110+ Steven Pinker Quotes On Language, Cognitive And Linguistics

Steven Pinker is a Canadian-born American cognitive psychologist, linguist, and popular science author. He is Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, and is known for his advocacy of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind. He is one of the world's foremost writers on language, mind, and human nature. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Steven Pinker on language, cognitive, linguistics.

Top 10 Steven Pinker Quotes

1. Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system, painting and sculpture on the visual system. Poetry and literature depend on language.
2. Why are empirical questions about how the mind works so weighted down with political and moral and emotional baggage?
3. I suspect music is auditory cheesecake, an exquisite confection crafted to tickle the sensitive spots of... our mental faculties.
4. All our behaviours are a result of neurophysiological activity in the brain. There is no reason to believe there is any magic going on.
5. Evolutionary psychology is one of four sciences that are bringing human nature back into the picture.
6. Thanks to the redundancy of language, yxx cxn xndxrstxnd whxt x xm wrxtxng xvxn xf x rxplxcx xll thx vxwxls wxth xn "x" (t gts lttl hrdr f y dn't vn kn whr th vwls r)
7. Photography is a kind of virtual reality, and it helps if you can create the illusion of being in an interesting world.
8. I would argue that nothing gives life more purpose than the realization that every moment of consciousness is a precious and fragile gift.
9. Plants can't very well defend themselves by their behavior, so they resort to chemical warfare, and plants are saturated with toxins and irritants to deter creatures like us who want to eat them.
10. We will never have a perfect world, but it's not romantic or naive to work toward a better one.

Steven Pinker Short Quotes

• Without goals the very concept of intelligence is meaningless
• The art of photography is all about directing the attention of the viewer.
• If anything, Powerpoint, if used well, would ideally reflect the way we think.
• Personality and socialization aren't the same thing.
• The typical imperative from biology is not "Thou shalt... ," but "If ... then ... else.
• You wouldn't believe the kind of hate mail I get about my work on irregular verbs.
• Unfortunately, creative people are at their most creative when writing their autobiographies.
• I like ice hockey. No one is ever going to ask me to write about that as a metaphor for life.
• Language mavens commonly confuse their own peeves with a worsening of the language.
• [Napoleon deployed] every available resource to inflict all-out defeats on [his] enemies.

Steven Pinker Quotes About Language

An enormous amount of scientific language is metaphorical. We talk about a genetic code, where code originally meant a cipher; we talk about the solar system model of the atom as though the atom were like a sun and moon and planets. — Steven Pinker

Parents provide their children with genes as well as an environment, so the fact that talkative parents have kids with good language skills could simply mean that and that the same genes that make parents talkative make children articulate. — Steven Pinker

For example, parents who talk a lot to their children have kids with better language skills, parents who spank have children who grow up to be violent, parents who are neither too authoritarian or too lenient have children who are well-adjusted, and so on. — Steven Pinker

I spent 20 years doing research on regular and irregular verbs, not because I'm an obsessive language lover but because it seemed to me that they tapped into a fundamental distinction in language processing, indeed in cognitive processing, between memory lookup and rule-driven computation. — Steven Pinker

Language surely does affect our thoughts, rather than just labeling them for the sake of labeling them. Most obviously, language is the conduit through which people share their thoughts and intentions and thereby acquire the knowledge, customs, and values of those around them." — Steven Pinker

Look at almost any passage, and you'll find that a paragraph has five or six metaphors in it. It's not that the speaker is trying to be poetic, it's just that that's the way language works. — Steven Pinker

Galileo wrote that 'the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics; without its help it is impossible to comprehend a single word of it.' — Steven Pinker

Obviously no language is innate. Take any kid from any race, bring them up in any culture and they will learn the language equally quickly. So no particular language is in the genes. But what might be in the genes is the ability to acquire language. — Steven Pinker

Language is a window into human nature, but it is also a fistula, an open wound through which we're exposed to an infectious world. — Steven Pinker

People do not think in English or Chinese or Apache; they think in a language of thought. This language of thought probably looks a bit like all these languagesBut compared with any given language, mentalese must be richer in some ways and simpler in others. — Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker Quotes About Cognitive

The reason I'm not a neurobiologist but a cognitive psychologist is that I think looking at brain tissue is often the wrong level of analysis. You have to look at a higher level of organization. — Steven Pinker

