Steven Pinker - The Language Instinct and other works (17 books)
STEVEN PINKER (b. 1954) is a Canadian-American cognitive psychologist, psycholinguist, popular science author and public intellectual. His research covers a variety of topics in psychology and cognitive science, including common knowledge (things that everyone knows everyone knows), visual cognition, language acquisition, emotion, the moral sense, rationality, and trends in violence. He is an advocate of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind.
Pinker's early studies on the linguistic behaviour of children led him to endorse Noam Chomsky’s assertion that humans possess an innate facility for understanding language. Eventually Pinker concluded that this facility arose as an evolutionary adaptation and expressed this conclusion in his first popular book for a general audience, THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT: HOW THE MIND CREATES LANGUAGE (1994). The sequel, HOW THE MIND WORKS (1997), expounded a scientific method that Pinker termed “reverse engineering” which involved analyzing human behaviour in an effort to understand how the brain developed through the process of evolution. It earned a nomination for the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction.
In WORDS AND RULES (1999) Pinker offered an analysis of the cognitive mechanisms that make language possible. While his work was received enthusiastically in some circles, many of his colleagues, including Stephen Jay Gould, felt that the data on natural selection was still insufficient to support all his claims and that other possible influences on the brain’s development existed. Pinker directly replied to critics of his evolutionary approach in THE BLANK SLATE (2002), also a Pulitzer Prize finalist, in which he dismissed tabula rasa notions of human mental development, citing a large body of research indicative of the determinist role played by genes.
Pinker later illustrated the manner in which the structure and semantics of language reflect the human perception of reality in THE STUFF OF THOUGHT (2007). Drawing on a range of psychological and historical data, THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE (2011) argued that violence in human societies has generally steadily declined over time, and identified 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. ENLIGHTENMENT NOW (2018) elaborated this argument by using social science data to show a general improvement of the human condition over recent history brought by reason, science and humanism. The nature and importance of reason was further explored in his most recent book RATIONALITY: WHAT IT IS, WHY IT SEEMS SCARCE, WHY IT MATTERS (2021).
In addition to more than 100 unitemized academic papers (all PDF), the following books are in ePUB and/or PDF format as noted:
* Better Angels of Our Nature (Penguin/Viking, 2012) – ePUB + PDF
* The Blank Slate (Penguin, 2016) – ePUB
* Do Humankind's Best Days Lie Ahead? (Anansi, 2016) – ePUB
* Enlightenment Now (Penguin, 2019) – ePUB
* How the Mind Works (Norton, 1997) – ePUB
* The Language Instinct (HarperCollins, 2007) – ePUB
* Language Learnability and Development (Harvard, 1996) – PDF
* Language, Cognition, and Human Nature (Oxford, 2013) – PDF
* Learnability and Cognition (MIT, 2013) – ePUB + PDF
* Rationality: What It Is, ... Why It Matters (Viking, 2021) – ePUB
* Sense of Style: The Denial of Human Nature (Penguin, 2015) – ePUB
* Seven Words You Cant Say on Television (Penguin, 2008) – ePUB
* Stuff of Thought: Language as Window... (Penguin, 2008) – ePUB + PDF
* Words and Rules: Ingredients of Language (Basic, 2015) – ePUB + PDF
== EDITOR ==
* Connections and Symbols [with (with Mehler] (MIT, 1988) – PDF
* Lexical and Conceptual Semantics [with Levin] (Blackwell, 1992) – PDF
* Visual Cognition (MIT, 1986) – PDF
