Steven Pinker

His grandparents emigrated to Canada from Poland and Romania in 1926, and owned a small necktie factory in Montreal.

His father, Harry, worked in real estate and was a lawyer.

His mother, Roslyn, was originally a homemaker, but later became a guidance counsellor and a high-school vice-principal.

In an interview, Pinker described his mother as "very intellectual" and "an intense reader [who] knows everything".

His brother, Robert, worked for the Canadian government for several decades as an administrator and a policy analyst, while his sister, Susan Pinker, is a psychologist and writer who authored The Sexual Paradox and The Village Effect.

Susan is also a columnist for The Wall Street Journal.

Steven Arthur Pinker (born September 18, 1954) is a Canadian-American cognitive psychologist, psycholinguist, popular science author, and public intellectual.

He is an advocate of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind.

Pinker is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University.

He specializes in visual cognition and developmental linguistics, and his experimental topics include mental imagery, shape recognition, visual attention, regularity and irregularity in language, the neural basis of words and grammar, and childhood language development.

Other experimental topics he works on are the psychology of cooperation and of communication, including emotional expression, euphemism, innuendo, and how people use "common knowledge", a term of art meaning the shared understanding in which two or more people know something, know that the other one knows, know the other one knows that they know, and so on.

He has written two technical books that proposed a general theory of language acquisition and applied it to children's learning of verbs.

Pinker was born in Montreal, Quebec, in 1954, to a middle-class secular Jewish family in an English-speaking community.

Pinker graduated from Dawson College in 1973.

He graduated from McGill University in 1976 with a Bachelor of Arts in psychology, then did doctoral studies in experimental psychology at Harvard University under Stephen Kosslyn, receiving a PhD in 1979.

He did research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for a year, then became a professor at Harvard and later, Stanford University.

Pinker married Nancy Etcoff in 1980 and they divorced in 1992; he married again in 1995 and again divorced.

From 1982 until 2003 Pinker taught at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, was the co-director of the Center for Cognitive Science (1985–1994), and eventually became the director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience (1994–1999), taking a one-year sabbatical at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1995–96.

In particular, his work with Alan Prince published in 1989 critiqued the connectionist model of how children acquire the past tense of English verbs, positing that children use default rules, such as adding -ed to make regular forms, sometimes in error, but are obliged to learn irregular forms one by one.

Pinker is the author of nine books for general audiences.

The Language Instinct (1994), How the Mind Works (1997), Words and Rules (2000), The Blank Slate (2002), and The Stuff of Thought (2007) describe aspects of psycholinguistics and cognitive science, and include accounts of his own research, positing that language is an innate behavior shaped by natural selection and adapted to our communication needs.

Since 2003 he has been serving as the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard and between 2008 and 2013 he also held the title of Harvard College Professor in recognition of his dedication to teaching.

He currently gives lectures as a visiting professor at the New College of the Humanities, a private college in London.

In 2004, Pinker was named in Times "The 100 Most Influential People in the World Today", and in the years 2005, 2008, 2010, and 2011 in Foreign Policys list of "Top 100 Global Thinkers".

His third wife, whom he married in 2007, is the novelist and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein.

He has two stepdaughters, the novelist Yael Goldstein Love and the poet Danielle Blau.

Pinker adopted atheism at 13, but at various times was a serious "cultural Jew."

Pinker is an avid cyclist.

Pinker's research on visual cognition, begun in collaboration with his thesis adviser, Stephen Kosslyn, showed that mental images represent scenes and objects as they appear from a specific vantage point (rather than capturing their intrinsic three-dimensional structure), and thus correspond to the neuroscientist David Marr's theory of a "two-and-a-half-dimensional sketch."

He also showed that this level of representation is used in visual attention, and in object recognition (at least for asymmetrical shapes), contrary to Marr's theory that recognition uses viewpoint-independent representations.

In psycholinguistics, Pinker became known early in his career for promoting computational learning theory as a way to understand language acquisition in children.

Pinker was the chair of the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary from 2008 to 2018.

Pinker's book The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011) posits that violence in human societies has generally declined over time, and identifies six major trends and five historical forces of this decline, the most important being the humanitarian revolution brought by the Enlightenment and its associated cultivation of reason.

Pinker was also included in Prospect Magazine's top 10 "World Thinkers" in 2013.

He has won awards from the American Psychological Association, the National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Institution, the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, and the American Humanist Association.

He delivered the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh in 2013.

He has served on the editorial boards of a variety of journals, and on the advisory boards of several institutions.

Pinker's The Sense of Style (2014) is a general language-oriented style guide.

Enlightenment Now (2018) further argues that the human condition has generally improved over recent history because of reason, science, and humanism.

The nature and importance of reason is also discussed in his next book Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters (2021).