Steven Pinker

From Philosopedia

Steven Pinker (18 Sep 1954 - )

Now a famed experimental psychologist and cognitive scientist, Pinker was born in Montreal. Harry Pinker, his father, was a traveling salesman who became a lawyer. Rosylyn, his mother, was a guidance counselor and high school vice-principal. In 1980 he married Nancy Etcoff, a clinical psychologist, but divorced in 1992. In 1995, he married Malaysian-born cognitive psychologist Illavenil Subbiah, but they have divorced. Now single and with no childen, he lives with Rebecca Goldstein, a professor of philosophy at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. Until 2003, he taught in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. Currently, he is the Johnstone Family Professor in Harvard's Department of Psychology.

Doug Linder, in a 2004 interview with Pinker, wrote,

• Steven Pinker grew up in Montreal’s English-speaking Jewish community. “It was a culture with a lot of arguing,” Pinker recalls. “I never outgrew my conversion to atheism at 13,” Pinker said in a 1999 interview, “but at various times was a serious cultural Jew.” About the same time as he lost religion, Pinker found his interest in the human mind. “I was a 13-year-old anarchist, and wanted to study human nature, through anthropology, psychoanalysis, and psychology. I was a Rousseauan then; now I’m a Hobbesian.” Asked whether parents sparked his interest in evolutionary psychology, Pinker smiled and answered, “Yes, it comes from my parents. The question is how it comes from my parents.”
• Pinker argues that a view of the mind as having been shaped by evolution is not amoral. Morality derives from the physical structure of our brain, he contends. The fact that eighteen-month-old children share toys and try to comfort adults is strong evidence for a moral instinct. So too, according to Pinker, is the universality among cultures of many concepts and applications of right and wrong. Pinker asserts that our moral sense comes from evolution, not God, and that its “circle of application” has expanded over time through reason, knowledge, and sympathy.
• Moreover, according to Pinker, our innate moral sense is far less likely to produce evil than is religion. He blames the stoning of prostitutes, the execution of homosexuals, the bombing of abortion clinics, the burning of witches, the slaying of heretics, and the crashing of airplanes into skyscrapers on imagined commands of God. Actions of that sort are not responses to an internal moral sense. The religious “doctrine of the soul,” in Pinker’s estimation, “necessarily devalues the lives we live on this earth.” The doctrine encourages suicide bombers and prevents such potentially life-saving research techniques as those involving stem cells.
• In Pinker’s view, people who argue that evolutionary psychology drains life of meaning seriously confuse “ultimate causation (why something evolved by natural selection) with proximate causation (how the entity works here and now).” The “metaphorical motives” of genes are not the real motives of people. Even if the good, the true, and the beautiful are merely “neural constructs, movies we project onto the interior of our skulls,” it does not mean that those “movies” aren’t real. Pinker compares our innate moral sense to our sense of number—both might have developed to “grasp abstract truths in the world that exist independently of the minds that grasp them.” The Golden Rule might well be just as real as the number 2. Pinker concludes, “If we are so constituted that we cannot help but think in moral terms, then morality is as real for us as if it were decreed by the Almighty or written into the cosmos.”

Pinker has written popular science bestsellers such as The Language Instinct and How the Mind Works. In the latter book, much of the final chapter, "The Meaning of Life," explores the origin of religious belief (as an empirical problem for evolutionary psychology). The possibility that God actually exists is dismissed in a short paragraph (p. 560):

• The problem with the religious solution [for mysteries such as consciousness and moral judgments] was stated by Mencken when he wrote, 'Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.' For anyone with a persistent intellectual curiosity, religious explanations are not worth knowing because they pile equally baffling enigmas on top of the original ones. What gave God a mind, free will, knowledge, certainty about right and wrong? How does he infuse them into a universe that seems to run just fine according to physical laws? How does he get ghostly souls to interact with hard matter? And most perplexing of all, if the world unfolds according to a wise and merciful plan, why does it contain so much suffering? As the Yiddish expression says, If God lived on earth, people would break his window."

In 2004, Time named Pinker one of the 100 most influential people in the world. The following year, Foreign Policy and Prospect named him one of the 100 top public intellectuals.

He is a member of the International Academy of Humanism and in 2006 was presented with the American Humanist Association's Humanist of the Year award.

(See entry for his partner, Rebecca Goldstein.)

Selected Books and Articles

Books

• Language Learnability and Language Development (1984)
• Visual Cognition (1985)
• Connections and Symbols (1988)
• Learnability and Cognition: The Acquisition of Argument Structure (1989)
• Lexical and Conceptual Semantics (1992)
• The Language Instinct (1994)
• How the Mind Works (1997)
• Words and Rules|Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language (1999)
• The Blank Slate|The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (2002)
• The Best American Science and Nature Writing (editor and introduction author, 2004)
• Hotheads (2005)

Articles and essays

• Pinker, S. (1991) Rules of Language. Science, 253, 530-535.
• Ullman, M., Corkin, S., Coppola, M., Hickok, G., Growdon, J. H., Koroshetz, W. J., & Pinker, S. (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. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 9, 289-299.
• Pinker, S. (2003) Language as an adaptation to the cognitive niche. In M. Christiansen & S. Kirby (Eds.), Language evolution: States of the Art. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Pinker, S. (2005) So How Does the Mind Work? Mind and Language, 20(1), 1-24.
• Jackendoff, R. & Pinker, S. (2005) The nature of the language faculty and its implications for evolution of language (Reply to Fitch, Hauser, & Chomsky) Cognition, 97(2), 211-225.