Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard. He is an experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, and science writer known for his spirited and wide-ranging explorations of language, mind, and human nature.

In addition to his research on visual cognition and language acquisition, he has written synthetic overviews of language (The Language Instinct, 1994) and the mind (How the Mind Works, 1997), using ideas from the computational theory of mind and evolutionary psychology. In his 2002 book The Blank Slate, he explored the moral, political, and emotional colorings of the concept of human nature. His most recent book, The Stuff of Thought, combines all these themes and uses language as a window into human thought, emotion, and social relationships.

He has won numerous prizes for his teaching, research, and books, and has been named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world today and one of Prospect and Foreign Policy’s 100 top public intellectuals.

Professor Pinker delivered the following address at the 2007 ASC conference.