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Language, Cognition, and Human Nature by Steven Pinker
Language, Cognition, and Human Nature collects together for the first time much of Steven Pinker's most influential scholarly work on language and cognition. Pinker's seminal research explores the workings of language and its connections to cognition, perception, social relationships, child development, human evolution, and theories of human nature. This eclectic collection spans Pinker's thirty-year career, exploring his favorite themes in greater depth and scientific detail. It includes thirteen of Pinker's classic articles, ranging over topics such as language development in children, mental imagery, the recognition of shapes, the computational architecture of the mind, the meaning and uses of verbs, the evolution of language and cognition, the nature-nurture debate, and the logic of innuendo and euphemism. Each outlines a major theory or takes up an argument with another prominent scholar, such as Stephen Jay Gould, Noam Chomsky, or Richard Dawkins. Featuring a new introduction by Pinker that discusses his books and scholarly work, this collection reflects essential contributions to cognitive science by one of our leading thinkers and public intellectuals.
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First published January 1, 2013
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About the author
Steven Pinker
72 books10.5k followersSteven Arthur Pinker is a prominent Canadian-American experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, and author of popular science. Pinker is known for his wide-ranging explorations of human nature and its relevance to language, history, morality, politics, and everyday life. He conducts research on language and cognition, writes for publications such as the New York Times, Time, and The New Republic, and is the author of numerous books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, Words and Rules, The Blank Slate, The Stuff of Thought, The Better Angels of Our Nature, The Sense of Style, and most recently, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.
He was born in Canada and graduated from Montreal's Dawson College in 1973. He received a bachelor's degree in experimental psychology from McGill University in 1976, and then went on to earn his doctorate in the same discipline at Harvard in 1979. He did research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for a year, then became an assistant professor at Harvard and then Stanford University. From 1982 until 2003, Pinker taught at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, and eventually became the director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. (Except for a one-year sabbatical at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1995-6.) As of 2008, he is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard.
Pinker was named one of Time Magazine's 100 most influential people in the world in 2004 and one of Prospect and Foreign Policy's 100 top public intellectuals in 2005. He has also received honorary doctorates from the universities of Newcastle, Surrey, Tel Aviv, McGill, and the University of Tromsø, Norway. He was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, in 1998 and in 2003. In January 2005, Pinker defended Lawrence Summers, President of Harvard University, whose comments about the gender gap in mathematics and science angered much of the faculty. On May 13th 2006, Pinker received the American Humanist Association's Humanist of the Year award for his contributions to public understanding of human evolution.
In 2007, he was invited on The Colbert Report and asked under pressure to sum up how the brain works in five words – Pinker answered "Brain cells fire in patterns."
Pinker was born into the English-speaking Jewish community of Montreal. He has said, "I was never religious in the theological sense... I never outgrew my conversion to atheism at 13, but at various times was a serious cultural Jew." As a teenager, he says he considered himself an anarchist until he witnessed civil unrest following a police strike in 1969. His father, a trained lawyer, first worked as a traveling salesman, while his mother was first a home-maker then a guidance counselor and high-school vice-principal. He has two younger siblings. His brother is a policy analyst for the Canadian government. His sister, Susan Pinker, is a columnist for the Wall Street Journal and the author of The Sexual Paradox and The Village Effect.
Pinker married Nancy Etcoff in 1980 and they divorced 1992; he married Ilavenil Subbiah in 1995 and they too divorced. He is married to the novelist and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein, the author of 10 books and winner of the National Medal of the Humanities. He has no children.
His next book will take off from his research on "common knowledge" (knowing that everyone knows something). Its tentative title is: Don't Go There: Common Knowledge and the Science of Civility, Hypocrisy, Outrage, and Taboo.
He was born in Canada and graduated from Montreal's Dawson College in 1973. He received a bachelor's degree in experimental psychology from McGill University in 1976, and then went on to earn his doctorate in the same discipline at Harvard in 1979. He did research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for a year, then became an assistant professor at Harvard and then Stanford University. From 1982 until 2003, Pinker taught at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, and eventually became the director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. (Except for a one-year sabbatical at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1995-6.) As of 2008, he is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard.
Pinker was named one of Time Magazine's 100 most influential people in the world in 2004 and one of Prospect and Foreign Policy's 100 top public intellectuals in 2005. He has also received honorary doctorates from the universities of Newcastle, Surrey, Tel Aviv, McGill, and the University of Tromsø, Norway. He was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, in 1998 and in 2003. In January 2005, Pinker defended Lawrence Summers, President of Harvard University, whose comments about the gender gap in mathematics and science angered much of the faculty. On May 13th 2006, Pinker received the American Humanist Association's Humanist of the Year award for his contributions to public understanding of human evolution.
