Fifty-three-year-old Steven Pinker may look like a rock star, but he is actually a linguistics explorer, hunting around the sentences and syntax of human language for clues (he calls them “rabbit holes”) to the inner world of the human brain. His favorite rabbit hole is verbs—what they mean, how they are used in sentences, and how, according to his latest book, The Stuff of Thought, kids “figure it all out.” Why so much attention to verbs? Pinker confesses in part it’s simply because he finds them fascinating. As one of his colleagues remarked, “They really are your little friends, aren’t they?”
For more than a quarter century, Pinker has been a driving force in linguistics theory, analyzing language in labs at MIT, Stanford University, and Harvard University, where he is currently the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology. At MIT he studied colleague Noam Chomsky’s theory of an “innate grammar,” testing to what extent language is biologically programmed. His research suggests that language is an instinct, an evolutionary adaptation that is partly hardwired into our brains and partly learned. This work led Pinker to develop his theory of the evolution of the mind and the source of language. He wrote about his work in four popular books: The Language Instinct (1994), How the Mind Works (1997), Words and Rules (1999), and The Blank Slate (2002). Although his books present scientific research, they have twice been finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in part because they’re so much fun to read, with Pinker’s creative weaving of movie dialogue, snippets from novels, news headlines, Yiddishisms, even bits from comic strips.
In his books Pinker argues that the brain at birth is not simply a blank slate to be shaped by culture and experience. Rather, it comes programmed with many behavioral dispositions and talents. In other words, human nature is to some extent innate and shaped by natural selection. Not surprisingly, Pinker’s ideas have been at the center of some heated debates, most notably a recent controversy at Harvard, in which university president Lawrence Summers offered innate gender differences as a possible explanation for the dearth of women in the sciences.
In many ways, Pinker’s book The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature, which will be published this month, may be his most ambitious yet—an attempt to show that the entire range of human thought is built on the “scaffolding” of a few core concepts that shape our understanding of the physical and social worlds and form the basis for the way we interpret reality. We spoke with the researcher from his office in William James Hall at Harvard.
You’ve said that when you were growing up in the Jewish community in Montreal, you were surrounded by fervent devotees of all kinds of political philosophies, by passionate wars of language and ideas. Does this influence your efforts now to describe the universal patterns of thought underlying language?
Certainly the argumentative intellectual community that I came from got me interested in these large issues of human nature, which I really think made me interested in the human mind. But I definitely wanted to study it in a way that was more tractable than just arguments around the dining room table. So I went into cognitive psychology.
In your best-selling book The Blank Slate, you argue that the infant mind is not an empty vessel that society can fill with whatever values and behaviors it chooses but rather that we are born with predispositions that are genetically determined. Why do you think these ideas are so controversial?
I think there are a number of reasons that looking at human beings as biological organisms can be unsettling. One of them is the possibility of inequality. If human nature is a “blank slate,” then by definition we’re all the same. Whereas if nature endows us with anything, then some people might be endowed with more of it than others are, or with different stuff than others are. And people who are worried about racial discrimination or class discrimination or sexism would prefer that the mind be a blank slate, because then it’s impossible by definition for, say, men to be significantly different from women. My response is that we shouldn’t confuse our political and moral position that people should be treated as individuals rather than prejudging them as a member of a category—a political policy that I think worth upholding—with the empirical claim that all people are biologically indistinguishable or that the mind at birth is a blank slate.
The second fear, I think, is that of dashing the dream of the perfectibility of humankind. If we were all blank slates, we could change what gets written on children’s slates and mold them into the kind of people we want. If people are born with certain drives, if certain ignoble traits, such as violence and selfishness, are innate, then that might make them unchangeable, and attempts at social reform and human improvement might be proven to be a waste of time. And there, too, my response is that what you find is that the mind is a complicated system of many parts, and there is room for social improvement in trying to get some parts of the mind to work against the others. For example, the frontal lobes, with their ability to empathize and to anticipate consequences of choices in the future, can override whatever selfish or antisocial urges may also be harbored in the brain.
A third fear is the fear of determinism, of a loss of personal responsibility. It’s the fear that personal responsibility will vanish if free will is shown to be an illusion. And here, too, these fearful reactions are a kind of non sequitur. Because even if there’s no such thing as a soul that’s separate from the brain and that somehow pushes the buttons of behavior—even if we are nothing but our brains—it’s undoubtedly true that there are parts of the brain that are responsive to the potential consequences of our actions, that are responsive to social norms, to reward, punishment, credit, and blame.
