HOME WEB NEWS IMAGES CLASSIFIEDS YELLOW PAGESPOLLS - SURVEYS WIKI COUNTRIES PHOTOS US UK INDIA
Cities Stocks Weather Movies Coupons Travel Blogs Health Horoscope Maps ASIA EUROPE Classifieds Yellow Pages
 1
|
| Steven Pinker | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | Steven Arthur Pinker September 18 1954 |
| Nationality | Canadian-American |
| Employer | Harvard |
| Occupation | Scientist Author |
Steven Arthur Pinker (born September 18 1954) is a prominent Canadian-American experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, and author of popular science. Pinker is known for his wide-ranging advocacy of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind.
Pinker’s academic specializations are visual cognition and language development in children, and he is most famous for popularizing the idea that language is an "instinct" or biological adaptation shaped by natural selection rather than a by-product of general intelligence. He is the author of five books for a general audience, which include The Language Instinct (1994), How the Mind Works (1999), Words and Rules (2000), The Blank Slate (2002), and The Stuff of Thought (2007). Pinker\'s books have won numerous awards and been New York Times best-sellers.
Contents |
Pinker was born in Canada and graduated from Montreal\'s Dawson College in 1973, received a bachelor\'s degree in experimental psychology from McGill University in 1976, then went on to earn his doctorate in the same discipline at Harvard in 1979. He did research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for a year, then became an assistant professor at Harvard and then Stanford University. From 1982 until 2003, Pinker taught in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, and eventually became the director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. (Except for a one-year sabbatical at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1995-6.) As of 2007, he is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard.Official Biography
Pinker was named one of Time Magazine\'s 100 most influential people in the world in 2004"Steven Pinker: How Our Minds Evolved" by Robert Wright, Time Magazine. Retrieved on 8 February, 2006. and one of Prospect and Foreign Policy\'s 100 top public intellectuals in 2005."The Prospect/FP Top 100 Public Intellectuals," Foreign Policy (free registration required). Retrieved on 8 February, 2006. He has also received honorary doctorates from the universities of Newcastle, Surrey, Tel Aviv and McGill.
In January 2005, Pinker defended Lawrence Summers, President of Harvard University, whose comments about the gender gap in mathematics and science angered much of the faculty."PSYCHOANALYSIS Q-and-A: Steven Pinker," The Harvard Crimson. Retrieved on 8 February, 2006.
Pinker addresses the criticisms of scholars like Geoffrey Sampson (as outlined in his "Educating Eve", a biting criticism of the language "instinct" Pinker advocates) and Suren Naicker (as outlined in his "Rationalism vs. Empiricism: a critique of the Chomskyan paradigm").[clarify]
In 2007, he was invited on The Colbert Report and asked under pressure to sum up how the brain works in five words – Pinker answered "Brain cells fire in patterns."
Pinker was born into the English-speaking Jewish community of Montreal. He 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."."Steven Pinker: the mind reader" by Ed Douglas, ‘‘The Guardian’’. Retrieved on 3 February, 2006. Politically, he self-identified as an anarchist until he witnessed civil unrest following a police strike in 1969."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)." — Pinker, Steven (2002), The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, Penguin Putnam, ISBN 0-670-03151-8. His father, a trained lawyer, first worked as a traveling salesman, while his mother was first a home-maker then a guidance counselor and high-school vice-principal. He has two younger siblings; his brother is a policy analyst for the Canadian government, his sister is a writer and school psychologist.Shermer, Michael (2001-03-01), The Pinker Instinct, Altadena, CA: Skeptics Society & Skeptic Magazine, <http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-10144194_ITM>. Retrieved on 11 September 2007"Steven Pinker: the mind reader," The Guardian. Retrieved on 25 November, 2006. Pinker married Nancy Etcoff in 1980 and they divorced 1992; he married Ilavenil Subbiah in 1995 and they, too, divorced.Biography for Steven Pinker. Retrieved on 2007-09-12. His partner is the novelist and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein."How Steven Pinker Works" by Kristin E. Blagg, The Harvard Crimson. Retrieved on 3 February, 2006. He has no children.
Pinker is most famous for his work — popularized in The Language Instinct (1994) — on how children acquire language, and for his popularization of Noam Chomsky\'s work on language as an innate faculty of mind. Pinker has suggested an evolutionary mental module for language, although this idea remains controversial. Additionally Pinker argues that many other human mental faculties are evolved (and is an ally of Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins in many evolutionary disputes).
Pinker\'s books, How the Mind Works and The Blank Slate, are from the evolutionary psychology tradition, which views the mind as a kind of Swiss-army knife equipped with a set of specialized tools (or modules) to deal with problems faced by our Pleistocene ancestors. Pinker and other evolutionary psychologists believe that these tools evolved by natural selection, just like other body parts. The field of evolutionary psychology was pioneered by E. O. Wilson, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby. The Language Instinct has been criticized by Geoffrey Sampson in his book, The \'Language Instinct\' Debate [1]. The assumptions underlying the nativist view have also been subject to sustained criticism in Jeffrey Elman\'s Rethinking Innateness: A Connectionist Perspective on Development (Neural Networks and Connectionist Modeling).
Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:
| Steven Pinker | |
|---|---|
| Major works |
The Language Instinct · How the Mind Works · Words and Rules · The Blank Slate |
| Related topics |
Evolutionary psychology · Cognitive science · Leda Cosmides · John Tooby |
| Persondata | |
|---|---|
| NAME | Pinker, Steven |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | |
| SHORT DESCRIPTION | American cognitive scientist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | 18 September 1954 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Montreal |
| DATE OF DEATH | |
| PLACE OF DEATH | |
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from Wikipedia
