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}} Steven Arthur "Steve" Pinker (born September 18, 1954) is a Canadian-American cognitive scientist, psychologist, linguist, and popular science author. He is Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University,〔(Steven Pinker – About. Department of Psychology Harvard University ) Accessed 28 February 2010.〕 and is known for his advocacy of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind. Pinker's academic specializations are visual cognition and psycholinguistics. His experimental subjects include mental imagery, shape recognition, visual attention, children's language development, regular and irregular phenomena in language, the neural bases of words and grammar, and the psychology of cooperation and communication, including euphemism, innuendo, emotional expression, and common knowledge. He has written two technical books which proposed a general theory of language acquisition and applied it to children's learning of verbs. In particular, his work with Alan Prince published in 1989 critiqued the connectionist model of how children acquire the past tense of English verbs, arguing instead that children use default rules such as adding "-ed" to make regular forms, sometimes in error, but are obliged to learn irregular forms one by one. In his popular books, he has argued that the human faculty for language is an instinct, an innate behavior shaped by natural selection and adapted to our communication needs. He is the author of seven books for a general audience. Five of these, namely ''The Language Instinct'' (1994), ''How the Mind Works'' (1997), ''Words and Rules'' (2000), ''The Blank Slate'' (2002), and ''The Stuff of Thought'' (2007) describe aspects of the field of psycholinguistics or cognitive science, and include, among much else, accessible accounts of his own research. The sixth book, ''The Better Angels of Our Nature'' (2011), makes the case that violence in human societies has in general steadily declined with time, and identifies six major causes of this decline. His seventh book, ''The Sense of Style'' (2014), is intended as a general style guide that is informed by modern scientific and psychologically arguments on why so much of today's academic and popular writing is difficult for readers to understand, and suggestions for how to achieve a more comprehensible and unambiguous writing style in nonfiction contexts. Pinker has been named as one of the world's most influential intellectuals by various magazines. He has won awards from the American Psychological Association, the National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Institution, the Cognitive Neuroscience Society and the American Humanist Association. He has served on the editorial boards of a variety of journals, and on the advisory boards of several institutions. He has frequently participated in public debates on science and society and is a regular contributor to the online science and culture digest ''3 Quarks Daily''. ==Biography== Pinker was born in Montreal, Quebec, Pinker graduated from Dawson College in 1971. He received a Bachelor of Arts in psychology from McGill University in 1976, and earned his Doctorate of Philosophy in experimental psychology at Harvard University in 1979 under Stephen Kosslyn. He did research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for a year, after which he became an assistant professor at Harvard and then Stanford University. 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. As of 2003, he is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard; from 2008 to 2013 he also held the title of Harvard College Professor in recognition of his dedication to teaching. He currently gives lectures as a visiting professor at the New College of the Humanities, a private college in London.〔("The professoriate" ), New College of the Humanities, accessed 8 June 2011.〕〔("Professor Stephen Pinker" ), New College of the Humanities, accessed 4 November 2014.〕 About his Jewish background Pinker has said, "I was never religious in the theological sense ... I never outgrew my conversion to atheism at 13, but at various times was a serious cultural Jew."〔("Steven Pinker: the mind reader" by Ed Douglas ) ''The Guardian'' Accessed 3 February 2006.〕 As a teenager, he says he considered himself an anarchist until he witnessed civil unrest following a police strike in 1969, when: Pinker identifies himself as an equity feminist, which he defines as "a moral doctrine about equal treatment that makes no commitments regarding open empirical issues in psychology or biology".〔Pinker, Steven, ''The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature'' (Viking, 2002), p. 341〕 He reported the result of a test of his political orientation that characterized him as "neither leftist nor rightist, more libertarian than authoritarian."〔("My Genome, My Self" by Steven Pinker ) ''The New York Times Sunday Magazine'' Accessed 10 April 2010.〕 He describes himself as having "experienced a primitive tribal stirring" after his genes were shown to trace back to the Middle East, noting that he "found it just as thrilling to zoom outward in the diagrams of my genetic lineage and see my place in a family tree that embraces all of humanity". Pinker also identifies himself as an atheist. In the 2007 interview with the Point of Inquiry podcast, Pinker states that he would "defend atheism as an empirically supported view." He sees theism and atheism as competing empirical hypotheses, and states that "we're learning more and more about what makes us tick, including our moral sense, without needing the assumption of a deity or a soul. It's naturally getting crowded out by the successive naturalistic explanations." 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Steven Pinker」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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