Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker

Pinker in 2011
Born Steven Arthur Pinker
(1954-09-18) September 18, 1954
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Nationality Canadian / American
Fields Evolutionary psychology, experimental psychology, cognitive science, linguistics, visual cognition
Alma mater Dawson College,
McGill University,
Harvard University
Thesis The Representation of Three-dimensional Space in Mental Images (1979)
Doctoral advisor Stephen Kosslyn
Known for How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate, The Better Angels of Our Nature
Influences Noam Chomsky, Thomas Sowell, Leda Cosmides, John Tooby, Richard Dawkins, Thomas Schelling[1]
Notable awards Troland Award (1993, National Academy of Sciences),
Henry Dale Prize (2004, Royal Institution),
Walter P. Kistler Book Award (2005),
Humanist of the Year award (2006, issued by the AHA),
George Miller Prize (2010, Cognitive Neuroscience Society), Richard Dawkins Award (2013)
Spouse Nancy Etcoff (1980–1992; divorced)
Ilavenil Subbiah (1995–2006; divorced)
Rebecca Goldstein (2007-present)
Website
www.stevenpinker.com
Steven Pinker's voice
from the BBC program Desert Island Discs, 30 June 2013[2]

Steven Arthur "Steve" Pinker (born September 18, 1954) is a Canadian-born American cognitive scientist, psychologist, linguist, and popular science author. He is 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 cooperation and communication, including euphemism, innuendo, emotional expression, and common knowledge. He has written two technical books which 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, arguing instead 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.

In his popular books, he has argued that the human faculty for language is an instinct, an innate behavior shaped by natural selection and adapted to our communication needs. He is the author of seven books for a general audience. Five of these, namely 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 the field of psycholinguistics and cognitive science, and include accounts of his own research. The sixth book, The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011), makes the case that violence in human societies has, in general, steadily declined with time, and identifies six major causes of this decline. His seventh book, The Sense of Style (2014), is intended as a general style guide that is informed by modern science and psychology, offering advice on how to produce more comprehensible and unambiguous writing in nonfiction contexts and explaining why so much of today's academic and popular writing is difficult for readers to understand.

Pinker has been named as one of the world's most influential intellectuals by various magazines. 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. He has frequently participated in public debates on science and society and is a regular contributor to the online science and culture digest 3 Quarks Daily.

Biography

Pinker was born in Montreal, Quebec, in 1954, to a middle-class Jewish family. His parents were Roslyn and Harry Pinker.[3] His grandparents immigrated to Canada from Poland and Bessarabia in 1926.[4][5] His father, a lawyer, first worked as a manufacturer's representative, while his mother was first a home-maker then a guidance counselor and high-school vice-principal. He has two younger siblings. His brother Robert is a policy analyst for the Canadian government, while his sister, Susan Pinker, is a psychologist and writer who authored The Sexual Paradox and The Village Effect.[6][7] Pinker married Nancy Etcoff in 1980 and they divorced in 1992; he married Ilavenil Subbiah in 1995 and they too divorced.[8] His third wife, whom he married in 2007, is the novelist and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein.[9] He has two stepdaughters: the novelist Yael Goldstein Love and the poet Danielle Blau.

Pinker graduated from Dawson College in 1973. He received a Bachelor of Arts in psychology from McGill University in 1976, and earned his Doctorate of Philosophy in experimental psychology at Harvard University in 1979 under Stephen Kosslyn. He did research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for a year, after which he became an assistant professor at Harvard and then Stanford University.