Cognitive psychology has shown that the mind best understands facts when they are woven into a conceptual fabric, such as a narrative, mental map, or intuitive theory. Disconnected facts in the mind are like unlinked pages on the Web: They might as well not exist. — Steven Pinker

Cognitive psychology tells us that the unaided human mind is vulnerable to many fallacies and illusions because of its reliance on its memory for vivid anecdotes rather than systematic statistics. — Steven Pinker

What is true for the emotions may also be true for the intellect. Some of our perplexities may come from a mismatch between the purposes for which our cognitive faculties evolved and the purposes to which we put them today. — Steven Pinker

Effective education may also require co-opting old faculties to deal with new demands. . . Because much of the content of education is not cognitively natural, the process of mastering it may not always be easy and pleasant, notwithstanding the mantra that learning is fun. — Steven Pinker

We really are creatures of a violent world, biologically speaking - watching violence and learning about it is one of our cognitive drives. — Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker Quotes About Psychology

There's a common criticism of evolutionary psychology that it's fatalistic and it dooms us to eternal strife, 'Why even try to work toward peace if we're just bloody killer apes and violence is in our genes?' — Steven Pinker

Morality is not just any old topic in psychology but close to our conception of the meaning of life. Moral goodness is what gives each of us the sense that we are worthy human beings. — Steven Pinker

Equity feminism is a moral doctrine about equal treatment that makes no commitments regarding open empirical issues in psychology or biology. — Steven Pinker

Evolution is an indispensable component of any satisfying explanation of our psychology. — Steven Pinker

If we are not to abandon values such as peace and equality, or our commitments to science and truth, then we must pry these values away from claims about our psychological makeup that are vulnerable to being proven false. — Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker Quotes About Mind

The great appeal of the doctrine that the mind is a blank slate is the simple mathematical fact that zero equals zero. — Steven Pinker

Most intellectuals today have a phobia of any explanation of the mind that invokes genetics. — Steven Pinker

Why do people believe that there are dangerous implications of the idea that the mind is a product of the brain, that the brain is organized in part by the genome, and that the genome was shaped by natural selection? — Steven Pinker

the mind is a neural computer — Steven Pinker

The human moral sense can excuse any atrocity in the minds of those who commit it, and it furnishes them with motives for acts of violence that bring them no tangible benefit. — Steven Pinker

The brain is not a bag of traits. It's startlingly complex. There are few or no single genes with a consistent effect on the mind. — Steven Pinker

The 9/11 strikes left an indelible impact on our minds, but in relative terms, the scale of casualties actually wasn't all that high. — Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker Quotes About Political

My politics were pretty anarchistic until 1969 when the Montreal police went on strike. Within hours, mayhem and rioting broke out and the Mounties had to be called in to restore order. It instilled in me that one's convictions can be subjected to empirical test. — Steven Pinker

By exploring the political and moral colorings of discoveries about what makes us tick, we can have a more honest science and a less fearful intellectual milieu. — Steven Pinker

The connections I draw between human nature and political systems in my new book, for example, were prefigured in the debates during the Enlightenment and during the framing of the American Constitution. — Steven Pinker

I think students should know something about religion as a historical phenomenon, in the same way that they should know something about socialism and humanism and the other great ideas that have shaped political philosophies and therefore the course of human events. — Steven Pinker

People today sometimes get uncomfortable with empirical claims that seem to clash with their political assumptions, often because they haven't given much thought to the connections. — Steven Pinker

As many political writers have pointed out, commitment to political equality is not an empirical claim that people are clones. — Steven Pinker

In the 1970s, many intellectuals had become political radicals. Marxism was correct, liberalism was for wimps, and Marx had pronounced that 'the ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.' — Steven Pinker

If people are innately saddled with certain sins and flaws, like selfishness, prejudice, sort-sightedness, and self-deception, then political reform would seem to be a waste of time. — Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker Quotes About Nature

The strongest argument against totalitarianism may be a recognition of a universal human nature; that all humans have innate desires for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The doctrine of the blank slate... is a totalitarian's dream. — Steven Pinker

It's natural to think that living things must be the handiwork of a designer. But it was also natural to think that the sun went around the earth. Overcoming naive impressions to figure out how things really work is one of humanity's highest callings. — Steven Pinker