In 2007, he was invited on The Colbert Report and asked under pressure to sum up how the brain works in five words – Pinker answered "Brain cells fire in patterns."
Pinker was born into the English-speaking Jewish community of Montreal. He has said, "I was never religious in the theological sense... I never outgrew my conversion to atheism at 13, but at various times was a serious cultural Jew." As a teenager, he says he considered himself an anarchist until he witnessed civil unrest following a police strike in 1969. His father, a trained lawyer, first worked as a traveling salesman, while his mother was first a home-maker then a guidance counselor and high-school vice-principal. He has two younger siblings. His brother is a policy analyst for the Canadian government. His sister, Susan Pinker, is a columnist for the Wall Street Journal and the author of The Sexual Paradox and The Village Effect.
Pinker married Nancy Etcoff in 1980 and they divorced 1992; he married Ilavenil Subbiah in 1995 and they too divorced. He is married to the novelist and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein, the author of 10 books and winner of the National Medal of the Humanities. He has no children.
His next book will take off from his research on "common knowledge" (knowing that everyone knows something). Its tentative title is: Don't Go There: Common Knowledge and the Science of Civility, Hypocrisy, Outrage, and Taboo.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
September 4, 2013
This is a first for me – to see a popular science writer bringing out a book of what you might call their "selected academic papers". I suppose it speaks to Steven Pinker's (justified) popularity, but even so it's difficult to know exactly who the intended audience is: the stuff in here seems far too advanced for those who merely take a passing interest in linguistic theory or cognitive science, but on the other hand working academics or students in the field presumably already have access to most of these studies via university libraries, academic websites, etc. I suppose there's something to be said for having it all pulled together in a nice bound copy?
Among linguists, Pinker has become just slightly…well, "divisive" and "controversial" are much too strong words, but let's just say that his success with the public has meant that some of his ideas are taken as fact now, when many would say they're still under debate. Notably his championing of Noam Chomsky's Universal Grammar theory, which definitely is still controversial and divisive. On the other hand, it's also unfair to characterise Pinker as a Chomsky cheerleader – perhaps his most important academic paper (certainly his most-cited) was a 1990 study coauthored with Paul Bloom which went dead against Chomsky's non-Darwinist ideas on language evolution.
Actually, this last paper was almost taboo-busting – the idea of how language evolved is so thorny, and so beset by competing arguments, that the Linguistic Society of Paris famously banned any mention of it back in 1866. I love the paper for its epigraph – a comment contrasting the birth of language with the supposed first spoken words of the infant Thomas Babbington Macaulay:
It was an important paper, and it led to a bit of a renaissance of language evolution studies in the 1990s. On the other hand, this collection is also at times a way for Pinker to promote papers that he feels have received too little attention: ‘As far as I know,’ he says of one study, ‘this article has attracted zero citations (except by me)’.
Of course much of his work is not to do with linguistics at all, or at least not directly – he has had a long involvement with cognitive science generally, though the studies in here that mark this involvement are mostly over my head. For the general reader, perhaps the most interesting part of the book is the thoughtful introduction, in which Pinker considers the value in maintaining an interest in both academic studies and also popular writing.
Well, quite. Which brings us back to the question of who this book is aimed at exactly. Despite the witty introduction and the perceptive chapter-by-chapter commentaries, I suspect it has rather little general appeal – though that's not to detract from the fact that it's a very rich collection of often brilliant work.
Among linguists, Pinker has become just slightly…well, "divisive" and "controversial" are much too strong words, but let's just say that his success with the public has meant that some of his ideas are taken as fact now, when many would say they're still under debate. Notably his championing of Noam Chomsky's Universal Grammar theory, which definitely is still controversial and divisive. On the other hand, it's also unfair to characterise Pinker as a Chomsky cheerleader – perhaps his most important academic paper (certainly his most-cited) was a 1990 study coauthored with Paul Bloom which went dead against Chomsky's non-Darwinist ideas on language evolution.
Actually, this last paper was almost taboo-busting – the idea of how language evolved is so thorny, and so beset by competing arguments, that the Linguistic Society of Paris famously banned any mention of it back in 1866. I love the paper for its epigraph – a comment contrasting the birth of language with the supposed first spoken words of the infant Thomas Babbington Macaulay:
…once when he was taken out, his hostess accidentally spilled hot tea on him. The little lad first bawled his head off, but when he had calmed he said in answer to his hostess' concern, ‘Thank you Madam, the agony is sensibly abated.’
It was an important paper, and it led to a bit of a renaissance of language evolution studies in the 1990s. On the other hand, this collection is also at times a way for Pinker to promote papers that he feels have received too little attention: ‘As far as I know,’ he says of one study, ‘this article has attracted zero citations (except by me)’.