From 1982 until 2003, Pinker taught at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, and eventually became the director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, taking a one-year sabbatical at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1995–96. As of 2003, he is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard; from 2008 to 2013 he also held the title of Harvard College Professor in recognition of his dedication to teaching.[10] He currently gives lectures as a visiting professor at the New College of the Humanities, a private college in London.[11][12]

About his Jewish background Pinker has said, "I was never religious in the theological sense ... I never outgrew my conversion to atheism at 13, but at various times was a serious cultural Jew."[13] As a teenager, he says he considered himself an anarchist until he witnessed civil unrest following a police strike in 1969, when:

As a young teenager in proudly peaceable Canada during the romantic 1960s, I was a true believer in Bakunin's anarchism. I laughed off my parents' argument that if the government ever laid down its arms all hell would break loose. Our competing predictions were put to the test at 8:00 A.M. on October 17, 1969, when the Montreal police went on strike... This decisive empirical test left my politics in tatters (and offered a foretaste of life as a scientist).[14]

Pinker identifies himself as an equity feminist, which he defines as "a moral doctrine about equal treatment that makes no commitments regarding open empirical issues in psychology or biology".[15] He reported the result of a test of his political orientation that characterized him as "neither leftist nor rightist, more libertarian than authoritarian."[16] He describes himself as having "experienced a primitive tribal stirring" after his genes were shown to trace back to the Middle East, noting that he "found it just as thrilling to zoom outward in the diagrams of my genetic lineage and see my place in a family tree that embraces all of humanity".[17]

Pinker also identifies himself as an atheist. In the 2007 interview with the Point of Inquiry podcast, Pinker states that he would "defend atheism as an empirically supported view." He sees theism and atheism as competing empirical hypotheses, and states that "we're learning more and more about what makes us tick, including our moral sense, without needing the assumption of a deity or a soul. It's naturally getting crowded out by the successive naturalistic explanations."[18]

Research and theory

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's theory of a "two-and-a-half-dimensional sketch."[19] 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",[20] 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".[20] He then focused on verbs of two kinds which illustrate what he considers to be the processes required for human language: retrieving whole words from memory, like the past form of the irregular verb[21] "bring", namely "brought"; and using rules to combine (parts of) words, like the past form of the regular verb "walk", namely "walked".[20]

In 1989 Pinker and Alan Prince published an influential 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 of irregular forms and his popular 1999 book, Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language. Pinker argued that language depends on two things, the associative remembering of sounds and their meanings in words, and the use of rules to manipulate symbols for grammar. He presented evidence against connectionism, where a child would have to learn all forms of all words and would simply retrieve each needed form from memory, in favour of the older alternative theory, the use of words and rules combined 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[22]

Vpast → Vstem + d

where V is a verb and d is the regular ending. Pinker further argued that since the ten most frequently occurring English verbs (be, have, do, say, make ...) are all irregular, while 98.2% of the thousand least common verbs are regular, there is a "massive correlation" of frequency and irregularity. He explains this by arguing that every irregular form, such as 'took', 'came' and 'got', has to be committed to memory by the children in each generation, or else lost, and that the common forms are the most easily memorized. Any irregular verb that falls in popularity past a certain point is lost, and all future generations will treat it as a regular verb instead.[22]

In 1990, Pinker, with Paul Bloom, published the paper "Natural Language and Natural Selection", arguing that the human language faculty must have evolved through natural selection.[23] 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 of the main authorities, linguist Noam Chomsky and Stephen Jay Gould.[24] 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".[24][25] The article also presaged Pinker's argument in The Language Instinct.

Pinker's research includes delving into human nature and what science says about it. In his interview on the Point of Inquiry podcast in 2007, he provides the following examples of what he considers defensible conclusions of what science says human nature is:

He informs the listeners that one can read more about human nature in his book, Blank Slate.

Pinker also speaks about evolutionary psychology in the podcast and believes that this area of science is going to pay off. He cites the fact that there are many areas of study, such as beauty, religion, play, and sexuality, that were not studied 15 years ago. It is thanks to evolutionary psychology that these areas are being studied.[18]

Popularization of science

Human cognition and natural language

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 Sapir–Whorf hypothesis that language limits the kinds of thoughts a person can have, and that 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"[26] 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"[26] — Eric Lenneberg, George Miller, Roger Brown, Morris Halle and Alvin Liberman.[26] Brown mentored Pinker through his thesis; Pinker stated that Brown's "funny and instructive"[27] book Words and Things (1958) was one of the inspirations for The Language Instinct.[27][28]

