Steven Pinker (b. 1954) is a Canadian-American cognitive scientist who has made important contributions to language acquisition, visual cognition, and the computational theory of mind, while also becoming one of science's most prominent public communicators. His academic research on language development, regular and irregular morphology, and visual cognition has been highly influential, and his popular books have brought cognitive science to a broad audience.
Language and Mind
Pinker's academic work on language focuses on how children acquire the rules of language, particularly the distinction between regular (rule-governed: walk/walked) and irregular (memory-based: go/went) morphological forms. His dual-mechanism theory proposes that regulars are produced by a symbolic rule (add -ed) while irregulars are stored in associative memory — a hybrid of symbolic and connectionist approaches that resolves debates between the two frameworks. His research on verb argument structure investigates how the meanings of verbs constrain the sentence structures they can appear in.
Pinker's popular books have been enormously influential. The Language Instinct (1994) presented Chomsky's nativist approach to language for a general audience. How the Mind Works (1997) applied computational and evolutionary psychology to explain perception, emotion, reasoning, and social life. The Blank Slate (2002) argued against the view that human nature is entirely culturally determined, making the case that evolved cognitive and emotional predispositions shape behavior. While controversial, Pinker's work has been instrumental in bringing cognitive and evolutionary psychology into public discourse.