Steven Pinker
Steven Pinker
Steven Arthur "Steve" Pinkeris 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...
NationalityCanadian
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth18 September 1954
CountryCanada
philosophy believe exercise
As every student in Philosophy 101 learns, nothing can force me to believe that anyone except me is conscious. This power to deny that other people have feelings is not just an academic exercise but an all-too-common vice, as we see in the long history of human cruelty.
emotional political mind
Why are empirical questions about how the mind works so weighted down with political and moral and emotional baggage?
violence world violent
We really are creatures of a violent world, biologically speaking - watching violence and learning about it is one of our cognitive drives.
acceptance long people
People have long assumed that violence is necessary for political change. Rulers never cede power voluntarily, the argument goes, so progressives have no choice but to contemplate the use of force to bring about a better world, mindful of the trade-off between a small amount of violence now and acceptance of an unjust status quo indefinitely.
psychology criticism trying
There's a common criticism of evolutionary psychology that it's fatalistic and it dooms us to eternal strife, 'Why even try to work toward peace if we're just bloody killer apes and violence is in our genes?'
gmos perception brain
But the newest research is showing that many properties of the brain are genetically organized, and don't depend on information coming in from the senses.
play astrology important
Astrology had an important role in the ancient world. You can't understand many things unless you know something about astrology - the plays of Shakespeare and so on.
people different daily-life
As individual people, embedded in our daily lives, of course we're interested in what makes one person different from another. We've got to hire one person and not another, marry one person and not another.
eye fertility faces
An eye for beauty locks onto faces that show signs of health and fertility - just as one would predict if it had evolved to help the beholder find the fittest mate.
moon ciphers sun
An enormous amount of scientific language is metaphorical. We talk about a genetic code, where code originally meant a cipher; we talk about the solar system model of the atom as though the atom were like a sun and moon and planets.
two might messages
Whenever you speak to someone, you are presuming the two of you have a certain degree of familiarity - which your words might alter. So every sentence has to do two things at once: convey a message and continue to negotiate that relationship.
sound creatures visuals
We are visual creatures. Visual things stay put, whereas sounds fade.
promise benefits dawn
Like the early days of the Internet, the dawn of personal genomics promises benefits and pitfalls that no one can foresee.
mavens language peeves
Language mavens commonly confuse their own peeves with a worsening of the language.