The reality of Pinker's proposed language instinct, and the related claim that grammar is innate and genetically based, has been contested by many linguists. One prominent opponent of Pinker's view is Geoffrey Sampson whose 1997 book, Educating Eve: The 'Language Instinct' Debate has been described as the "definitive response" to Pinker's book.[29][30] 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.[30] Others have sought a middle ground between Pinker's nativism and Sampson's culturalism.[31]

The assumptions underlying the nativist view have also been criticised 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."[32]

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 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",[33] and explained that "The Tragic Vision" and the "Utopian Vision" are the views of human nature behind right- and left-wing ideologies.[33]

In 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.[34] "Words and Rules" is also the title of an essay by Pinker outlining many of the topics discussed in the book.[22] Critiqueing the book from the perspective of Generative linguistics Charles Yang, in the London Review of Books, writes that "this book never runs low on hubris or hyperbole".[35] 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."[35]

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.[36]

Pinker is critical of theories about the evolutionary origins of language which 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 — a feature not adaptive in its own right, but which has persisted through other traits which 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". This argument has been rejected by Daniel Levitin and Joseph Carroll, experts in music cognition, who argue that music has had an important role in the evolution of human cognition.[37][38][39][40][41][42] 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.[43]

The Better Angels of Our Nature

Violence in the middle ages: detail from "Mars" in Das Mittelalterliche Hausbuch, c. 1475 – 1480. The image is used by Pinker in The Better Angels of Our Nature, with the comment "as the Housebook illustrations suggest, [the knights] did not restrict their killing to other knights".[44]

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 six 'major historical declines of violence' which all have their own socio/cultural/economic causes:[45]

  1. "The Pacification Process" – The rise of organized systems of government has a correlative relationship with the decline in violent deaths. As states expand they prevent tribal feuding, reducing losses.
  2. "The Civilizing Process" – Consolidation of centralized states and kingdoms throughout Europe results in the rise of criminal justice and commercial infrastructure, organizing previously chaotic systems which could lead to raiding and mass violence.
  3. "The Humanitarian Revolution" – The 18th - 20th century abandonment of institutionalized violence by the state (breaking on the wheel, burning at the stake). Suggests this is likely due to the spike in literacy after the invention of the printing press thereby allowing the proletariat to question conventional wisdom.
  4. "The Long Peace" – The powers of 20th Century believed that period of time to be the bloodiest in history. This to a largely peaceful 65-year period post World War I and World War II. Developed countries have stopped warring (against each other and colonially), adopted democracy, and this has led a massive decline (on average) of deaths.
  5. "The New Peace" – The decline in organized conflicts of all kinds since the end of the Cold War.
  6. "The Rights Revolutions" – The reduction of systemic violence at smaller scales against vulnerable populations (racial minorities, women, children, homosexuals, animals).

The book was welcomed by many critics and reviewers, who found its arguments convincing and its synthesis of a large volume of historical evidence compelling.[46][47][48][49][50] It also aroused criticism on a variety of grounds, such as whether deaths per capita was an appropriate metric, Pinker's atheism, lack of moral leadership, excessive focus on Europe (though the book covers other areas), the interpretation of historical data, and its image of indigenous people.[51][52][53][54][55][56][57][58][59][60][61]

Public debate

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. This doctrine (the tabula rasa), writes West, remained accepted "as fact, rather than fantasy"[62] a decade after the book's publication. West describes Pinker as "no polemicist, and he leaves readers to draw their own conclusions".[62]

In January 2005, Pinker defended Lawrence Summers, president of Harvard University, whose comments about a gender gap in mathematics and science angered much of the faculty. Pinker noted that Summers's remarks, properly understood, were hypotheses about overlapping statistical distributions of men's and women's talents and tastes, and that in a university such hypotheses ought to be the subject of empirical testing rather than dogma and outrage.[63] Edge.org ran a debate between Pinker and Elizabeth Spelke on gender and science.[64]

In 2009, Pinker wrote a mixed review of Malcolm Gladwell's essays in The New York Times criticizing his analytical methods.[65] Gladwell replied, disputing Pinker's comments about the importance of IQ on teaching performance and by analogy, the effect, if any, of draft order on quarterback performance in the National Football League.[66] Advanced NFL Stats addressed the issue statistically, siding with Pinker and showing that differences in methodology could explain the two men's differing opinions.[67]

