Language is not a cultural artifact that we learn the way we learn to tell time or how the federal government works. Instead, it is a distinct piece of the biological makeup of our brains. Language is a complex, specialized skill, which develops in the child spontaneously, without conscious effort or formal instruction, is deployed without awareness of its underlying logic, is qualitatively the same in every individual, and is distinct from more general abilities to process information or behave intelligently.
Psychologists
Steven Pinker
Canadian-American cognitive psychologist, psycholinguist, and public intellectual (born 1954). Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard. Across nine general-audience books — including The Language Instinct (1994), How the Mind Works (1997), The Blank Slate (2002), The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011), and Enlightenment Now (2018) — he has carried evolutionary psychology and Enlightenment humanism to a vast global readership. He is also one of the most contested living intellectuals: the 2006 Epstein-defense letter, a 2020 LSA open letter seeking his removal, archaeological pushback on Better Angels, and the gender-essentialism debates have all kept him at the center of academic controversy.
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Steven Pinker's Other Quotes
Believe it or not — and I know that most people do not — violence has declined over long stretches of time, and today we may be living in the most peaceable era in our species's existence.
The mind is a system of organs of computation, designed by natural selection to solve the kinds of problems our ancestors faced in their foraging way of life.
Reason, science, humanism, and progress: the Enlightenment values are more relevant today than ever.
The blank slate doctrine, holding that the human mind has no inherent structure and is shaped entirely by experience, is itself a kind of myth — a politically convenient story rather than a scientific finding.
Related Quotes
Behavior as we shall observe it always seems to have the character of getting-to or getting-from a specific goal-object, or goal-situation.
-- Edward C. Tolman
Behavior is shaped largely by the exigencies of a given situation, and the notion that individuals act in consistent ways across different situations, reflecting the influence of underlying personality traits, is a myth.
-- Walter Mischel
The mind is a system of organs of computation, designed by natural selection to solve the kinds of problems our ancestors faced in their foraging way of life.
-- Steven Pinker
Memory, like liberty, is a fragile thing.
-- Elizabeth Loftus
I have been called an authority on the malleability of memory. ... I warn those involved in legal proceedings that memory is malleable, that it can be written over, that it is like a vast blackboard onto which we can write and erase infinitely.
-- Elizabeth Loftus
When an axon of cell A is near enough to excite cell B and repeatedly or persistently takes part in firing it, some growth process or metabolic change takes place in one or both cells such that A's efficiency, as one of the cells firing B, is increased.
-- Donald O. Hebb