My opinions about human nature are shared by many psychologists, linguists, and biologists, not to mention philosophers and scholars going back centuries. — Steven Pinker

Many artists and scholars have pointed out that ultimately art depends on human nature. — Steven Pinker

With violence, as with so many other concerns, human nature is the problem, but human nature is also the solution. — Steven Pinker

Natural selection is not the only process that changes organisms over time. But is the only process that seemingly designs organisms over time. — Steven Pinker

Human nature is complex. Even if we do have inclinations toward violence, we also have inclination to empathy, to cooperation, to self-control. — Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker Quotes About People

In culture after culture, people believe that the soul lives on after death, that rituals can change the physical world and divine the truth, and that illness and misfortune are caused and alleviated by spirits, ghosts, saints ... and gods. — Steven Pinker

Some people believe that the nuclear bomb should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, since it scared the major powers away from war by equating it with doomsday. — Steven Pinker

The stirrings of morality emerge early in childhood. Toddlers spontaneously offer toys and help to others and try to comfort people they see in distress. — Steven Pinker

As every student in Philosophy 101 learns, nothing can force me to believe that anyone except me is conscious. This power to deny that other people have feelings is not just an academic exercise but an all-too-common vice, as we see in the long history of human cruelty. — Steven Pinker

The fact that people can forget these simple truths when intellectualizing about children shows how far modern doctrines have taken us. They make it easy to think of children as lumps of putty to be shaped instead of partners in a human relationship. — Steven Pinker

If you give people literacy, bad ideas can be attacked and experiments tried, and lessons will accumulate. — Steven Pinker

People consider the harms they inflict to be justified and forgettable, and the harms they suffer to be unprovoked and grievous. — Steven Pinker

As individual people, embedded in our daily lives, of course we're interested in what makes one person different from another. We've got to hire one person and not another, marry one person and not another. — Steven Pinker

I have never been a fan of science fiction. For me, fiction has to explore the combinatorial possibilities of people interacting under the constraints imposed by our biology and history. When an author is free to suspend the constraints, it's tennis without a net. — Steven Pinker

People know there is a difference between what you do and what you accept. There is a difference between me knowing that people swear, me hearing people swear and me swearing, and everyone accepting that this is something you can do as much as you like. — Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker Quotes About Genes

Just as blueprints don't necessarily specify blue buildings, selfish genes don't necessarily specify selfish organisms. As we shall see, sometimes the most selfish thing a gene can do is build a selfless brain. Genes are a play within a play, not the interior monologue of the players. — Steven Pinker

Heritability pertains to the entirety of the genome, not to a single gene. — Steven Pinker

But in most cases even the possibility that the correlations reflect shared genes is taboo. — Steven Pinker

So no, it's not all in the genes, but what isn't in the genes isn't in the family environment either. It can't be explained in terms of the overall personalities or the child-rearing practices of parents. — Steven Pinker

Of course, genes can't pull the levers of our behavior directly. But they affect the wiring and workings of the brain, and the brain is the seat of our drives, temperaments and patterns of thought. — Steven Pinker

Evolutionary psychologists seem to want to unmask our noblest motives as ultimately self-interested - to show that our love for children, compassion for the unfortunate and sense of justice are just tactics in a Darwinian struggle to perpetuate our genes. — Steven Pinker

Genetically influenced behavior is not necessarily good and not necessarily unchangeable. Explanations of bad behavior that appeal to genes do not absolve a person any more than do explanations that appeal to upbringing. — Steven Pinker

No one knows what the nongenetic causes of individuality are. Perhaps people are shaped by modifications of genes that take place after conception, or by haphazard fluctuations in the chemical soup in the womb or the wiring up of the brain or the expression of the genes themselves. — Steven Pinker

Genes are a play within a play, not the interior monologue of the players. — Steven Pinker

The problem with the emotions is not that they are untamed forces or vestiges of our animal past; it is that they were designed to propagate copies of the genes that built them rather than to promote happiness, wisdom, or moral values. — Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker Famous Quotes And Sayings

We're living in primate heaven. We're warm, dry, we're not hungry, we don't have fleas and ticks and infections. So why are we so miserable? — Steven Pinker

Most wars are not fought over shortages of resources such as food and water, but rather over conquest, revenge, and ideology. — Steven Pinker

