| Stephen Pinker |
Article Index for Stephen |
Website Links For Steven |
Information AboutStephen Pinker |
|
Steven Arthur Pinker (born September 18 1954 ) is a prominent Canadian-American Experimental Psychologist , Cognitive Scientist , and Popular Science writer known for his spirited and wide-ranging advocacy of Evolutionary Psychology and the Computational Theory Of Mind . Pinker’s academic specializations are Visual Cognition and Language Development In Children , and he is most famous for popularizing the idea that language is an "instinct" or Biological Adaptation shaped by Natural Selection rather than a by-product of general intelligence. His four books for a general audience — '' The Language Instinct '', '' How The Mind Works '', '' Words And Rules '' and '' The Blank Slate '' — have won numerous awards. BIOGRAPHY Career Pinker was born in Canada and graduated from Montreal's Dawson College in 1973, received a first class bachelor's degree in experimental psychology from McGill University in 1976, then went on to earn his Doctorate in the same discipline at Harvard in 1979. Pinker is currently the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard , having previously been director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute Of Technology . Pinker was named one of '' Time Magazine 's'' 100 most influential people in the world in 20041 and one of '' Prospect '' and '' Foreign Policy '''s 100 top public intellectuals in 2005.2 He has also received honorary doctorates from the universities of Newcastle , Surrey , Tel Aviv and McGill . In January 2005, Pinker defended Lawrence Summers , President of Harvard University, whose comments about the Gender Gap in mathematics and science angered much of the faculty.3 After the Language Instinct he seems to be moving away for a sychophantically Chomskyan approach, focussing more on general topics and Cognitive Linguistics, as per his latest book "The Stuff of Thought". Pinker addresses the criticisms of scholars like Geoffrey Sampson (as outlined in his "Educating Eve", a biting criticism of the alleged language 'instinct' Pinker advocates) and Suren Naicker (as outlined in his "Rationalism vs. Empiricism: a critique of the Chomskyan paradigm"). There has been talk that he left MIT due to pressure regarding the nature of his general work, but Pinker himself refuses to comment/verify this claim. In 2007 he was invited on The Colbert Report and asked under pressure to sum up how the brain works in five words - Pinker answered "Brain cells fire in patterns." Personal Pinker was born into the English-speaking Jewish community of Montreal . He has said, "I was never religious in the theological sense... I never outgrew my conversion to atheism at 13, but at various times was a serious cultural Jew."4. His father, a trained lawyer, first worked as a traveling salesman, while his mother, was first a home-maker then a guidance counselor and high-school vice-principal. He has one brother and one sister.5 Pinker has been married and divorced twice. His current girlfriend, Rebecca Goldstein , is a professor of philosophy at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut.6 He has no children. THEORIES OF LANGUAGE AND MIND Pinker is most famous for his work — popularized in '' The Language Instinct '' (1994) — on how children Acquire Language , and for his popularization of Noam Chomsky 's work on language as an innate faculty of mind. Pinker has suggested an Evolutionary Mental Module for language, although this idea remains controversial. Additionally Pinker argues that many other human mental faculties are evolved (and is an ally of Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins in many evolutionary disputes). Pinker's books,'' view have also been subject to sustained criticism in Jeffrey Elman 's ''Rethinking Innateness: A Connectionist Perspective on Development (Neural Networks and Connectionist Modeling)''. Pinker has also studied swear words (epithets) and how they represent what he calls "a window into emotion." He has written on the taboo of certain words; various types of swear words that exist in various languages, the grammar of swearing, and the circumstances that lead to swearing. SELECTED PUBLICATIONS Books
Articles and essays
REFERENCES EXTERNAL LINKS Language Instinct ?: Gradualistic Natural Selection is not a good enough explanation DEBATES
=Vitae=
=Reviews=
|
|
|