Pinker's theories and conclusions—based upon methodical analyses of experimental results obtained in field work and in psychological laboratories, often borrowed from colleagues—are totally revolutionary, indeed earth-shaking, and yet he seems to avoid being outlawed and branded as a horseman of the Apocalypse.
He succeeds in coming across as an unassuming academic who rambles on rapidly in a quiet voice, keeping a low profile: a kind of anti-Dawkins. Maybe his apparently peaceful attitude towards religion provides the professor with a reassuring homely bearing, enhanced by his marvelous mop of curly hair. In an interview for The Guardian in 1999, he said: "I was never religious in the theological sense. I never outgrew my conversion to atheism at 13, but at various times was a serious cultural Jew." Whatever the reason, I'm intrigued that Pinker's utterly mind-boggling descriptions of the realities of humanity have not stirred up harsh opposition.His ideas have been expressed in five wonderful easy-to-read books, which compose two parallel trilogies, as shown here:
The language trilogy, at the top, starts with the book that made Pinker famous: The Language Instinct (1994). Then it includes a technical book on linguistics, Words and Rules (1999), and culminates in The Stuff of Thought (2007), which envisages language as "a window into human nature". This same book plays a double role in that it terminates Pinker's trilogy on human nature, which starts with How the Mind Works (1997) and evolves through a beautifully blasphemous book (from the viewpoint of politically-correct behavior and thinking), The Blank Slate (2002). Click the above chart to access a talk of 2007 in which Pinker presents the themes of his last book.In my article of April 2010 entitled God travels incognito [display], I spoke of a novel by Pinker's wife Rebecca Goldstein.
Use the search box up in the top left-hand corner of this blog to access other articles in which I've mentioned Steven Pinker and his books.
No comments:
Post a Comment