The elegant study... is consistent with the themes of modern cognitive neuroscience . Every aspect of thought and emotion is rooted in brain structure and function, including many psychological disorders and, presumably, genius. The study confirms that the brain is a modular system comprising multiple intelligences, mostly nonverbal. — Steven Pinker

Morality comes from a commitment to treat other as we wish to be treated, which follows from the realization that none of us is the sole occupant of the universe. — Steven Pinker

If the myth of pure evil is that evil is committed with the intention of causing harm and an absence of moral considerations, then it applies to very few acts of so-called 'pure evil' because most evildoers believe what they are doing is forgivable or justifiable. — Steven Pinker

I think this confusion leads intellectuals and artists themselves to believe that the elite arts and humanities are a kind of higher, exalted form of human endeavor. — Steven Pinker

Equality is not the empirical claim that all groups of humans are interchangeable; it is the moral principle that individuals should not be judged or constrained by the average properties of their group. — Steven Pinker

After their return from Babylon, the practice of human sacrifice died out among the Jews, but survived as an ideal in one of its break-away sects, which believed that God accepted the torture-sacrifice of an innocent man in exchange for not visiting a worse fate on the rest of humanity. The sect is called Christianity. — Steven Pinker

Commerce is a noble profession, and Jews should get over any self-hatred they might harbor from contemplating the capitalist spirit of diaspora Judaism. — Steven Pinker

Northeastern and most coastal states will vote for the candidate who is more closely aligned with international cooperation and engagement, secularism and science, gun control, individual freedom in culture and sexuality, and a greater role for the government in protecting the environment and ensuring economic equality. — Steven Pinker

Why is it surprising that scientists might have long hair and wear cowboy boots? In fields like neuroscience, where the events you are recording are so minute, I suspect scientists cultivate a boring, reliable image. A scientist with a reputation for flamboyance might be suspect. — Steven Pinker

Jews are known for many things, but strength, swiftness, and agility are not among them. There is one trait, as controversial as it is familiar, for which Jews are above all known, and that is shrewdness in business. — Steven Pinker

Though knowledge itself increasingly ignores boundaries between fields, professors are apt to organize their pedagogy around the methods and history of their academic subculture rather than some coherent topic in the world. — Steven Pinker

But the newest research is showing that many properties of the brain are genetically organized, and don't depend on information coming in from the senses. — Steven Pinker

Working out what it would take to program goodness into a robot shows not only how much machinery it takes to be good but how slippery the concept of goodness is to start with. — Steven Pinker

According to a recent study of the brains of identical and fraternal twins, differences in the amount of gray matter in the frontal lobes are not only genetically influenced but are significantly correlated with differences in intelligence. — Steven Pinker

Writers acquire their technique by spotting, savoring, and reverse-engineering examples of good prose. — Steven Pinker

Broadly speaking, the Southern and Western desert and mountain states will vote for the candidate who endorses an aggressive military, a role for religion in public life, laissez-faire economic policies, private ownership of guns and relaxed conditions for using them, less regulation and taxation, and a valorization of the traditional family. — Steven Pinker

Academics lack perspective. In a debate on whether the world is round, they would argue, 'No,' because it's an oblate spheroid. They suffer from 'the curse of knowledge': the inability to imagine what it's like not to know something that they know. — Steven Pinker

Violent movements attract thugs and firebrands who enjoy the mayhem. Violent tactics provide a pretext for retaliation by the enemy and alienate third parties who might otherwise support the movement. — Steven Pinker

Anything that makes it easier to imagine trading places with someone else increases your moral consideration for that other person. — Steven Pinker

Conventions are unstated agreements within a community to abide by a single way of doing things - not because there is any inherent advantage to the choice, but because there is an advantage to everyone making the same choice. — Steven Pinker

Regardless of its causes, thoughtlessly blaming the present is a weakness which, even if it is never outlawed, ought to be resisted. Though commonly flaunted as a sign of sophistication, it can be an opportunity for one-upmanship and an excuse for misanthropy, especially against the young. — Steven Pinker

Whenever you speak to someone, you are presuming the two of you have a certain degree of familiarity - which your words might alter. So every sentence has to do two things at once: convey a message and continue to negotiate that relationship. — Steven Pinker

