Steven Pinker: Biography, Theory And Main Contributions
Steven Pinker is a linguist, psychologist, and writer known primarily for his role in disseminating ideas related to evolutionary psychology, communication, visual perception and cognition, and the computational theory of mind, as well as for his own theories about the development of language and the decline of violence.
In this article We will analyze the theory and contributions of Steven Pinker, focusing on their perspectives on communication, human nature, and the decline of violence. To begin, we will briefly review his biography and his professional career.
Steven Pinker was born in Montreal in 1954 into a Jewish family that had emigrated to Canada from Poland and what is now Moldova. He received his doctorate in Experimental Psychology from Harvard University in 1979; His tutor was Stephen Kosslyn, a prominent author in the fields of cognitive psychology and neuroscience.
Later it was researcher and professor at Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, often known as “MIT.” Between 1994 and 1999 he was co-director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at this renowned institution.
Currently Pinker is a professor of psychology at Harvard University and continues his work as a theorist, researcher, writer and science communicator. He is also a relevant figure in the press and frequently participates in conferences and debates on various topics related to science and human beings in general.
Contributions, publications and merits
Pinker has carried out numerous publications and research on visual perception, psycholinguistics and interpersonal relationships which have been awarded by very prominent institutions, including the National Academy of Sciences, the American Psychological Association and the Cognitive Neuroscience Society.
He has also written 14 books on these topics and human nature in general, with emphasis on cognitive and evolutionary perspectives. The most celebrated are “The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language,” “How the Mind Works,” “The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature,” and “The Decline of Violence and Its Implications.”
Theories of communication and the human being
At the beginning of his professional career Pinker carried out research on the development and characteristics of language in children. Her results led him to publicly support Noam Chomsky’s theory, which states that human beings have innate brain abilities that allow language understanding
Pinker’s methodology at this time was based on studying the behavior of people and going back in phylogenetic evolution in order to explain the development of brain functions. Using this method he developed hypotheses about language and other phenomena, such as three-dimensional vision and logical reasoning.
According to Pinker, the innate capacity of human beings for language depends fundamentally on two cognitive processes: memorization of words and their manipulation through grammatical rules s, equally learned. These biologicalist approaches have received criticism focused on moral or philosophical aspects.
This author generally defends the idea that genes determine a significant proportion of human behavior. Although he has stated that he identifies with egalitarian feminism, he has been criticized for his assertions about the existence of biological differences between people of different ethnicities, as well as between men and women.
The decline of violence
In his popular book “The Decline of Violence and Its Implications” Pinker states that, from a proportional and historical point of view, the frequency of violent behavior has tended to decrease worldwide, especially in the last two centuries. In this work he explores the widespread perception that violence has become more present today.
According to Pinker, the decline in violence began with the rise of the states, characterized by obtaining a monopoly on behaviors of this type, while most individuals were punished through the use of the law. This would have allowed a large number of people to live together with a lower risk of murder.
Later, factors such as the expansion of trade, the humanitarian revolution associated with the Enlightenment movement, the rise of cosmopolitanism or the rejection of slavery further contributed to the decrease in the relative number of violent behaviors.
Pinker suggests that The experience of the two World Wars was fundamental in the decline of violence that occurred during the 20th century. He also cites as relevant variables globalization, movements for the rights of minorities and non-human animals, as well as a supposed decrease in the weight of ideologies.
This author attributes the common perception that violence is increasingly frequent to confirmation bias and affirms that we have entered the era he calls “the Long Peace.” Various authors have criticized these ideas, arguing that they promote a lack of concern about violence and war conflicts and interpret numerical data in a reductionist way.
