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
associated evokes hear raw word
You can't hear a word and just hear it as raw sound; it always evokes an associated meaning and emotion in the brain.
I think that if you were to probe a lot of people's religious opinions, they would not be as religious as the numbers would suggest.
alive bargain chance death dying painful premature takes
Part of the bargain of being alive is that one takes a chance at dying a premature or painful death, be it from violence, accident, or disease.
everywhere government less life
Everywhere you look for comparisons of life under anarchy and life under government, life under government is less violent.
actual arranged billion cells goes hundred individual level nerve trillion ways
The actual organization of behavior goes on the level of the individual nerve cells and their connections, and we have a hundred billion nerve cells, probably a hundred trillion connections. It's just mind-boggling to think of all the different ways in which they're arranged in a baby's head.
economic number personal
There is a correlation between economic inequality and personal violence. The explanation for the correlation isn't completely clear; there are a number of possibilities.
average principles groups
Equality is not the empirical claim that all groups of humans are interchangeable; it is the moral principle that individuals should not be judged or constrained by the average properties of their group.
baby home animal
Consciousness surely does not depend on language. Babies, many animals, and patients robbed of speech by brain damage are not insensate robots; they have reactions like ours that indicate that someone's home.
common ecological family harmonies hostility ideologies modernity moral nature nostalgia primitive rhythms shared
A hostility to modernity is shared by ideologies that have nothing else in common - a nostalgia for moral clarity, small-town intimacy, family values, primitive communism, ecological sustainability, communitarian solidarity, or harmonies with the rhythms of nature.
close distant falling hear massacre taken
We know about every massacre that has taken place close to the present, but the ones in the distant past are like trees falling in the forest with no one to hear them.
best literacy phenomenon printing reforms
I think it may not be a coincidence that the rise of printing and book publication and literacy and the phenomenon of best sellers all preceded the humanitarian reforms of the Enlightenment.
appealing commerce contracts everywhere recognized
Roads, better harnesses for horses, time-keeping devices, financial instruments like a currency that was recognized everywhere in the kingdom, enforceable contracts - all of this made commerce more appealing than plunder.
among both empirical hang human human-nature includes mind nature people pundits theory values works
I think that there is a quasi-religious theory of human nature that is prevalent among pundits and intellectuals, which includes both empirical assumptions about how the mind works and a set of values that people hang on those assumptions.
large number occasion people vent
It got ugly. People used this as an occasion to vent a large number of grievances.