Tom Hanks, who starred in 'The Da Vinci Code,' turns out to be related to a number of the historic characters that feature in 'The Da Vinci Code,' including William the Conqueror and Shakespeare. — Steven Pinker

Human evolution, at first, seems extraordinary. How could the process that gave rise to slugs and oak trees and fish produce a creature that can fly to the moon and invent the Internet and cross the ocean in boats? — Steven Pinker

Astrology had an important role in the ancient world. You can't understand many things unless you know something about astrology - the plays of Shakespeare and so on. — Steven Pinker

No matter how inured you get to atrocities, you're still always stunned and shocked by how cruel and wasteful Homo sapiens can be. — Steven Pinker

Evolutionarily speaking, there is seldom any mystery in why we seek the goals we seek — why, for example, people would rather make love with an attractive partner than get a slap on the belly with a wet fish. — Steven Pinker

'Capitalism' is a dirty word for many intellectuals, but there are a number of studies showing that open economies and free trade are negatively correlated with genocide and war. — Steven Pinker

I don't think aggression works like thirst or sleep. I think aggression is more elicited by particular situations. I think it can be mitigated. — Steven Pinker

An eye for beauty locks onto faces that show signs of health and fertility - just as one would predict if it had evolved to help the beholder find the fittest mate. — Steven Pinker

It begins with skepticism. The history of human folly, and our own susceptibility to illusions and fallacies, tell us that men and women are fallible. — Steven Pinker

The likelihood that inborn differences are one contributor to social status does not mean that it is the only contributor. — Steven Pinker

Reading is a technology for perspective-taking. When someone else's thoughts are in your head, you are observing the world from that person's vantage point. — Steven Pinker

Everyone's pedigree merges into everyone else's pedigree. So if you go back far enough, everyone is related. — Steven Pinker

The foundation of individual rights is the assumption that people have wants and needs and are authorities on what those wants and needs are. If people's stated desires were just some kind of erasable inscription or reprogrammable brainwashing, any atrocity could be justified. — Steven Pinker

Morality, then, is not a set of arbitrary regulations dictated by a vengeful deity and written down in a book; nor is it the custom of a particular culture or tribe. It is a consequence of the interchangeability of perspectives and the opportunity the world provides for positive-sum games. — Steven Pinker

We can make fun of hockey fans, but someone who enjoys Homer is indulging the same kind of vicarious bloodlust. — Steven Pinker

However much we might deplore the profit motive, or consumerist values, if everyone just wants i-Pods we would probably be better off than if they wanted class revolution. — Steven Pinker

Statisticians tell us that people underestimate the sheer number of coincidences that are bound to happen in a world governed by chance. — Steven Pinker

The human capacity for compassion is not a reflex that is triggered automatically by the presence of another living thing. — Steven Pinker

People have long assumed that violence is necessary for political change. Rulers never cede power voluntarily, the argument goes, so progressives have no choice but to contemplate the use of force to bring about a better world, mindful of the trade-off between a small amount of violence now and acceptance of an unjust status quo indefinitely. — Steven Pinker

The rules of friendship are tacit, unconscious; they are not rational. In business, though, you have to think rationally. — Steven Pinker

I think the reason that swearing is both so offensive and so attractive is that it is a way to push people's emotional buttons, and especially their negative emotional buttons. Because words soak up emotional connotations and are processed involuntarily by the listener, you can't will yourself not to treat the word in terms of what it means. — Steven Pinker

In the past two decades anthropologists have gathered data on life and death in pre-state societies rather than accepting the warm and fuzzy stereotypes. What did they find? In a nutshell: Hobbes was right, Rousseau was wrong. — Steven Pinker

Terrorist bombings, like rampage shootings, are events that maximize the amount of publicity per amount of damage. That's why people do them, because they know they will set off a media frenzy. — Steven Pinker

The idea that children are passive repositories to be shaped by their parents has been massively overstated. A child's peer group is a far greater determinant of its development and achievements than parental aspiration. — Steven Pinker

Life Lessons by Steven Pinker

1. Steven Pinker's work emphasizes the importance of using evidence-based data to inform decisions, and of understanding the power of language to shape our thinking.
2. He also encourages us to be mindful of our biases, and to strive for objectivity and clarity in our communication.
3. Finally, Pinker's work highlights the importance of being open to new ideas, and of using reason and logic to understand the world around us.