In 2009, David Shenk criticized Pinker for siding with the "nature" argument and for "never once acknowledg[ing] gene-environment interaction or epigenetics" in an article on nature versus nurture in The New York Times.[68] Pinker responded to a question about epigenetics as a possibility for the decline in violence in a lecture for the BBC World Service. Pinker said it was unlikely since the decline in violence happened too rapidly to be explained by genetic changes.[69]

Steven Pinker is also noted for having identified the rename of Phillip Morris to Altria as an "egregious example" of phonesthesia - with the company attempting to "switch its image from bad people who sell addictive carcinogens to a place or state marked by altruism and other lofty values".[70]

Awards and distinctions

Pinker in Göttingen, 2010

Pinker was named one of Time's 100 most influential people in the world in 2004[71] and one of Prospect and Foreign Policy's 100 top public intellectuals in both years the poll was carried out, 2005[72] and 2008;[73] in 2010 and 2011 he was named by Foreign Policy to its list of top global thinkers.[74][75] In 2016 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.[76]

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 Award (1993) from the 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, Surrey, Tel Aviv, McGill, Simon Fraser University and the University of Tromsø, Norway. He was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, in 1998 and in 2003. 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.[77]

Pinker has served on the editorial boards of journals such as Cognition, Daedalus, and PLOS One, and on the advisory boards of institutions for scientific research (e.g., the Allen Institute for Brain Science), free speech (e.g., the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education), the popularization of science (e.g., the World Science Festival and the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry), peace (e.g., the Peace Research Endowment), and secular humanism (e.g., the Freedom from Religion Foundation and the Secular Coalition for America).

Since 2008, he has chaired the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary, and wrote the essay on usage for the fifth edition of the Dictionary, which was published in 2011.

