Article on Steven Pinker

The Toronto Star has just published a very introductory article about Steven Pinker and his ideas about the psychology of language. Pinker delivered a lecture in Toronto on January 24, as part of 15th anniversary celebrations for the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.

The article is very uncritical and introductory, but it is interesting.

Of thought and metaphor, by Peter Calamai for Toronto Star.

Here are the first few lines.

“Asking Steven Pinker, Harvard researcher and best-selling author, to pass the salt turns out to be very educational. Not about sodium and high blood pressure, but about how we use language and what that reveals about human nature.”

Pinker specializes in the psychology of language and also in shaking up the scientific establishment. Five years ago he ignited an academic firestorm with the best-selling book The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, which argued that innate behavioural differences exist among individuals and between men and women.

The 52-year-old cognitive scientist, born and raised in Montreal, is again challenging conventional wisdom with The Stuff of Thought, a book about language due out in September. He’ll deliver a lecture in Toronto on the topic Wednesday, as part of 15th anniversary celebrations for the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.

“We have to do two things with language. We’ve got to convey a message and we’ve got to negotiate what kind of social relationship we have with someone,” Pinker says in a telephone interview from his home in Cambridge, Mass.

Read the rest of the article…