Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker (born 1954 in Montreal) is a Canadian-American cognitive psychologist and psycholinguist who serves as the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and is widely known as a public intellectual and popular science author. He is best known for arguing that language is an innate faculty of mind shaped by natural selection for communication, a thesis he set out for a general audience in The Language Instinct (1994). His words-and-rules theory holds that language relies on both memory retrieval of individual words and rule-based grammatical operations, a claim he grounded in research on how children learn English past-tense forms, applying default rules to regular verbs such as walked while retrieving irregular forms such as brought from memory. Pinker has written nine popular books on cognitive science and linguistics, including How the Mind Works (1997).