Steven Pinker
Biographic Data
| ID | 384935 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Steven Pinker |
| GIVEN NAMES | Steven |
| FAMILY NAME | Pinker |
| SIGNATURE | PINKER S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Harvard University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2319-4085 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 52 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 175 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 51 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1981 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
What happens in vagueness
La sélection naturelle des connards
Judith Rich Harris and child development: 25 Years after The Nurture Assumption
Reply to Joachim Krueger's Review of Rationality
I enjoyed Joachim Krueger's thoughtful and good-natured review of Rationality. As fellow students of rationality and irrationality, including self-serving biases, neither of us will be surprised that I wish to defend myself in the face of some of his gentle critical remarks.Krueger suggests that I anchored my story in the mainstream heuristics-and-biases school of reasoning. But members of that school beg to differ: Some have given me a hard time…
Piled Modifiers, Buried Verbs, and Other Turgid Prose in the American Political Science Review
Academic writing is notoriously difficult to read. Can political science do better? To assess the state of prose in political science, we examined a recent issue of the American Political Science Review. We evaluated the articles according to the basic principles of style endorsed by writing experts. We find that the writing suffers most from heavy noun phrases in forms such as noun noun noun and adjective adjective noun noun. Further, we describ…
Judith Rich Harris (1938–2019)
Universality and diversity in human song
Cross-cultural analysis of song It is unclear whether there are universal patterns to music across cultures. Mehr et al. examined ethnographic data and observed music in every society sampled (see the Perspective by Fitch and Popescu). For songs specifically, three dimensions characterize more than 25% of the performances studied: formality of the performance, arousal level, and religiosity. There is more variation in musical behavior within soci…
Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress
Common knowledge, coordination, and the logic of self-conscious emotions
A critical period for second language acquisition: Evidence from 2/3 million English speakers
Universality and diversity in human song
What is universal about music across human societies, and what varies? We built a corpus of ethnographic text on musical behavior from a representative sample of the world’s societies and a discography of audio recordings of the music itself. The ethnographic corpus reveals that music appears in every society observed; that variation in musical behavior is well-characterized by three dimensions, which capture the formality, arousal, and religiosi…
L'inexorable déclin de la violence
Virtuous Violence: Hurting and Killing to Create, Sustain, End, and Honor Social Relationships
What motivates violence? How can good and compassionate people hurt and kill others or themselves? Why are people much more likely to kill or assault people they know well, rather than strangers? This provocative and radical book shows that people mostly commit violence because they genuinely feel that it is the morally right thing to do. In perpetrators' minds, violence may be the morally necessary and proper way to regulate social relationships…
The psychology of coordination and common knowledge
Research on human cooperation has concentrated on the puzzle of altruism, in which 1 actor incurs a cost to benefit another, and the psychology of reciprocity, which evolved to solve this problem. We examine the complementary puzzle of mutualism, in which actors can benefit each other simultaneously, and the psychology of coordination, which ensures such benefits. Coordination is facilitated by common knowledge: the recursive belief state in whic…
Why It Is Hard to Find Genes Associated With Social Science Traits: Theoretical and Empirical Considerations
Objectives. We explain why traits of interest to behavioral scientists may have a genetic architecture featuring hundreds or thousands of loci with tiny individual effects rather than a few with large effects and why such an architecture makes it difficult to find robust associations between traits and genes. Methods. We conducted a genome-wide association study at 2 sites, Harvard University and Union College, measuring more than 100 physical an…
Why the World Is More Peaceful
On top of all the benefits that modernity has brought us in health, experience, and knowledge, we can add its role in the reduction of violence
Indirect speech, politeness, deniability, and relationship negotiation: "Comment on Marina Terkourafi's "The Puzzle of Indirect Speech
Rationales for indirect speech: The theory of the strategic speaker
Speakers often do not state requests directly but employ innuendos such as Would you like to see my etchings?Though such indirectness seems puzzlingly inefficient, it can be explained by a theory of the Strategic Speaker, who seeks plausible deniability when he is uncertain of whether the hearer is cooperative or antagonistic.A paradigm case is bribing a policeman who may be corrupt or honest: a veiled bribe may be accepted by the former and igno…
The Alliance Hypothesis for Human Friendship
BACKGROUND: Exploration of the cognitive systems underlying human friendship will be advanced by identifying the evolved functions these systems perform. Here we propose that human friendship is caused, in part, by cognitive mechanisms designed to assemble support groups for potential conflicts. We use game theory to identify computations about friends that can increase performance in multi-agent conflicts. This analysis suggests that people woul…
The logic of indirect speech
When people speak, they often insinuate their intent indirectly rather than stating it as a bald proposition. Examples include sexual come-ons, veiled threats, polite requests, and concealed bribes. We propose a three-part theory of indirect speech, based on the idea that human communication involves a mixture of cooperation and conflict. First, indirect requests allow for plausible deniability, in which a cooperative listener can accept the requ…
The stuff of thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature
Psychologist Pinker explains how the mind works in a completely new way--by examining how we use words. Every time we swear, we reveal something about human emotions. When we use an innuendo to convey a bribe, threat, or sexual come-on (rather than just blurting it out), we disclose something about human relationships. Our use of prepositions and tenses tap into peculiarly human concepts of space and time, and our nouns and verbs tap into mental …
The evolutionary social psychology of off-record indirect speech acts
This paper proposes a new analysis of indirect speech in the framework of game theory, social psychology, and evolutionary psychology. It builds on the theory of Grice, which tries to ground indirect speech in pure rationality (the demands of efficient communication between two cooperating agents) and on the Politeness Theory of Brown and Levinson, who proposed that people cooperate not just in exchanging data but in saving face (both the speaker…
The nature of the language faculty and its implications for evolution of language (Reply to Fitch, Hauser, and Chomsky)
The faculty of language: What's special about it
Liberals Ate My Genes?
