Steven Pinker on How the Mind Works: Cognitive Science, Evolutionary Biology (1997)

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How the Mind Works is a 1997 book by Canadian-American cognitive scientist Steven Pinker. The book attempts to explain some of the human mind’s poorly understood functions and quirks in evolutionary terms. About the book: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0393334775/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0393334775&linkCode=as2&tag=doc06-20&linkId=357012cf4ae1a970beec1cf148de009c

Drawing heavily on the paradigm of evolutionary psychology articulated by John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, Pinker covers subjects as diverse as vision, emotion, feminism, and, in the final chapter, “the meaning of life.” He argues for both a computational theory of mind and a neo-Darwinist / adaptationist approach to evolution, all of which he sees as the central components of evolutionary psychology. He criticizes difference feminism in his book because he believes scientific research has shown that women and men differ little or not at all in their moral reasoning. This book was a Pulitzer Prize Finalist.

Jerry Fodor, considered one of the fathers of the computational theory of mind, criticized the book. Fodor wrote a book called The Mind Doesn’t Work That Way, saying “There is, in short, every reason to suppose that the Computational Theory is part of the truth about cognition. But it hadn’t occurred to me that anyone could suppose that it’s a very large part of the truth; still less that it’s within miles of being the whole story about how the mind works”. He continued, “I was, and remain, perplexed by an attitude of ebullient optimism that’s particularly characteristic of Pinker’s book. As just remarked, I would have thought that the last forty or fifty years have demonstrated pretty clearly that there are aspects of higher mental processes into which the current armamentarium of computational models, theories and experimental techniques offers vanishingly little insight.”[2]

Pinker responded to Fodor’s criticisms in Mind & Language. Pinker argued that Fodor had attacked straw man positions, wryly suggesting a possible title for his riposte as No One Ever Said it Did.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_the_Mind_Works

Steven Arthur Pinker (born September 18, 1954) is a Canadian-born U.S. experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, linguist, and popular science author. He is a Harvard College Professor and the Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University,[3] 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 innuendo and euphemism. He published 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, 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, offers a scientific and psychologically based argument on why so much of today’s academic and popular writing is difficult for readers to understand.

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.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Pinker

Image By Steven Pinker (Rebecca Goldstein) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

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