so.” The commitment to intelligibility is not a matter of brute faith, but gradually validates itself as more and more of the world becomes explicable in scientific terms. The processes of life, for example, used to be attributed to a mysterious élan vital; now we know they are powered by chemical and physical reactions among complex molecules.

     Demonizers of scientism often confuse intelligibility with a sin called reductionism. But to explain a complex happening in terms of deeper principles is not to discard its richness. No sane thinker would try to explain World War I in the language of physics, chemistry, and biology as opposed to the more perspicuous language of the perceptions and goals of leaders in 1914 Europe. At the same time, a curious person can legitimately ask why human minds are apt to have such perceptions and goals, including the tribalism, overconfidence, and sense of honor that fell into a deadly combination at that historical moment.

    The second ideal is that the acquisition of knowledge is hard. The world does not go out of its way to reveal its workings, and even if it did, our minds are prone to illusions, fallacies, and super- stitions. Most of the traditional causes of belief — faith, revelation, dogma, authority, charisma, conventional wisdom, the invigorating glow of subjective certainty — are generators of error and should be dismissed as sources of knowledge. To understand the world, we must cultivate work-arounds for our cognitive limitations, including skepticism, open debate, formal precision, and empirical tests, often requiring feats of ingenuity. Any movement that calls itself “scientific” but fails to nurture opportunities for the falsification of its own beliefs (most obviously when it murders or imprisons the people who disagree with it) is not a scientific movement.

    The facts of science, by exposing the absence of purpose in the laws governing the universe, force us to take responsibility for the welfare of ourselves, our species, and our planet. The humanities have yet to recover from the disaster of postmodernism, with its defiant obscurantism, dogmatic relativism, and suffocating political correctness. Surely our conceptions of politics, culture, and morality have much to learn from our best understanding of the physical universe and of our makeup as a species. ...

2011

• (Pinker, 2011) ⇒ Steven Pinker. (2011). “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined." Viking New York. ISBN:978-0-670-02295-3

1997

• (Ullman et al., 1997) ⇒ Michael T. Ullman, Suzanne Corkin, Marie Coppola, Gregory Hickok, John H. Growdon, Walter J. Koroshetz, and Steven Pinker. (1997). “A Neural Dissociation Within Language: Evidence That the Mental Dictionary is Part of Declarative Memory, and That Grammatical Rules Are Processed by the Procedural System.” In: Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 9(2). doi:10.1162/jocn.1997.9.2.266

1994

• (Pinker, 1994) ⇒ Steven Pinker. (1994). “The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language." Perennial. ISBN:0688121411

1988

• (Pinker, 1988) ⇒ Steven Pinker. (1988). “On Language and Connectionism: Analysis of a Parallel Distributed Processing Model of Language Acquisition.” In: Connections and symbols.

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