Steven Arthur Pinker (born September 18, 1954)[2][3] is a Canadian-American cognitive psychologist, psycholinguist, popular science author, and public intellectual.

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

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

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.

[37] 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.

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

He wrote a tutorial review of the field followed by two books that advanced his own theory of language acquisition, and a series of experiments on how children acquire the passive, dative, and locative constructions.

Pinker argued that language depends on two things: the associative remembering of sounds and their meanings in words, and the use of rules to manipulate symbols for grammar.

He argued that this shows that irregular verb-forms in English have to be learnt and retrieved from memory individually, and that the children making these errors were predicting the regular "-ed" ending in an open-ended way by applying a mental rule.

Dershowitz included Pinker's opinion in a letter to the court during proceedings that resulted in a plea deal in which all federal sex trafficking charges against Epstein were dropped.

[45] In 2019, Pinker stated that he was unaware of the nature of the charges against Epstein, and that he engaged in an unpaid favor for his Harvard colleague Dershowitz, as he had regularly done.

Pinker states in his introduction that his ideas are "deeply influenced"[47] by Chomsky; he also lists scientists whom Chomsky influenced to "open up whole new areas of language study, from child development and speech perception to neurology and genetics"[47] – Eric Lenneberg, George Miller, Roger Brown, Morris Halle and Alvin Liberman.

By 2015, the linguistic nativist views of Pinker and Chomsky had a number of challenges on the grounds that they had incorrect core assumptions and were inconsistent with research evidence from psycholinguistics and child language acquisition.

In his 1996 book Impossible Minds, the machine intelligence researcher Igor Aleksander calls The Language Instinct excellent, and argues that Pinker presents a relatively soft claim for innatism, accompanied by a strong dislike of the 'Standard Social Sciences Model' or SSSM (Pinker's term), which supposes that development is purely dependent on culture.

Aleksander concludes that while he doesn't support the SSSM, "a cultural repository of language just seems the easy trick for an efficient evolutionary system armed with an iconic state machine to play.

Another major theme in Pinker's theories is that human cognition works, in part, by combinatorial symbol-manipulation, not just associations among sensory features, as in many connectionist models.

[57] The book's topic, the English past tense, is in Yang's view unglamorous, and Pinker's attempts at compromise risk being in no man's land between rival theories.

He sees language as being tied primarily to the capacity for logical reasoning, and speculates that human proclivity for music may be a spandrel – a feature not adaptive in its own right, but that has persisted through other traits that are more broadly practical, and thus selected for.

[67] Like most psycholinguists (but apparently unlike many school boards), I think it's essential for children to be taught to become aware of speech sounds and how they are coded in strings of letters.

[71][72][73] This and other aspects drew criticism, including the use of deaths per capita as a metric, Pinker's liberal humanism, the focus on Europe, the interpretation of historical data, and its image of indigenous people.

[81] He supports same-sex marriage, a universal basic income, the legalization of drugs, the taxation of carbon, and the abolition of capital punishment.

[83] However, Pinker has argued that the far-left has created an atmosphere of intellectual intolerance on college campuses and elsewhere, and helped form the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard to combat what he described as an epidemic of censorship at universities.

"[85] Pinker has sharply criticized social conservatives, such as former chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics Leon Kass, for opposing stem cell research, arguing that their moral views were mere expressions of disgust that were obstructing treatments that could save millions of lives.

Social commentators such as Ed West, author of The Diversity Illusion, consider Pinker important and daring in his willingness to confront taboos, as in The Blank Slate.

[91] In January 2009 Pinker wrote an article about the Personal Genome Project and its possible impact on the understanding of human nature in The New York Times.

[94] In a November 2009 article for The New York Times, Pinker wrote a mixed review of Malcolm Gladwell's essays, criticizing his analytical methods.

[98] Helga Vierich and Cathryn Townsend wrote a critical review of Pinker's sweeping "civilizational" explanations for patterns of human violence and warfare in response to a lecture he gave at Cambridge University in September 2015.

Pinker argued that Bhabha had perceived the causal relationship between Enlightenment thinking and these sources of suffering "backwards", responding in part that "The natural state of humanity, at least since the dawn of civilization, is poverty, disease, ignorance, exploitation, and violence (including slavery and imperial conquest).

"[101] In a 2019 story in Current Affairs, proprietor Nathan Robinson criticised Pinker, saying that he misrepresents his critics' arguments against his work.

[104] Pinker said in reply that through this letter, he, and more importantly, younger academics with less protection, were being threatened by "a regime of intimidation that constricts the theatre of ideas.