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Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker
Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker (born September 18 1954, in Montreal, Canada) is a psychologist at Harvard University and a writer of popular science books. He was a professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for 21 years before returning to Harvard in 2003. He received a Bachelor of Arts (Psychology) from McGill University in 1976, and a Doctor of Philosophy (Experimental Psychology) from Harvard University in 1979.

Pinker has written about language and cognitive science for both specialist and popular audiences. He is most famous for his work on how children acquire language and for his skilful popularization of Noam Chomsky's work on language as an innate faculty of mind. Pinker has suggested an evolutionary mechanism for this faculty, but his idea remains controversial.

His most recent book The Blank Slate was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and The Aventis Prizes for Science Books. In 2004, he was named one of Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People.

Books by Steven Pinker

  • 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 (1996)
  • Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language (1999)
  • (2002)

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations by or about Steven Pinker
  • Steven Pinker's Home Page http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/
  • Gen Kuroki's Unofficial Web Page about Steven Pinker http://www.math.tohoku.ac.jp/~kuroki/Pinker/
  • Criticisms of Evolutionary Psychology http://www.psy.plym.ac.uk/year3/psy364criticisms-evolutionary-psychology/psy364c
    riticisms-evolutionary_psychology.htm
  • The Seven Sins of Evolutionary Psychology http://caspar.bgsu.edu/~huberlab/jules/papers/sevensins.pdf (paper by Panksepp & Panksepp (2000))
  • The Trouble with Psychological Darwinism http://humanities.uchicago.edu/faculty/goldsmith/CogSciCourse/Fodor.htm by Jerry Fodor (critical review of Pinker's How the Mind Works)
  • Dig-dug, think-thunk http://www.lrb.co.uk/v22/n16/yang01_.html by Charles Yang (critical review of Pinker's "Words and Rules")
  • Meet the Flintstones http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/~swb24/reviews/Pinker.htm by Simon Blackburn (critical review of The Blank Slate)





Last updated: 02-05-2005 19:01:54
Last updated: 02-27-2005 12:28:39