Steven Pinker - Research and Theory

Research and Theory

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. 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.

In 1989 Pinker and Alan Prince published an influential critique of a connectionist model of the acquisition of the past tense (a textbook problem in language acquisition), followed by a series of studies of how people use and acquire the past tense. This included a monograph on children’s regularization of irregular forms, and a popular 1999 book, Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language, in which he argued that regular and irregular phenomena were products of computation and memory lookup, respectively, and that language could be understood as an interaction between the two.

The Language Instinct (1994) was the first of several books that combined cognitive science with behavioral genetics and evolutionary psychology. In it he introduced the science of language and popularized Noam Chomsky's theory that language is an innate faculty of mind, with the twist that this faculty evolved by natural selection as a Darwinian adaptation for communication (both ideas remain controversial; see below). Two other books, How the Mind Works (1997) and The Blank Slate (2002), broadly surveyed the mind and defended the idea of a complex human nature which comprises many mental faculties that are adaptive (and is an ally of Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins in many disputes surrounding adaptationism). 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.

In 2011 Pinker published The Better Angels of Our Nature, which argued that violence has decreased over multiple scales of time and magnitude, including tribal warfare, homicide, cruel punishments, child abuse, animal cruelty, domestic violence, lynching, pogroms, and international and civil wars. He tried to explain these declines as a change in the interaction between violent impulses (such as dominance, sadism, and revenge) and peaceful impulses (such as self-control, empathy, and reason) brought on by historical forces such as government, trade, and literacy.