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
world fields topics
Though knowledge itself increasingly ignores boundaries between fields, professors are apt to organize their pedagogy around the methods and history of their academic subculture rather than some coherent topic in the world.
art world body
There is no society ever discovered in the remotest corner of the world that has not had something that we would consider the arts. Visual arts - decoration of surfaces and bodies - appears to be a human universal.
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.
long world groups
As long as your ideology identifies the main source of the world's ills as a definable group, it opens the world up to genocide.
violence world violent
We really are creatures of a violent world, biologically speaking - watching violence and learning about it is one of our cognitive drives.
world too-much morality
The world has far too much morality.
reality understanding world
Semantics is about the relation of words to thoughts, but it also about the relation of words to other human concerns. Semantics is about the relation of words to reality - the way that speakers commit themselves to a shared understanding of the truth, and the way their thoughts are anchored to things and situations in the world.
perspective suffering world
Academics lack perspective. In a debate on whether the world is round, they would argue, 'No,' because it's an oblate spheroid. They suffer from 'the curse of knowledge': the inability to imagine what it's like not to know something that they know.
numbers people world
Statisticians tell us that people underestimate the sheer number of coincidences that are bound to happen in a world governed by chance.
perfect world a-perfect-world
We will never have a perfect world, but it's not romantic or naive to work toward a better one.
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.
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.
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.