Steven Pinker

Steven Arthur Pinker is a Canadian-American cognitive psychologist and psycholinguist, born September 18, 1954, who serves as the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. He is known for his work on language and the mind, advocating for evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind, and for research on how children acquire language, particularly regular versus irregular verb forms, developed in part with Alan Prince. His popular science books have made him a prominent public intellectual, including The Language Instinct (1994), which argues that language is an innate faculty of mind shaped by natural selection, How the Mind Works (1997), The Blank Slate (2002), The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011), and Enlightenment Now (2018).