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
avoiding errors genius kinds language master obeying respecting rules
The three-year-old, then, is a grammatical genius - master of most constructions, obeying rules farmore often than flouting them, respecting language universals, erring in sensible, adultlike ways, and avoiding many kinds of errors altogether.
children long language-development
As a graduate student, I wrote a long paper connecting the dots between mathematical models of learning and language development in children. It was published in a major journal.
world language human-nature
Language is a window into human nature, but it is also a fistula, an open wound through which we're exposed to an infectious world.
mavens language peeves
Language mavens commonly confuse their own peeves with a worsening of the language.
cat judging language
One can choose to obsess over prescriptive rules, but they have no more to do with human language than the criteria for judging cats at a cat show have to do with mammalian biology.
thanks language redundancy
Thanks to the redundancy of language, yxx cxn xndxrstxnd whxt x xm wrxtxng xvxn xf x rxplxcx xll thx vxwxls wxth xn "x" (t gts lttl hrdr f y dn't vn kn whr th vwls r)
children invent language thrown
Indeed, children thrown together in a community that doesn't have a language of its own will invent one in order to communicate with each other.
argue feelings hurt hurts question somebody university
Even if he does occasionally hurt people's feelings -- he occasionally hurts my feelings -- but I'm a big boy. I can get over it. I can argue back. We really need somebody to question the way a university is run.
agenda behavior blank century doctrine explain few mechanisms past psychology sciences simple slate social sought
During the past century the doctrine of the blank slate has set the agenda for much of the social sciences and humanities, ... ... Psychology has sought to explain all thought, feeling, and behavior with a few simple mechanisms of learning.
argued genetic humans identify learning massively point trying unless
I've never argued that humans are massively hot-wired. What I was trying to point out was that you can't understand how we learn unless you identify the learning mechanisms. And these have some genetic basis.
behind bones buried creature evolving left rot skull thousands
You have to remember that not every creature that was evolving left behind its skull or its tools for our convenience tens of thousands of years later. Most bones or most tools rot or get buried and are never found again.
change gone perfect permanent religion religions themselves
Violence and religion have often gone together, but it's not a perfect correlation, and it doesn't have to be a permanent connection, because religions themselves change.
behavior brain coming lever reason systems temptation understand
There's no reason that we should give up that lever on people's behavior - namely, the inhibition systems of the brain - just because we're coming to understand more about the temptation systems.
casualties indelible left relative scale strikes
The 9/11 strikes left an indelible impact on our minds, but in relative terms, the scale of casualties actually wasn't all that high.