Stiven Pinker

Steven Pinker is a Canadian-American scholar and science popularizer specializing in experimental psychology, psycholinguistics, and cognitive science.

Pinker received a bachelor’s degree in experimental psychology from McGill University in 1976 and then a doctorate from Harvard in 1979.

He taught in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is a professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. His research is devoted to the problems of language and cognition, and he has done extensive work on how children acquire language. For his research in the psychology of language, Steven Pinker was awarded the Troland Research Award of the National Academy of Sciences and two awards from the American Psychological Association. He is a member of several scholarly societies, including the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

The Language Instinct was his first book aimed at a general readership; in it, the author seeks to explain the essence of the science of language and define its place within computational cognitive science and evolutionary psychology. The ideas in this book were further developed in Steven Pinker’s other books, Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language and How the Mind Works, where he explains “what the mind is, how it develops, how it enables us to see, think, feel, laugh, interact with the outside world, enjoy art, and ponder the mysteries of life.”