Rationales for indirect speech: The theory of the strategic speaker
Speakers often do not state requests directly but employ innuendos such as Would you like to see my etchings?Though such indirectness seems puzzlingly inefficient, it can be explained by a theory of the Strategic Speaker, who seeks plausible deniability when he is uncertain of whether the hearer is cooperative or antagonistic.A paradigm case is bribing a policeman who may be corrupt or honest: a veiled bribe may be accepted by the former and igno…
Words and rules
The evolutionary social psychology of off-record indirect speech acts
This paper proposes a new analysis of indirect speech in the framework of game theory, social psychology, and evolutionary psychology. It builds on the theory of Grice, which tries to ground indirect speech in pure rationality (the demands of efficient communication between two cooperating agents) and on the Politeness Theory of Brown and Levinson, who proposed that people cooperate not just in exchanging data but in saving face (both the speaker…
The Learnability and Acquisition of the Dative Alternation in English
The dative alternation poses a learnability paradox: when children hear give money to him and give him money , they could formulate a rule deriving the double object from the prepositional form, but the rule would allow overgeneralization from donate money to him to donate him money. Children are not corrected for speaking ungrammatically, so how do they avoid overgeneralizing? The ‘conservatism’ hypothesis proposes that children do not generaliz…
How could a child use verb syntax to learn verb semantics
The psychology of coordination and common knowledge
Research on human cooperation has concentrated on the puzzle of altruism, in which 1 actor incurs a cost to benefit another, and the psychology of reciprocity, which evolved to solve this problem. We examine the complementary puzzle of mutualism, in which actors can benefit each other simultaneously, and the psychology of coordination, which ensures such benefits. Coordination is facilitated by common knowledge: the recursive belief state in whic…
The Nature of Regularity and Irregularity: Evidence from Hebrew Nominal Inflection
Why nature & nurture won't go away
The nature-nurture debate has preoccupied psychology and the social sciences for centuries. Many writers have expressed a hope for a compromise that it will make the debate disappear.. In this view, all behavior comes from an inextricable interaction between heredity and environment, and it is a mistake to try to tease them apart. reasons, among them that it is simply false that all aspects of brain function involve a mixture of heredity and envi…
Indirect speech, politeness, deniability, and relationship negotiation: "Comment on Marina Terkourafi's "The Puzzle of Indirect Speech
Why It Is Hard to Find Genes Associated With Social Science Traits: Theoretical and Empirical Considerations
Objectives. We explain why traits of interest to behavioral scientists may have a genetic architecture featuring hundreds or thousands of loci with tiny individual effects rather than a few with large effects and why such an architecture makes it difficult to find robust associations between traits and genes. Methods. We conducted a genome-wide association study at 2 sites, Harvard University and Union College, measuring more than 100 physical an…
On the acquisition of grammatical morphemes
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Language Learnability and Language Development
On language and connectionism: Analysis of a parallel distributed processing model of language acquisition
The Learnability and Acquisition of the Dative Alternation in English
The dative alternation poses a learnability paradox: when children hear give money to him and give him money , they could formulate a rule deriving the double object from the prepositional form, but the rule would allow overgeneralization from donate money to him to donate him money. Children are not corrected for speaking ungrammatically, so how do they avoid overgeneralizing? The ‘conservatism’ hypothesis proposes that children do not generaliz…
Syntax and semantics in the acquisition of locative verbs
Children between the ages of three and seven occasionally make errors with locative verbs like pour and fill , such as * I filled water into the glass and * I poured the glass with water (Bowerman, 1982). To account for this pattern of errors, and for how they are eventually unlearned, we propose that children use a universal linking rule called OBJECT AFFECTEDNESS: the direct object corresponds to the argument that is specified as ‘affected’ in …
Regular and Irregular Morphology and the Psychological Status of Rules of Grammar
Proceedings of the Seventeenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session and Parasession on The Grammar of Event Structure (1991), pp. 230-251
Learnability and Cognition: The Acquisition of Argument Structure (Learning, Development, and Conceptual Change)
