Steven Arthur Pinker (b.1954) is a Canadian-American experimental psychologist renowned for his work in the fields of cognitive science and linguistics. He is known for his advocacy of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind.
Born in Montreal, Pinker studied cognitive science at McGill University and earned a doctorate in experimental psychology at Harvard University. After stints as an assistant professor at Harvard 1980–81 and at Stanford 1981–82, he was Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) before returning to Harvard in 2003.
Pinker is the author of such bestsellers on the mind and the science of language as The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (1994,) How the Mind Works (1997,) The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (2011,) and Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (2018.)
Pinker’s The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century (2014) recommends effective writing techniques and defends the indispensable elasticity of language and grammar.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Steven Pinker
Most intellectuals today have a phobia of any explanation of the mind that invokes genetics.
—Steven Pinker
Topics: Explanation
Neuroscience is showing that all aspects of mental life—every emotion, every thought pattern, every memory—can be tied to the physiological activity or structure of the brain. Cognitive science has shown that feats that were formerly thought to be doable by mental stuff alone can be duplicated by machines, that motives and goals can be understood in terms of feedback and cybernetic mechanisms, and that thinking can be understood as a kind of computation.
—Steven Pinker
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