Bibliography

Wikiquote has quotations related to: Steven Pinker

Books

Articles and essays

References

  1. ↑ C-SPAN | BookTV "In Depth with Steven Pinker" November 2nd 2008
  2. ↑ "Steven Pinker". Desert Island Discs. 30 June 2013. BBC Radio 4. Retrieved 18 January 2014.
  3. ↑ Pinker, S. (2009). Language Learnability and Language Development, With New Commentary by the Author. Harvard University Press. ISBN 9780674042179. Retrieved 10 October 2014.
  4. ↑ Annie Maccoby Berglof «At home: Steven Pinker»
  5. ↑ Curious Minds: How a Child Becomes a Scientist
  6. ↑ Shermer, Michael (2001-03-01). The Pinker Instinct. Altadena, CA: Skeptics Society & Skeptic Magazine. Retrieved 11 September 2007.
  7. ↑ Steven Pinker: the mind reader The Guardian Accessed 25 November 2006.
  8. ↑ Biography for Steven Pinker at imdb Accessed 12 September 2007.
  9. ↑ "How Steven Pinker Works" by Kristin E. Blagg The Harvard Crimson Accessed 3 February 2006.
  10. ↑ Pinker, Steven. "Official Biography. Harvard University". Pinker.wjh.harvard.edu. Retrieved 20 January 2012.
  11. ↑ "The professoriate" Archived June 8, 2011, at the Wayback Machine., New College of the Humanities, accessed 8 June 2011.
  12. ↑ "Professor Stephen Pinker", New College of the Humanities, accessed 4 November 2014.
  13. ↑ "Steven Pinker: the mind reader" by Ed Douglas The Guardian Accessed 3 February 2006.
  14. ↑ Pinker, Steven (2002), The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, Penguin Putnam, ISBN 0-670-03151-8.
  15. ↑ Pinker, Steven, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (Viking, 2002), p. 341
  16. ↑ "My Genome, My Self" by Steven Pinker The New York Times Sunday Magazine Accessed 10 April 2010.
  17. ↑ "DNA and You – Personalized Genomics Goes Jewish". The Forward. 12 August 2011. Retrieved 13 August 2011.
  18. 1 2 Grothe, D.J. (23 February 2007). "Podcast:Steven Pinker - Evolutionary Psychology and Human Nature". Point of Inquiry with D.J. Grothe. Retrieved 29 December 2014.
  19. ↑ The nature of the language faculty and its implications for evolution of language
  20. 1 2 3 Pinker, Steven. "Steven Pinker: Long Biography". Harvard University. Retrieved 18 May 2014.
  21. ↑ Pinker has written a piece on The Irregular Verbs, 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.
  22. 1 2 3 Pinker, Steven. "Words and rules (essay)" (PDF). Harvard University. Retrieved 24 May 2014.
  23. ↑ Pinker, S. & Bloom, P. (1990). Natural language and natural selection. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13 (4): 707‐784
  24. 1 2 Christine Kenneally. "Language Development:The First Word. The Search for the Origins of Language".
  25. ↑ "The 20th Anniversary of Steven Pinker & Paul Bloom: Natural Language and Natural Selection (1990)". Replicatedtypo.com.
  26. 1 2 3 Pinker, Steven (1994). The Language Instinct. Penguin. pp. 23–24.
  27. 1 2 Pinker, Steven (1998). "Obituary: Roger Brown" (PDF). Cognition. 66: 199–213 (see page 205). doi:10.1016/s0010-0277(98)00027-4.
  28. ↑ Kagan, Jerome (1999). "Roger William Brown 1925-1997" (PDF). Biographical Memoirs. 77: 7.
  29. ↑ "The "Language Instinct" Debate". University of Sussex.
  30. 1 2 "Empiricism v. Nativism: Nature or Nurture?". GRSampson.net. Retrieved 8 June 2014.. More at The 'Language Instinct' Debate
  31. ↑ Cowley, S. J. (2001). The baby, the bathwater and the "language instinct" debate. Language Sciences, 23(1), 69-91.
  32. ↑ Aleksander, Igor (1996). Impossible Minds. pp. 228–234. ISBN 1-86094-030-7.
  33. 1 2 Sailer, Steve (30 October 2002). "Q&A: Steven Pinker of 'Blank Slate'". United Press International. Retrieved 10 May 2014.
  34. ↑ Pinker, Steven. "Words and Rules (book)". Harvard University. Archived from the original on March 30, 2014. Retrieved 24 May 2014.
  35. 1 2 Yang, Charles (24 August 2000). "Dig-dug, think-thunk (review of Words and Rules by Steven Pinker)". London Review of Books. 22 (6): 33.
  36. ↑ Pinker, Steven. "The Stuff of Thought". Harvard University. Retrieved 30 May 2014.
  37. ↑ Levitin, D. J.; Tirovolas, A. K. (2009). "Current Advances in the Cognitive Neuroscience of Music". Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. 1156: 211–231. doi:10.1111/j.1749-6632.2009.04417.x.
  38. ↑ Perlovsky L. Music. Cognitive Function, Origin, And Evolution Of Musical Emotions. WebmedCentral PSYCHOLOGY 2011;2(2):WMC001494