Of course much of his work is not to do with linguistics at all, or at least not directly – he has had a long involvement with cognitive science generally, though the studies in here that mark this involvement are mostly over my head. For the general reader, perhaps the most interesting part of the book is the thoughtful introduction, in which Pinker considers the value in maintaining an interest in both academic studies and also popular writing.
The demand for clarity [in works aimed at the general public] can expose bad ideas that are obscured by murky academese, and the demand for concrete detail in recounting experiments ("Ernie and Bert puppets" not "stimuli") can uncover flaws in design that would otherwise be overlooked.
Well, quite. Which brings us back to the question of who this book is aimed at exactly. Despite the witty introduction and the perceptive chapter-by-chapter commentaries, I suspect it has rather little general appeal – though that's not to detract from the fact that it's a very rich collection of often brilliant work.
April 19, 2014
Even though I had already read half the articles, it was still worth getting this collection.
Warning: This is a collection of peer-reviewed academic journal articles, not a book written for a general audience, so some parts might be a bit dry and tedious if you're not used to reading that sort of thing. I'm a long-time fan of Pinker, a student of psychology, and now a wanna-be linguist. So I loved it, but the group of people for whom this book would be worth getting is probably extremely small. If you're interested in Pinker (and not a psychologist or linguist), I'd recommend one of his many excellent books written for a general audience instead, like The Blank Slate.
Warning: This is a collection of peer-reviewed academic journal articles, not a book written for a general audience, so some parts might be a bit dry and tedious if you're not used to reading that sort of thing. I'm a long-time fan of Pinker, a student of psychology, and now a wanna-be linguist. So I loved it, but the group of people for whom this book would be worth getting is probably extremely small. If you're interested in Pinker (and not a psychologist or linguist), I'd recommend one of his many excellent books written for a general audience instead, like The Blank Slate.
September 20, 2017
This collection of academic papers by one of my favorite psychologists was mind-blowing. Very advanced concept matter in here, thus not the best choice for the reader searching for a leisure book. However, unlike some of the books I have read in the past (Malcolm Gladwell rings a bell), the author doesn't advertise this read as a leisure book for the popular audience. It was sometimes challenging to understand the ideas presented, as I have only meandered into the deep realm of psychology on my own time and this is written for the purpose of expert study by an expert himself. However the ideas explored could be really interesting to anyone who enjoys Steven Pinker's more foundational or "entry level" books for the lack of a better term; the behind the scenes research that was used later in his larger publications was interesting to study here in a scholarly format. If you are brave enough, prepare yourself for a hard read but overall a great learning experience from this diamond in the rough of a book.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
October 17, 2024
Like all of Pinker's works, I wanted to love it. But some of the topics and articles are quite dense for the general, even educated public. It feels like there was a point in Pinker's writing, somewhere around The Blank Slate and How the Mind Works, where he moved from writing just for academics and to the educated public, and unfortunately this collect of articles feels like it's from before that time.
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July 6, 2025People are embraced or condemned according to their beliefs, so one function of the mind may be to hold beliefs that bring the belief-holder the greatest number of allies, protectors, or disciples, rather than beliefs that are most likely to be true.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
September 27, 2019
I struggled through the book. Some of the articles I had to reread a couple of times to understand. A more seasoned reader of Pinker would probably appreciate it more than I did.
June 24, 2021
Pinker and his damn 5 stars
November 15, 2015
This book of scholarly papers by my favorite psychologist was INTENSE. Extremely erudite stuff here, not for a popular audience. But unlike some books I've read recently (a-HEM, 'Anxious' by Dr. LaDoux) this work does not market itself as popular reading. It was very difficult to understand some of it, as I'm merely starting out on my psychology degree and this is written by and for experts, but the topics covered were of intense interest to anyone who enjoys Pinker's bibliography of more approachable works, and the science behind his more famous tomes was certainly worthy of a read. Know what you're getting into, but this is an under-appreciated gem.
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June 16, 2014this book is just way too long and daunting for me to tackle and complete. it consists of selected journal articles from stephen pinker's scientific career, and as interesting as it seems and sounds, i've been reading or attempting to read it for quite a while and making little progress as i always turn to easier options. i love stephen pinker's ideas, but i have a hard time getting through his actual work.
March 26, 2015
Excellent: concise, easy to read, covering many subjects, the perfect source book. I find myself using this often. Typical Pinker!
August 22, 2023
Paul Bloom ile yazdığı "Natural Language and Natural Selection" + Fodor'a cevap niyetine yazdığı "So, How Does the Mind Work?" başlıklı makaleler berrak bir zihnin mahsulleri.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews