About Steven Pinker
Canadian-American cognitive psychologist and linguist (b. 1954), Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard. Pinker's research spans language acquisition, visual cognition, and the evolution of the mind. His popular books — including The Language Instinct (1994), How the Mind Works (1997), and The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011) — make the case that human nature is both real and broadly benign. The Blank Slate (2002) is his most politically contested work, generating fierce debate from feminist, social-constructionist, and progressive critics who argue he misrepresents or oversimplifies the science.
Books by Steven Pinker
Enlightenment Now
The most prominent contemporary defense of the Enlightenment — reason, science, humanism, and progress — and a direct rebuttal to the pessimism of thinkers from the Frankfurt School to today's populists. Marshalling rea…
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The most rigorous scientific challenge to blank-slate social constructivism — the assumption, common to much feminist and socialist theory, that human nature is infinitely malleable and that observed sex differences or…
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