  39. ↑ Abbott, Alison (2002). "Neurobiology: Music, maestro, please!". Nature. 416: 12–14. doi:10.1038/416012a.
  40. ↑ 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.
  41. ↑ "Interview with Daniel Levitin". Pbs.org. May 20, 2009. Retrieved 29 December 2012.
  42. ↑ Carroll, Joseph (1998). "Steven Pinker's Cheesecake For The Mind". Cogweb.ucla.edu. Retrieved 29 December 2012.
  43. ↑ Levitin, Daniel. 2006. This Is Your Brain On Music: The Science of a Human Obsession, New York: Dutton/Penguin.
  44. ↑ Pinker, Steven (2011). The Better Angels of Our Nature. Allen Lane. p66
  45. ↑ Pinker, Steven. "The Decline of Violence". IAI. Retrieved 3 January 2014.
  46. ↑ Horgan, John (October 3, 2011). "Will War Ever End? Steven Pinker's new book reveals an ever more peaceable species: humankind". Slate Magazine.
  47. ↑ Boyd, Neil (January 4, 2012). "The Empirical Evidence for Declining Violence". The Huffington Post.
  48. ↑ Brittan, Samuel (22 October 2011). "The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence in History and its Causes by Stephen Pinker". The Spectator.
  49. ↑ Coffman, Scott (28 September 2012). "Book Review: 'The Better Angels of Our Nature'". Courier Journal.
  50. ↑ Kohn, Marek (7 October 2011). "Book Review: 'The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence in History and its Causes', By Steven Pinker". UK: The Independent.
  51. ↑ Epstein, R. (October 2011). "Book Review". Scientific American.
  52. ↑ Boyd, Neil (January 4, 2012). "The Empirical Evidence for Declining Violence". The Huffington Post.
  53. ↑ Gray, John (21 September 2011). "Delusions of peace". UK: Prospect Magazine.
  54. ↑ "Correspondence". Claremont Review of Books. 2012-05-02. Retrieved 22 January 2013.
  55. ↑ Herman, Edward S.; Peterson, David. "Steven Pinker on the alleged decline of violence". International Socialist Review.
  56. ↑ Edward S. Herman and David Peterson (2012-09-13). "Reality Denial: Steven Pinker's Apologetics for Western-Imperial Volence". Retrieved 2014-12-30.
  57. ↑ Kolbert, Elizabeth (3 October 2011). "Peace In Our Time: Steven Pinker's History of Violence in Decline". The New Yorker.
  58. ↑ Pinker, Steven (November 2011). "Frequently Asked Questions about The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined".
  59. ↑ Laws, Ben (21 March 2012). "Against Pinker's Violence". Ctheory.
  60. ↑ "The Big Kill – By John Arquilla". Foreign Policy. 2012-12-03. Retrieved 22 January 2013.
  61. ↑ Corry, Stephen. "The case of the 'Brutal Savage': Poirot or Clouseau?: Why Steven Pinker, like Jared Diamond, is wrong" (PDF). Survival International. Retrieved 30 May 2014. (Summary at The myth of the ‘Brutal Savage’)
  62. 1 2 West, Ed (17 August 2012). "A decade after Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate, why is human nature still taboo?". The Daily Telegraph. Retrieved 30 May 2014.
  63. ↑ "PSYCHOANALYSIS Q-and-A: Steven Pinker" The Harvard Crimson Accessed 8 February 2006.
  64. ↑ "The Science of Gender and Science: Pinker Vs. Spelke, A Debate". Edge.org. 16 May 2005. Retrieved 10 May 2014.
  65. ↑ Pinker, Steven (2009-11-15). "Malcolm Gladwell, Eclectic Detective". The New York Times.
  66. ↑ "Let's Go to the Tape". The New York Times. 2009-11-29.
  67. ↑ Burke, Brian (2010-04-22). "Steven Pinker vs. Malcolm Gladwell and Drafting QBs". Advanced NFL Stats. Retrieved 20 January 2012.
  68. ↑ Steven Pinker's "probabilistic" genes, David Shenk
  69. ↑ "Exchanges At The Frontier 2011", BBC.
  70. ↑ Pinker, Steven (2007). The Stuff of Thought. Penguin Books. p. 304.
  71. ↑ "Steven Pinker: How Our Minds Evolved" by Robert Wright Time Accessed 8 February 2006.
  72. ↑ "The Prospect/FP Top 100 Public Intellectuals" Foreign Policy (free registration required) Accessed 2006-082-08
  73. ↑ "Intellectuals". Prospect. 2009. Archived from the original on September 30, 2009. Retrieved 21 October 2011.
  74. ↑ "Foreign Policy". Foreignpolicy.com. Retrieved 20 January 2012.
  75. ↑ "The FP Top 100 Global Thinkers". Foreign Policy. Retrieved 20 January 2012.
  76. ↑ National Academy of Sciences Members and Foreign Associates Elected, News from the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Sciences, May 3, 2016, retrieved 2016-05-14.
  77. ↑ "Steven Pinker Receives Humanist of the Year Award". American Humanist Association. May 12, 2006.
  78. ↑ The Ling Space - Interview with Steven Pinker - Extras
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