In the area of language acquisition, for example, some ( such as Steven Pinker ) have argued that specific information containing universal grammatical rules must be contained in the genes, whereas others ( such as Jeffrey Elman and colleagues in Rethinking Innateness ) have argued that Pinker's claims are biologically unrealistic.

In 1990, Steven Pinker and Paul Bloom published their paper " Natural Language & Natural Selection " which strongly argued for an adaptationist approach to language origins.

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.

Cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker has argued that the game theoretic advantages of ethical behavior support the idea that morality is " out there " in a certain sense ( as part of the evolutionary fitness landscape ).

Pinker writes that if everyone was equal regarding abilities it can be argued that it is only necessary to give everyone equal opportunity.

Pinker argued that Fodor had attacked straw man positions, wryly suggesting a possible title for his riposte as No One Ever Said it Did.

In 2006 Steven Pinker wrote an unfavorable review of Lakoff's book Whose Freedom?

Pinker portrayed Lakoff's arguments as " cognitive relativism, in which mathematics, science, and philosophy are beauty contests between rival frames rather than attempts to characterize the nature of reality ".

Some natural languages have become naturally " standardized " by children's natural tendency to correct for illogical grammar structures in their parents ' language, which can be seen in the development of pidgin languages into creole languages ( as explained by Steven Pinker in The Language Instinct ), but this is not the case in many languages, including constructed languages such as Esperanto, where strict rules are in place as an attempt to consciously remove such irregularities.

Strunk and White have been proven wrong on this point by logical analysis of quantification in natural language ( like Pinker following Lewis and others above ) — distributive expressions are neither exclusively singular nor exclusively plural, they are typically indeterminate in number.

" Many properties of the brain are genetically organized, and don't depend on information coming in from the senses .”-Steven Pinker

Linguist Steven Pinker goes further and argues that traditional grammar prescriptions regarding the use of singular " they " are themselves grammatically incorrect:

In his book, The Language Instinct, Steven Pinker proposes the following: if we are not born with language, how can we be engineered to think in words alone?

Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker writes that " some categories really are social constructions: they exist only because people tacitly agree to act as if they exist.

Even though they are often described in the literature as " elfin-faced ", Steven Pinker says in The Language Instinct that to him they often appear " more like Mick Jagger ".

By calling language an instinct, Pinker means that it is not a human invention in the sense that metalworking and even writing are.

Steven Pinker acknowledged that he had " not plowed through MacDonald's trilogy and therefore run the complementary risks of being unfair to his arguments, and of not refuting them resoundingly enough to distance them from my own views on evolutionary psychology ", but states that MacDonald's theses are unable to pass the threshold of attention-worthiness or peer-approval, and contain a " consistently invidious portrayal of Jews, couched in value-laden, disparaging language.

As Pinker illustrates in his book the " The Language Instinct ", claims that chimpanzees can acquire language are exaggerated and rest on very limited or specious data.

According to psychologist and cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, our experiences of the world are represented in our minds as mental images.

Referencing a Gladwell reporting mistake, Pinker criticizes his lack of expertise: " I will call this the Igon Value Problem: when a writer ’ s education on a topic consists in interviewing an expert, he is apt to offer generalizations that are banal, obtuse or flat wrong.

Some scientists, including MIT linguist Noam Chomsky and cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, are skeptical about claims made for great ape language research.

Pinker claims these fears are non sequiturs, and that the blank slate view of human nature would actually be a greater threat if it were true.

Psychologist David P. Barash wrote that " Pinker ’ s thinking and writing are first-rate … maybe even better than that.

The title, Words and Rules, refers to a model Pinker believes best represents how words are represented in the mind.

Pinker also challenges Wright's core thesis, echoing the case made by Stephen Jay Gould, that human-like organisms are no more than a coincidence:

In particular, McClelland and collaborator David Rumelhart are known for their debate with Steven Pinker and Alan Prince.

However, other evidence from developmental studies has been presented ( most famously by Pinker, 1994, pp. 37 – 43 ) as supporting a language module, namely the purported dissociation between Specific Language Impairment ( SLI ), where language is disrupted whilst other mental abilities are not ( van der Lely, 2005 ), and Williams Syndrome ( WS ) where language is said to be spared despite severe mental deficits ( Bellugi et al.

According to Pinker, physiological changes in the brain are conceivable causes of the terminus of the critical period for language acquisition.

