Long Biography
Steven Pinker was born in 1954 in the English-speaking Jewish community of
Montreal, Canada. He earned a bachelor's
degree in experimental psychology at McGill
University and then moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts
in 1976, where he has spent most of his career bouncing back and forth
between Harvard and MIT. He earned his doctorate at Harvard in 1979,
followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at MIT, a one-year stint as an
assistant professor at Harvard, and in 1982, a move back to MIT that lasted
until 2003, when he returned to Harvard as the Johnstone Family Professor
of Psychology. He also has spent two years in California:
in 1981–82, when he was an
assistant professor at Stanford, and in 1995–96,when he spent a
sabbatical year at the University
of California, Santa Barbara.
Pinker is an experimental psychologist who is interested in all aspects
of language and mind. Much of his initial research was in visual cognition,
the ability to imagine shapes, recognize faces and objects, and direct
attention within the visual field. But beginning in graduate school he
cultivated an interest in language, particularly language development in
children, and this topic eventually took over his research activities.
Aside from his experimental papers in language and visual cognition, he
wrote two fairly technical books early in his career. One outlined a theory
of how children acquire the words and grammatical structures of their mother
tongue. The second focused on one aspect of this process, the ability to use
different kinds of verbs in appropriate sentences, such as intransitive
verbs, transitive verbs, and verbs taking different combinations of
complements and indirect objects. For the next two decades his research focused
on the distinction between irregular verbs like bring-brought and regular verbs like walk-walked. The reason is that the two kinds of verbs neatly
embody the two processes that make language possible: looking up words in
memory, and combining words (or parts of words) according to rules. He has also
studied language development in twins and the neuroimaging of language
processes in the brain, and has recently begun lines of research on the
nature of reminding and on the function of innuendo and other forms of indirect
speech.
In 1994 he published the first of five books written for a general
audience. The Language Instinct was
an introduction to all aspects of language, held together by the idea that
language is a biological adaptation. This was followed in 1997 by How the Mind
Works, which offered a similar synthesis of the rest of the
mind, from vision and reasoning to the emotions, humor, and art. In 1999he
published Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language,
which presented his research on regular and irregular verbs as a way of
explaining how language works in general. And in 2002 he published The Blank
Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, which explored
the political, moral, and emotional colorings of the concept of human
nature. His new book The Stuff of
Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature will be published by
Penguin in September 2007. Pinker frequently writes for the popular press
on subjects such as language and politics, the neural basis of consciousness, and the
genetic enhancement of human beings.
Pinker serves on numerous editorial and advisory boards, including the
Usage Panel of The American
Heritage Dictionary and the scientific advisory board for "The
Decade of Behavior." He has won many prizes for his books (including
the William James Book Prize three times, the Los Angeles Times Science Book Prize, and the Eleanor
Maccoby Book Prize), his research (including the Troland Research Prize
from the National Academy of Sciences, the Early Career Award from the American
Psychological Association, and the Henry Dale Prize from the Royal
Institution of Great Britain), and his graduate and undergraduate teaching.
He is also a Humanist Laureate, the 2006 Humanist of the Year, and the
recipient of four honorary doctorates.
Pinker lives in Boston and in Truro with Rebecca Newberger Goldstein. The
other authors in the family are his sister Susan Pinker and Rebecca’s daughter
Yael Goldstein.
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