Fifty-three-year-old Steven Pinker may look like a rock star, but he is actually a linguistics explorer, hunting around the sentences and syntax of human language for clues (he calls them “rabbit holes”) to the inner world of the human brain. His favorite rabbit hole is verbs—what they mean, how they are used in sentences, and how, according to his latest book, The Stuff of Thought, kids “figure it all out.” Why so much attention to verbs? Pinker confesses in part it’s simply because he finds them fascinating. As one of his colleagues remarked, “They really are your little friends, aren’t they?”
For more than a quarter century, Pinker has been a driving force in linguistics theory, analyzing language in labs at MIT, Stanford University, and Harvard University, where he is currently the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology. At MIT he studied colleague Noam Chomsky’s theory of an “innate grammar,” testing to what extent language is biologically programmed. His research suggests that language is an instinct, an evolutionary adaptation that is partly hardwired into our brains and partly learned. This work led Pinker to develop his theory of the evolution of the mind and the source of language. He wrote about his work in four popular books: The Language Instinct (1994), How the Mind Works (1997), Words and Rules (1999), and The Blank Slate (2002). Although his books present scientific research, they have twice been finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in part because they’re so much fun to read, with Pinker’s creative weaving of movie dialogue, snippets from novels, news headlines, Yiddishisms, even bits from comic strips.
In his books Pinker argues that the brain at birth is not simply a blank slate to be shaped by culture and experience. Rather, it comes programmed with many behavioral dispositions and talents. In other words, human nature is to some extent innate and shaped by natural selection. Not surprisingly, Pinker’s ideas have been at the center of some heated debates, most notably a recent controversy at Harvard, in which university president Lawrence Summers offered innate gender differences as a possible explanation for the dearth of women in the sciences.
