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Pinker, Steven

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Pinker

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Pinker, Steven
Author's Publications: search.filters.isAuthorOfPublication.59343daf-d04f-4d30-842f-c5bc2fe1a5b3

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Now showing 1 - 10 of 33
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    The Cognitive Niche: Coevolution of Intelligence, Sociality, and Language
    (2010) Pinker, Steven
    Although Darwin insisted that human intelligence could be fully explained by the theory of evolution, the codiscoverer of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace, claimed that abstract intelligence was of no use to ancestral humans and could only be explained by intelligent design. Wallace's apparent paradox can be dissolved with two hypotheses about human cognition. One is that intelligence is an adaptation to a knowledge-using, socially interdependent lifestyle, the "cognitive niche." This embraces the ability to overcome the evolutionary fixed defenses of plants and animals by applications of reasoning, including weapons, traps, coordinated driving of game, and detoxification of plants. Such reasoning exploits intuitive theories about different aspects of the world, such as objects, forces, paths, places, states, substances, and other people's beliefs and desires. The theory explains many zoologically unusual traits in Homo sapiens, including our complex toolkit, wide range of habitats and diets, extended childhoods and long lives, hypersociality, complex mating, division into cultures, and language (which multiplies the benefit of knowledge because know-how is useful not only for its practical benefits but as a trade good with others, enhancing the evolution of cooperation). The second hypothesis is that humans possess an ability of metaphorical abstraction, which allows them to coopt faculties that originally evolved for physical problem-solving and social coordination, apply them to abstract subject matter, and combine them productively. These abilities can help explain the emergence of abstract cognition without supernatural or exotic evolutionary forces and are in principle testable by analyses of statistical signs of selection in the human genome.
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    So How Does the Mind Work?
    (2005) Pinker, Steven
    In my book How the Mind Works, I defended the theory that the human mind is a naturally selected system of organs of computation. Jerry Fodor claims that 'the mind doesn't work that way'(in a book with that title) because (1) Turing Machines cannot duplicate humans' ability to perform abduction (inference to the best explanation); (2) though a massively modular system could succeed at abduction, such a system is implausible on other grounds; and (3) evolution adds nothing to our understanding of the mind. In this review I show that these arguments are flawed. First, my claim that the mind is a computational system is different from the claim Fodor attacks (that the mind has the architecture of a Turing Machine); therefore the practical limitations of Turing Machines are irrelevant. Second, Fodor identifies abduction with the cumulative accomplishments of the scientific community over millennia. This is very different from the accomplishments of human common sense, so the supposed gap between human cognition and computational models may be illusory. Third, my claim about biological specialization, as seen in organ systems, is distinct from Fodor's own notion of encapsulated modules, so the limitations of the latter are irrelevant. Fourth, Fodor's arguments dismissing of the relevance of evolution to psychology are unsound.
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    Computation of Semantic Number from Morphological Information
    (2005) Berent, Iris; Pinker, Steven; Tzelgov, Joseph; Bibi, Uri; Goldfarb, Liat
    The distinction between singular and plural enters into linguistic phenomena such as morphology, lexical semantics, and agreement and also must interface with perceptual and conceptual systems that assess numerosity in the world. Three experiments examine the computation of semantic number for singulars and plurals from the morphological properties of visually presented words. In a Stroop-like task, Hebrew speakers were asked to determine the number of words presented on a computer screen (one or two) while ignoring their contents. People took longer to respond if the number of words was incongruent with their morphological number (e.g., they were slower to determine that one word was on the screen if it was plural, and in some conditions, that two words were on the screen if they were singular, compared to neutral letter strings), suggesting that the extraction of number from words is automatic and yields a representation comparable to the one computed by the perceptual system. In many conditions, the effect of number congruency occurred only with plural nouns, not singulars, consistent with the suggestion from linguistics that words lacking a plural affix are not actually singular in their semantics but unmarked for number.
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    Why It Is Hard to Find Genes Associated With Social Science Traits: Theoretical and Empirical Considerations
    (American Public Health Association, 2013) Chabris, Christopher F.; Lee, James J.; Benjamin, Daniel J.; Beauchamp, Jonathan P.; Glaeser, Edward; Borst, Gregoire; Pinker, Steven; Laibson, David
    OBJECTIVES: We explain why traits of interest to behavioral scientists may have a genetic architecture featuring hundreds or thousands of loci with tiny individual effects rather than a few with large effects and why such an architecture makes it difficult to find robust associations between traits and genes. METHODS: We conducted a genome-wide association study at 2 sites, Harvard University and Union College, measuring more than 100 physical and behavioral traits with a sample size typical of candidate gene studies. We evaluated predictions that alleles with large effect sizes would be rare and most traits of interest to social science are likely characterized by a lack of strong directional selection. We also carried out a theoretical analysis of the genetic architecture of traits based on R.A. Fisher's geometric model of natural selection and empirical analyses of the effects of selection bias and phenotype measurement stability on the results of genetic association studies. RESULTS: Although we replicated several known genetic associations with physical traits, we found only 2 associations with behavioral traits that met the nominal genome-wide significance threshold, indicating that physical and behavioral traits are mainly affected by numerous genes with small effects. CONCLUSIONS: The challenge for social science genomics is the likelihood that genes are connected to behavioral variation by lengthy, nonlinear, interactive causal chains, and unraveling these chains requires allying with personal genomics to take advantage of the potential for large sample sizes as well as continuing with traditional epidemiological studies.
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    Author's Reply to Review of Histories of Violence
    (University of London, 2012) Pinker, Steven
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    Why The World is More Peaceful
    (Daniel Mark Redmond, 2012) Pinker, Steven
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    What of Human Nature in The Art of the Deal?
    (2018-03-08) Pinker, Steven
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    George A. Miller (1920–2012)
    (American Psychological Association (APA), 2013) Pinker, Steven
    Presents an obituary for George A. Miller (1920—2012). Miller ranks among the most important psychologists of the 20th century. In addition to writing one of the best known papers in the history of psychology (“The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information,” published in Psychological Review in 1956), Miller also fomented the cognitive revolution, invented psycholinguistics and cognitive psychology, imported powerful ideas from the theories of information, communication, grammar, semantics, and artificial intelligence, and left us a sparkling oeuvre that proves that a rigorous scientist needn’t write in soggy prose. Honors rained down on Miller. APA gave him the Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions (1963), the American Psychological Foundation Gold Medal Award for Life Achievement in Psychological Science (1990), the William James Book Award (1992, for The Science of Words), and the Award for Lifetime Contributions to Psychology (2003), and named a prize after him, as did the Cognitive Neuroscience Society. Miller was also honored by the Association for Psychological Science and the American Speech and Hearing Association. In 2000, he won the John P. McGovern Award in the Behavioral Sciences from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and in 1991, the National Medal of Science, the country’s highest scientific honor.
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    The Decline of War and Conceptions of Human Nature
    (Wiley, 2013) Pinker, Steven
    Many observers are skeptical of the evidence that war has declined, because they think that a decline in war requires an unrealistic, romantic theory of human nature. In fact it is compatible with a hardheaded view of human violent inclinations which is firmly rooted in evolutionary biology. Homo sapiens evolved with violent tendencies, but they are triggered by particular circumstances; they are not a hydraulic urge that must periodically be discharged. And though our species evolved with motives that can erupt in violence, it also evolved motives that can inhibit violence, including self-control, empathy, a sense of fairness, and open-ended cognitive mechanisms that can devise technologies for reducing violence.