Steven Pinker

Who is Steven Pinker?

Steven Arthur Pinker is a Canadian experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, linguist, and popular science author. He is a Harvard College Professor and the 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.

Pinker's academic specializations are visual cognition and psycholinguistics. His experimental subjects include mental imagery, shape recognition, visual attention, children's language development, regular and irregular phenomena in language, the neural bases of words and grammar, and the psychology of innuendo and euphemism. He published two technical books which proposed a general theory of language acquisition and applied it to children's learning of verbs. In his popular books, he has argued that language is an "instinct" or biological adaptation shaped by natural selection. He is the author of six books for a general audience: The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, Words and Rules, The Blank Slate, The Stuff of Thought, and The Better Angels of Our Nature.

Famous Quotes:

• Ancestor worship must be an appealing idea to those who are about to become ancestors.