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 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.
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)
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.
carried foreign human repeatedly though witnessed
Though as a psychologist I like to think that nothing human is foreign to me, I admit to having been repeatedly flabbergasted by the insouciance, and sometimes relish, with which our ancestors carried out and witnessed unspeakable cruelties.
brilliant turning
M.I.T. has a reputation for turning out Dilberts. They may be brilliant in what they do, but no one can understand what they say.
culture happen learning logical matter point simple
One of them is a simple logical point that no matter how important learning and culture and socialization are, they don't happen by magic.
countries economies less level likely open saved theory trade wars
Capitalism saved the world, and there is even a heretical theory now, moving up from the level of individuals to countries: countries that trade more and have more open economies are less likely to fight wars and less likely to have genocides.
large number occasion people vent
It got ugly. People used this as an occasion to vent a large number of grievances.