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Steven Pinker Steven
Pinker is a prominent American experimental psychologist,
cognitive scientist and popular science writer known for
his spirited and wide-ranging defence of evolutionary psychology
and the computational theory of mind. Pinker’s academic
specializations are visual cognition and language development
in children. He argues that language is an "instinct" or
biological adaption shaped by natural selection rather than
a by-product of general intelligence. In his four books for
a general audience – The
Language of Instinct, How
the Mind Works, Words
and Rules and The
Blank Slate – Pinker suggests an evolutionary
mental module for language, although this idea remains controversial.
Pinker goes further than Chomsky, arguing many other human
mental faculties are evolved, and is an ally of Daniel
Dennett and Richard
Dawkins in many evolutionary disputes. In his latest book, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature
Related Links • Steven
Pinker's home page
Steven Pinker Quotes Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system, painting and sculpture on the visual system. Poetry and literature depend on language. As many political writers have pointed out, commitment to political equality is not an empirical claim that people are clones. By exploring the political and moral colorings of discoveries about what makes us tick, we can have a more honest science and a less fearful intellectual milieu. I think that there is a quasi-religious theory of human nature that is prevalent among pundits and intellectuals, which includes both empirical assumptions about how the mind works and a set of values that people hang on those assumptions. If people are innately saddled with certain sins and flaws, like selfishness, prejudice, short-sightedness, and self-deception, then political reform would seem to be a waste of time. Most intellectuals today have a phobia of any explanation of the mind that invokes genetics. Personality and socialization aren't the same thing. Political equality consists of recognizing, as the Constitution says, that people have certain inalienable rights, namely life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Recognizing those rights is not the same thing as believing that people are indistinguishable in every respect. There has to be innate circuitry that does the learning, that creates the culture, that acquires the culture, and that responds to socialization. There's no reason that we should give up that lever on people's behavior – namely, the inhibition systems of the brain – just because we're coming to understand more about the temptation systems. Today there are movements in the arts to reintroduce beauty and narrative and melody and other basic human pleasures. And they are considered radical extremists! Why do people believe that there are dangerous implications of the idea that the mind is a product of the brain, that the brain is organized in part by the genome, and that the genome was shaped by natural selection? Our goals are the subgoals of the ultimate goal of the genes, replicating themselves. Intelligence, then, is the ability to attain goals in the face of obstacles by means of decisions based on rational (truth obeying) rules. The computer scientists Allen Newell and Herbert Simon fleshed this idea out further by noting that intelligence consists of specifying a goal, assessing the current situation to see how it differs from the goal, and applying a set of operations that reduce difference. Who decides that this mark in this system corresponds to that bit of the world? In the case of the computer, the answer is obvious: we get to decide what the symbols mean, because we built the machine. But who means the meaning allegedly inside us? Philosophers call this the problem of "intentionality" (confusingly, because it has nothing to do with intentions). There are two common answers. One [the causal theory] is that a symbol is connected to its referent in the world by our sense organs. Your mother's face reflects light, which stimulates your eye, which triggers a cascade of templates or similar circuits, which inscribe the symbol mother in your mind. The other [the inferential role theory] answer is that the unique pattern of symbol manipulations triggered by the first symbol mirrors the unique patterns of relationships between the referent of the first symbol and the referents of the triggered symbols. Once we agree, for whatever reason, to say that mother means mother, uncle means uncle, and so on, the new interlocking kinship statements generated by the demons turn out to be uncannily true, time and again. For many physicists and mathematicians, natural selection seems a repugnant kind of explanation, because it is too kludgey. Its random stochastic variation, and selection by utility seems like an ugly way to arrive at something beautiful, and for a physicist or a mathematician, or someone like Noam Chomsky, whose work has often been mathematical, the favored kind of theory is one where a conclusion can be deduced from a bunch of premises in an elegant deductive system. By the aesthetic of a grammarian, or the aesthetic of a physicist, natural selection seems too ugly and weak.
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Pinker investigates what the words we use tell us about the way we
think.
