Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker (born September 18 1954, in Montreal, Canada) is a psychologist at Harvard University and a writer of popular science books. He was a professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for 21 years before returning to Harvard in 2003. He received a Bachelor of Arts (Psychology) from McGill University in 1976, and a Doctor of Philosophy (Experimental Psychology) from Harvard University in 1979.

Pinker has written about language and cognitive science at every level, from technical papers to approachable popular science. He is most noted for his work on how children acquire language and for his furthering of Noam Chomsky's work on language as a basic human instinct.

Books by Steven Pinker

• Language Learnability and Language Development (1984)
• Visual Cognition (1985)
• Connections and Symbols (1988)
• Learnability and Cognition: The Acquisition of Argument Structure (1989)
• Lexical and Conceptual Semantics (1992)
• The Language Instinct (1994)
• How the Mind Works (1996)
• Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language (1999)
• The Blank Slate: The Denial of Human Nature in Modern Intellectual Life (2002)

• Barbara Ehrenreich and Janet McIntosh. "The New Creationism: Biology Under Attack". The Nation, June 9, 1997.
• Steven Pinker's Home Page