Steven Pinker
The Language Instinct is the book from Pinker's catalog that this biography leads with — a non-fiction work whose title alone signals his dual grounding in language and the study of mind.
Steven Pinker was born on September 18, 1954, in Montreal, and holds both Canadian and American citizenship. He attended Wagar High School, then studied at Dawson College, before moving on to McGill University. He later studied at Harvard University, which became his professional home. His roles span psychology, experimental psychology, evolutionary psychology, linguistics, cognitive science, anthropology, and philosophy, and he has worked as a university teacher and non-fiction writer throughout his career.
Pinker has authored a substantial list of books. In addition to The Language Instinct, his titles include How the Mind Works, Words and Rules, The Blank Slate, The Stuff of Thought, The Better Angels of Our Nature, Enlightenment Now, and The Sense of Style. That output places him among the more prolific non-fiction authors working across the disciplines he inhabits — psychology, linguistics, and cognitive science among them.
Pinker currently holds the position of Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. He has received the Troland Research Awards. That combination of a named professorship at Harvard and a recognized research award marks the ongoing shape of his academic career.
Quotes by Steven Pinker
Steven Pinker's insights on:
Ancestor worship must be an appealing idea to those who are about to become ancestors.
Astrology had an important role in the ancient world. You can't understand many things unless you know something about astrology - the plays of Shakespeare and so on.
Equity feminism is a moral doctrine about equal treatment that makes no commitments regarding open empirical issues in psychology or biology.
Equality is not the empirical claim that all groups of humans are interchangeable; it is the moral principle individuals should not be judged or constrained by the average properties of their group.
Irregularity in grammar seems like the epitome of human eccentricity and quirkiness.
20th-century totalitarian movements were no more defined by a rejection of Judeo-Christianity than they were defined by a rejection of astrology, alchemy, Confucianism, Scientology, or any of hundreds of other belief systems.
I teach classes 28 weeks of the year, but the rest of the time I do research and write books. While I'm writing a book, which I probably do two out of every three years, it's like having a second job. I squeeze in the hours when I can.
It’s often said that the Stone Age did not end because the world ran out of stones, and that has been true of energy as well.
If there’s a bag in your car, and a gallon of milk in the bag, there is a gallon of milk in your car. But if there’s a person in your car, and a gallon of blood in a person, it would be strange to conclude that there is a gallon of blood in your car.
An event is a stretch of time, and time, according to physicists, is a continuous variable-an inexorable cosmic flow, in Newton’s world, or a fourth dimension in a seamless hyperspace, in Einstein’s. But the human mind carves this fabric into the discrete swatches we call events.