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 past fifteen years his research has 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. Along the way he wrote a monograph that analyzed 20,000
past-tense forms in children's speech, concentrating on errors
like bringed and holded that reveal children's linguistic creativity
at work.
In 1994 he published the first of four 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 1999 he 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.
Pinker frequently writes for the popular press on subjects ranging
from politically correct language to 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 and the Early
Career Award from the American Psychological Association), and
his graduate and undergraduate teaching. He is also a Humanist
Laureate and the recipient of three honorary doctorates.