Advisors to the Secular Coalition for America are Woody Kaplan, chair ; Rob Boston ; Daniel Dennett ; Richard Dawkins ; Bruce Flamm ; Sam Harris ; Jeff Hawkins ; Susan Jacoby ; Wendy Kaminer ; Michael Newdow ; Massimo Pigliucci ; Steven Pinker ; Salman Rushdie ; Ellery Schempp ; Todd Stiefel ; and Julia Sweeney.

According to Steven Pinker, the Kivunjo language has 16 noun classes including classes for precise locations and for general locales, classes for clusters or pairs of objects and classes for the objects that come in pairs or clusters, and classes for abstract qualities.

Still, detractors such as Eric Lenneberg, Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker have criticized him for not being sufficiently clear in his formulation of how he meant language influences thought, and for not providing actual proof of his assumptions.

Universalist scholars such as Steven Pinker often see Malotki's study as a final refutation of Whorf's claim about Hopi, whereas relativist scholars such as John A Lucy and Penny Lee have criticized Malotki's study for mischaracterizing Whorf's claims and for forcing Hopi grammar into a pregiven model of analysis that doesn't fit the data.

From 1982 until 2003, Pinker taught at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, and eventually became the director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, taking a one-year sabbatical at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1995-96.

On May 13, 2006, Pinker received the American Humanist Association's Humanist of the Year award for his contributions to public understanding of human evolution.

Pinker has served on the editorial boards of journals such as Cognition, Daedalus, and PLOS One, and on the advisory boards of institutions for scientific research ( e. g., the Paul Allen Institute for Brain Science ), free speech ( e. g., the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education ), the popularization of science ( e. g., the World Science Festival and the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry ), peace ( e. g., the Peace Research Endowment ), and secular humanism ( e. g., the Freedom from Religion Foundation and the Secular Coalition of America

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.

David Shenk has criticized Pinker for an article he wrote in The New York Times which addressed the nature versus nurture debate.

" Pinker responded to a question about epigenetics as a possibility for the decline in violence in a lecture for the BBC World Service.

Webb was a stickler for accurate details, and Dragnet used many authentic touches, such as the LAPD's actual radio call sign ( KMA367 ), and the names of many real department officials, such as Ray Pinker and Lee Jones of the crime lab or Chief of Detectives ( and later LAPD Chief from 1967 – 69 ) Thad Brown.

Popular names in the discipline of psychology include George A. Miller, James McClelland, Philip Johnson-Laird, and Steven Pinker.

This stems from Gould's long-running public debate with E. O. Wilson and other evolutionary biologists over human sociobiology and its descendant evolutionary psychology, which Gould and Richard Lewontin opposed, but which Dennett advocated, together with Dawkins and Steven Pinker.

* Pinker, S. ( 1994 ) The language instinct, HarperCollins, New York.

" According to Steven Pinker, EP is " not a single theory but a large set of hypotheses " and a term which " has also come to refer to a particular way of applying evolutionary theory to the mind, with an emphasis on adaptation, gene-level selection, and modularity.

* Pinker, Steven ( 1994 ) The Language Instinct, William Morrow and Company.

Jaynes's theory has been influential to philosophers such as Daniel Dennett, psychologists such as Tim Crow and Steven Pinker, and psychiatrists such as Henry Nasrallah.

* Dronkers, N. F., Pinker, S. & Damasio, A .: Language and the Aphasias.

On the other hand, Steven Pinker has observed that mondegreen mishearings tend to be less plausible than the original lyrics, and that once a listener has " locked in " to a particular misheard interpretation of a song's lyrics, it can remain unquestioned, even when that plausibility becomes strained.

Pinker gives the example of a student " stubbornly " mishearing the chorus to I'm Your Venus as " I'm Your Penis ," and being surprised that the song was allowed on the radio.

Steven Pinker has described two logical fallacies.

One tradition of interpretation exemplified by his critics such as Eric Lenneberg, Max Black and Steven Pinker attributes him a very strong view of linguistic determinism, according to which commensuration between conceptual schemes and translation between languages is impossible.

Steven Pinker in The Language Instinct ridiculed this example, claiming that this was a failing of human insight rather than language.

For example, Steven Pinker argues in his book The Language Instinct that thought is independent of language, that language is itself meaningless in any fundamental way to human thought, and that human beings do not even think in " natural " language, i. e. any language that we actually communicate in ; rather, we think in a meta-language, preceding any natural language, called " mentalese.