48 Facts About Steven Pinker

Steven Arthur Pinker was born on September 18,1954 and is a Canadian-American cognitive psychologist, psycholinguist, popular science author, and public intellectual.

Steven Pinker is an advocate of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind.

Steven Pinker has written two technical books that proposed a general theory of language acquisition and applied it to children's learning of verbs.

Steven Pinker is the author of nine books for general audiences.

Steven Pinker's The Sense of Style is a general language-oriented style guide.

In 2004, Steven Pinker was named in Times "The 100 Most Influential People in the World Today", and in the years 2005,2008,2010, and 2011 in Foreign Policys list of "Top 100 Global Thinkers".

Steven Pinker was included in Prospect Magazine's top 10 "World Thinkers" in 2013.

Steven Pinker has won awards from the American Psychological Association, the National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Institution, the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, and the American Humanist Association.

Steven Pinker delivered the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh in 2013.

Steven Pinker has served on the editorial boards of a variety of journals, and on the advisory boards of several institutions.

Steven Pinker was the chair of the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary from 2008 to 2018.

Steven Pinker was born in Montreal, Quebec, in 1954, to a middle-class Jewish family.

Steven Pinker's grandparents emigrated to Canada from Poland and Romania in 1926, and owned a small necktie factory in Montreal.

Steven Pinker's mother, Roslyn, was a guidance counsellor and, later, a high-school vice-principal.

Steven Pinker graduated from McGill University in 1976 with a Bachelor of Arts in psychology, then did doctoral studies in experimental psychology at Harvard University under Stephen Kosslyn, receiving a PhD in 1979.

Steven Pinker did research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for a year, then became a professor at Harvard and then Stanford University.

Steven Pinker currently gives lectures as a visiting professor at the New College of the Humanities, a private college in London.

Steven Pinker married Nancy Etcoff in 1980 and they divorced in 1992; he married again in 1995 and again divorced.

Steven Pinker has two stepdaughters, the novelist Yael Goldstein Love and the poet Danielle Blau.

In psycholinguistics, Steven Pinker became known early in his career for promoting computational learning theory as a way to understand language acquisition in children.

Steven Pinker wrote a tutorial review of the field followed by two books that advanced his own theory of language acquisition, and a series of experiments on how children acquire the passive, dative, and locative constructions.

Steven Pinker argued that language depends on two things: the associative remembering of sounds and their meanings in words, and the use of rules to manipulate symbols for grammar.

Steven Pinker presented evidence against connectionism, where a child would have to learn all forms of all words and would simply retrieve each needed form from memory, in favour of the older alternative theory, the use of words and rules combined by generative phonology.

Steven Pinker showed that mistakes made by children indicate the use of default rules to add suffixes such as "-ed": for instance 'breaked' and 'comed' for 'broke' and 'came'.

Steven Pinker argued that this shows that irregular verb-forms in English have to be learnt and retrieved from memory individually, and that the children making these errors were predicting the regular "-ed" ending in an open-ended way by applying a mental rule.

In 2019, Steven Pinker stated that he was unaware of the nature of the charges against Epstein, and that he engaged in an unpaid favor for his Harvard colleague Dershowitz, as he had regularly done.

Steven Pinker stated in an interview with BuzzFeed News that he regrets writing the letter.

Steven Pinker says he never received money from Epstein and met with him three times over more than a dozen years, and said he could never stand Epstein and tried to keep his distance.

Steven Pinker sees language as unique to humans, evolved to solve the specific problem of communication among social hunter-gatherers.

Steven Pinker argues that it is as much an instinct as specialized adaptative behavior in other species, such as a spider's web-weaving or a beaver's dam-building.

The reality of Steven Pinker's proposed language instinct, and the related claim that grammar is innate and genetically based, has been contested by linguists such as Geoffrey Sampson in his 1997 book, Educating Eve: The 'Language Instinct' Debate.

Further, Aleksander writes that while Steven Pinker criticises some attempts to explain language processing with neural nets, Steven Pinker later makes use of a neural net to create past tense verb forms correctly.

In Words and Rules: the Ingredients of Language, Steven Pinker argues from his own research that regular and irregular phenomena are products of computation and memory lookup, respectively, and that language can be understood as an interaction between the two.

Steven Pinker is critical of theories about the evolutionary origins of language that argue that linguistic cognition might have evolved from earlier musical cognition.

In How the Mind Works, Steven Pinker reiterates Immanuel Kant's view that music is not in itself an important cognitive phenomenon, but that it happens to stimulate important auditory and spatio-motor cognitive functions.

Steven Pinker compares music to "auditory cheesecake", stating that "As far as biological cause and effect is concerned, music is useless".

Steven Pinker is a frequent participant in public debates surrounding the contributions of science to contemporary society.

In January 2005 Steven Pinker defended comments by then-President of Harvard University Lawrence Summers.

In January 2009 Steven Pinker wrote an article about the Personal Genome Project and its possible impact on the understanding of human nature in The New York Times.

Steven Pinker discussed the new developments in epigenetics and gene-environment interactions in the afterword to the 2016 edition of his book The Blank Slate.

Advanced NFL Stats addressed the issue statistically, siding with Steven Pinker and showing that differences in methodology could explain the two men's differing opinions.

Steven Pinker responded that it was unlikely since "some of the declines have occurred far too rapidly for them to be explicable by biological evolution which has a speed limit measured in generations, but crime can plummet in a span of 15 years and some of these humanitarian reforms like eliminating slavery and torture occurred in say 50 years".

Helga Vierich and Cathryn Townsend wrote a critical review of Steven Pinker's sweeping "civilizational" explanations for patterns of human violence and warfare in response to a lecture he gave at Cambridge University in September 2015.

Steven Pinker was named one of Time's 100 most influential people in the world in 2004 and one of Prospect and Foreign Policys 100 top public intellectuals in both years the poll was carried out, 2005 and 2008; in 2010 and 2011 he was named by Foreign Policy to its list of top global thinkers.

Steven Pinker was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, in 1998 and in 2003.

Steven Pinker received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement in 1999.

From 2008 to 2018, Steven Pinker chaired the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary.

Steven Pinker wrote the essay on usage for the fifth edition of the Dictionary, published in 2011.