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
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The three-year-old, then, is a grammatical genius - master of most constructions, obeying rules farmore often than flouting them, respecting language universals, erring in sensible, adultlike ways, and avoiding many kinds of errors altogether.
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Evolutionary psychology is taking that mindset and applying it to more emotionally charged aspects of behavior, such as sexuality, violence, beauty, and family feelings.
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It got ugly. People used this as an occasion to vent a large number of grievances.
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I'm very interested in language because it reflects our obsessions and ways of conceptualising the world.
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M.I.T. has a reputation for turning out Dilberts. They may be brilliant in what they do, but no one can understand what they say.
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Even if he does occasionally hurt people's feelings -- he occasionally hurts my feelings -- but I'm a big boy. I can get over it. I can argue back. We really need somebody to question the way a university is run.
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The way to understand how different species evolved is to think about the niches that they fill in an ecosystem - basically, how they make a living.
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I've never argued that humans are massively hot-wired. What I was trying to point out was that you can't understand how we learn unless you identify the learning mechanisms. And these have some genetic basis.
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All of us have a theory about human nature.
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That isn't really a question that can be answered.
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All our behaviours are a result of neurophysiological activity in the brain.
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The 9/11 strikes left an indelible impact on our minds, but in relative terms, the scale of casualties actually wasn't all that high.
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One of them is a simple logical point that no matter how important learning and culture and socialization are, they don't happen by magic.
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Today there are movements in the arts to reintroduce beauty and narrative and melody and other basic human pleasures. And they are considered radical extremists!