Overregularization in Language Acquisition
Children extend regular grammatical patterns to irregular words, resulting in overregularizations like comed, often after a period of correct performance ("U-shaped development"). The errors seem paradigmatic of rule use, hence bear on central issues in the psychology of rules: how creative rule application interacts with memorized exceptions in development, how overgeneral rules are unlearned in the absence of parental feedback, and whether cogn…
Learning and Cognition: The Acquisition of Argument Structure
Language and Species
Generalisation of regular and irregular morphological patterns
Both regular inflectional patterns (walk-walked) and irregular ones (swing-swung) can be applied productively to novel words (e.g. wug-wugged; spling -splung). Theories of generative phonology attribute both generalisations to rules; connectionist theories attribute both to analogies in a pattern associator network; hybrid theories attribute regular (fully predictable default) generalisations to a rule and irregular generalisations to a rote memo…
On The Language Instinct: (412952005-009)
In this extremely valuable book, very informative, and very well written (Noam Chomsky), one of the greatest thinkers in the field of linguistics explains how language works--how people, ny making noises with their mouths, can cause ideas to arise in other people's minds.
Sensitivity of children's inflection to grammatical structure
What is the input to the mental System that computes inflected forms like walked, came, dogs , and men ? Recent connectionist models feed a word's phonological features into a single network, allowing it to generalize both regular and irregular phonological patterns, like stop-stopped, step-stepped and fling-flung, cling-clung . But for adults, phonological input is insufficient: verbs derived from nouns like ring the city always have regular pas…
Lexical & Conceptual Semantics
Parts and boundaries, Ray Jackendoff the syntax of event structure, James Pustejovsky learning to express motion events in English and Korean - the influence of language-specific lexicanization patterns, Soonja Choi and Melissa Bowerman wiping the slate clean - a lexical semantic exploration, Beth Levin and Malka Rappaport Horav affectedness and direct objects - the role of lexical semantics in the acquisition of Vero argument structure, Jean Gro…
How could a child use verb syntax to learn verb semantics
Weird past tense forms
It is often assumed that children go through a stage in which they systematically overapply irregular past tense patterns to inappropriate verbs, as in wipe-wope, bring-brang, trick-truck, walk-has walken . Such errors have been interpreted both as reflecting over-use of minor grammatical rules (e.g. ‘change i to a ’), and as reflecting the operation of a connectionist pattern associator network that superimposes and blends patterns of various de…
El instinto del lenguaje: Cómo crea el lenguaje la mente
German Inflection: The Exception That Proves the Rule
The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language
Words and rules
Words and rules: The Ingredients of Language
"In Words and Rules, Pinker explains the profound mysteries of language by picking a deceptively single phenomenon and examining it from every angle. The phenomenon - regular and irregular verbs - connects an astonishing array of topics in the sciences and humanities: the history of languages; the theories of Noam Chomsky and his critics; the attempts to simulate language using computer simulations of neural networks; the illuminating errors of c…
How the mind works
In this book a cognitive scientist explains how the brain evolved to store and use information, allowing our ancestors to control their environment, and why we think and act as we do. He explains what the mind is, how it evolved, and how it allows us to see, think, feel, laugh, interact, enjoy the arts, and ponder the mysteries of life. This work explains many of the imponderables of everyday life. Why does a face look more attractive with makeup…
The past and future of the past tense
The Blank Slate: The Denial of Human Nature
In The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker explores the idea of human nature and its moral, emotional, and political colorings. He shows how many intellectuals have denied the existence of human nature by embracing three linked dogmas: the Blank Slate (the mind has no innate traits), the Noble Savage (people are born good and corrupted by society), and the Ghost in the Machine (each of us has a soul that makes choices free from biology). Each dogma carrie…
The Nature of Regularity and Irregularity: Evidence from Hebrew Nominal Inflection
Psychology (37 works) · Linguistics (28 works) · Philosophy (21 works) · Computer Science (19 works) · Cognitive psychology (11 works) · Language Development and Disorders (11 works) · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation (11 works) · Cognition (10 works) · Artificial Intelligence (9 works) · Cognitive science (9 works)