Steven Pinker
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Cognitive scientist and author
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Claims by Steven Pinker (20 of 107)
Language Enables Information as Reciprocity Medium
Language is central to being human because it enables cooperation: it lets you make agreements for delayed and different paybacks impossible in barter, and because information is a nonrivaled good that can be shared without deprivation and multiplied, it is the ideal medium of reciprocity—conferring large benefits to others at small cost—which lubricates the hyperdeveloped cooperation and cumulative technological know-how of our species.
Grammatical Items Resist Deliberate Change
Politically motivated language change is easier for open-class items (nouns and verbs) than for closed-class grammatical items like pronouns, articles, and tense markers; gender-neutral pronoun proposals since the 1970s have never caught on because grammatical items are learned early, highly frequent, and distributed across millions of conversing people, creating natural resistance to deliberate engineering.
Violence Decline Too Fast to Be Genetic
Declines in violence occur on timescales far too short for Darwinian natural selection—Germany shifted from the world's most militaristic to its most pacifist culture in roughly a generation, and the American homicide rate halved in eight years—so we need not invoke any genetic change to explain historical reductions in violence, even if a slow genetic contribution (as Gregory Clark speculated) cannot be entirely ruled out.
The Passive Voice Is Underrated
The passive voice is unfairly maligned by style manuals; no construction survives in a language for over 1,500 years without serving a purpose, and the passive is the better choice when the topic already in the spotlight is the acted-upon entity, since good style begins a sentence with given information (the topic) and ends with new information (the focus).
Universal Grammar Is a Learning Bias
There is a defensible version of universal grammar: the child is innately biased to analyze heard speech in particular ways, pulling combinatorial rules out of the speech stream rather than recording sentences verbatim; commonalities across languages arise because language is reconstructed anew each generation by children's minds from the data their parents and peers provide.
Critical Period for Phonology and Syntax
There are likely several critical or sensitive periods in language acquisition: phonology (accent, including Chinese tones) is most sensitive to early acquisition, vocabulary has no critical period since we learn words all our lives, and syntax/grammar mastery probably begins declining in the teenage years around age 15, making native mastery harder if learning starts late—though no specific brain change has been identified to explain it.
Violence Is Limited by Desire Not Cost
The amount of violence we see is not limited by the cost of technology but by the small number of people who think it a good idea to cause massive damage for no reason beyond publicity; the rate-limiting step on terrorist destruction is human desire, evidenced by how few attacks occur despite no technological or economic impediment to a pressure-cooker bomb anywhere.
Photography Exploits Perception as Hypothesis
Photography is possible because visual perception does not know the external world directly but makes hypotheses from a two-dimensional array of reflected light; duplicating that array with pigment or LEDs fools the perceiver into seeing the actual thing, creating a tension between conveying something out there and making the two-dimensional patch itself aesthetically pleasing.
Advanced Civilizations May Outgrow War
There is no natural arc toward civilizational self-destruction; rather, as civilizations advance they tend to develop mechanisms that make conflict less likely, because war is stupid—you destroy things, kill people, and gain nothing you couldn't get otherwise, while belligerence gives others an incentive to destroy you—so a plausible trajectory is that advancing civilizations make war obsolete through world government or international norms, as a response to the Fermi paradox.
Mind Is Determined But Practically Unpredictable
The mind is physically determined—there is no miracle in the brain when we decide—but because of chaotic, nonlinear processes (Brownian motion, possibly quantum phenomena) the system behaves in ways that are for all practical purposes random and unpredictable, like weather taken to higher degrees, so only a Laplace's-demon-level theory could predict our choices.
Euphemism Treadmill Mechanism
The euphemism treadmill occurs because changing a label cannot change underlying attitudes: as long as an entity carries a negative connotation, a new label will simply absorb the emotional aura of the concept rather than the reverse, so labels for stigmatized groups cycle (negro to black to African American) until the underlying prejudice declines—evidenced by African American persisting 20+ years, reflecting declining prejudice.
Intellectual Tribalism Resists Truth
There is an intellectual equivalent of tribalism in which we treat disagreements like Red Sox versus Yankees—it is pleasurable to read arguments supporting beliefs we hold and annoying to encounter challenges—so the ideal of science and intellectual discourse is an arena whose rules make wrong beliefs eventually too embarrassing to hold, but disturbing signs (campus speech restrictions, Internet-fostered conspiracy theories) show the process can worsen.
Two Mechanisms Underlie Language
Language is made possible by two mechanisms: brute-force rote memorization of arbitrary sound-meaning pairings (words), and a combinatorial rule system that lets you compute the meaning of phrases from the meaning of their parts and arrangement; the tension between these two systems produces much of language's quirkiness, including irregular verbs.
Irregular Verbs Erode Through Frequency
Irregular verbs must be memorized because no rule generates them, and since memory thrives on frequency, when a verb declines in usage a generation of children may fail to master it and default to the regular add-'ed' rule, causing the verb to become regular permanently; this is a Darwinian erosion of the stock of irregular verbs filtered through children's minds.
Language Spontaneously Evolves Without Design
No one planned language to be optimal; multiple competing tradeoffs (memory frequency, phonological euphony, ease of pronunciation) act as pushes and pulls, and as millions of speakers and learning children make small adjustments, the language spontaneously evolves into a balance—a Hayekian spontaneous order.
Chomsky's Theory Was Never Field-Tested
Chomsky's theory has been an unscientific moving target—revised every decade on a principle of perpetual revolution, never specified precisely nor tested against a dataset of language variation—because linguistics was polarized by a charismatic figure and his opponents rather than proceeding toward more precise, testable theory.
Phonological Similarity Protects Verbs
A verb can resist erosion even when uncommon if it is similar to other well-memorized verbs, because it can parasitize the memory strength of phonologically nearby forms; this is why analogically-formed new irregulars like 'snuck' (from dig/dug, sing/sang/sung) can take hold and spread.
Mind Has Specialization Without Strict Modules
The mind is neither a homogeneous neural network nor a set of strictly walled-off snap-in modules with limited communication; rather it has specialization and structure like biological organs and tissues (e.g., blood that suffuses all tissues yet is still an organ), so there are different faculties or mindsets without them being literally independent.
Hard Problem May Be Cognitive Quirk
The hard problem of consciousness (why information-processing neurons feel like something) may not be a genuine scientific puzzle but a quirk of how our minds reflect on themselves; the mind examining itself is naturally puzzled because the part doing the articulating is part of the very thing it is trying to explain, so this is a case where human intuition hits a wall like the nature of time or before the Big Bang.
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