A Thought about Steven Pinker

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress; Paperback; Author - Steven Pinker

I suspect I've mentioned Steven Pinker in this blog before, although I'm too lazy to look it up right now. I've got a Big Thought about Pinker, but I have to get to it in stages. First: who is he? Second: what is the Context of the Big Thought. Third: the Big Thought.

Who Is He?

The lengthy wikipedia article attached to his name will tell you. But in case you're lazy: Pinker teaches psychology at Harvard. He got his Ph.D. in the field with a thesis on "The Representation of 3D Space in Mental Images," which suggests that cognitive psychology is his especial concern.

Aside from his scholarly works -- to which I will return in a bit -- he is the author of several books aimed at broad audiences, including THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE (2011) and ENLIGHTENMENT NOW (2018). He is generally considered a conservative intellectual, but since "conservative" still often means counter-Enlightenment, and Pinker is an Enlightenment enthusiast, that may not be the best moniker.

The Context of The Big Thought

I had my Big Thought about Pinker soon after someone on Quora asked me my view of Pinker's relationship with feminism.

I replied,

"So far as I know, he has never defined himself as such, nor has he described himself as opposed to feminism.

"Pinker is an essentialist as to sex. He does not believe that what one means by the term 'woman' is solely a matter of social construction or conditioning. This may put him at odds with some contemporary conceptions of feminism. He once participated in a debate on this subject with Elizabeth Spelke, a cognitive psychologist who does self-identify as a feminist."

Then it occurred to me ....

The Big Thought

Pinker's reputation amongst the 'educated laypeople' he seeks to educate about psychology is in amusingly direct contrast to his actual work as a professor of psychology, and the sometimes quite technical writings by which he made his reputation there.

Pinker made his bones in recent years as a sort-of conservative by denying that human nature is a 'blank slate' on which society can write as it wants. He believes, and he says contemporary psychology as a science leads him to this, that biology has written on this slate before society can get to it. Biology has written certain facts about sex roles, for example.

After Lawrence Summers, then the President of Harvard, made some comments (I won't quote or parse here) about the possibility that more men than women go into the quantitative sciences because of natural facts about the workings of brains, there was a big brouhaha. That was the context for the Spelke-Pinker debate. And that kind of debate is often seen as something that plays out on a left/right axis, with Spelke to the left of Summers and/or Pinker.

Intellectual history is seldom simple. Surely Noam Chomsky, who is after all a key figure in a field adjacent to Spelke's and Pinker's, is opposed to any view of human nature as a blank slate. And would be aghast at the thought that this makes him a figure of the right.

But that isn't my thought here: rather, it occurred to me that in his technical/professional work, Pinker seems to have been on the social constructionist, or blank slater, side!

Take past-tense verbs. There is a post-Chomskean debate among both psychologists and linguists about how growing children in the Anglosphere learn the proper past tense for verbs. They learn the general rule, to add "ed" after a present-tense verb, quite early. Then they often misapply it, and they are corrected in their mis-applications, so one by one they learn the exceptions. At least that SEEMS to be what happens. A kid will say, "I runned down to the store." Then he'll be corrected, "You mean you RAN down to the store, Johnny."

Is there anything more to be said about the learning of the past tense of verbs than that? The connectionist literature posits that there is more to be said: that there are patterns in the learning of the exceptions.

But Pinker responds, "no, sorry, but it is what it seems to be. We learn the irregular verbs one at a time and commit them to memory."

https://www.scribd.com/document/160032575/Pinker-The-Past-Tense-Debate

In that debate, then, the connectionists are saying that language capability is NOT a blank slate, and Pinker, the anti-blank-slate guy, is replying "yes it is."

This is my Big Thought: simply that that is odd.

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