Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker has been married three times. His first wife was Nancy Etcoff, a psychologist and a faculty member at Harvard Medical School, who he married in 1980. They divorced in 1992, after 12 years of marriage.

Pinker married his second wife, Ilavenil Subbiah, in 1995, and they divorced in 2006. A Malaysian national, Subbiah is also a psychologist and a well-respected member of her field.

In 2007, he wed his third and current wife, the philosopher and novelist Rebecca Goldstein. Through Goldstein, he has two stepdaughters, the novelist Yael Goldstein Love and the poet Danielle Blau.

Steven Pinker was born on September 18, 1954, in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, as the oldest child of Roslyn and Harry Pinker. His father was a lawyer, who worked as a manufacturer’s representative for a while. His mother was initially a home-maker, but later became a guidance counsellor and high-school vice-principal.

His younger brother, Robert, serves as a policy analyst for the Canadian government, while his younger sister, Susan, is a celebrated psychologist and author herself.

Pinker received his high school education at Wager High School in Côte Saint-Luc, Quebec. In 1971, he enrolled at Dawson College, graduating two years later. He then attended McGill University, from where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in psychology in 1976.

In 1979, he got his Doctorate of Philosophy in experimental psychology from Harvard University under Stephen Kosslyn. He then invested a year in research at MIT before starting his career as an assistant professor at Harvard and later, at Stanford.

Steven Pinker spent a year each at Harvard (1980-1981) and at Stanford (1981-82) as an assistant professor. He then returned to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to take a job in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. He was associated with the MIT from 1982 to 2003, for more than two decades.

During his tenure at the MIT, Pinker served as the co-director of the Center for Cognitive Science from 1985 to 1994 and from 1994 to 1999, as the director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. In 1995, he took a one-year sabbatical at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Pinker came back to Harvard as a full-time professor in 2003 and began to teach as the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology. He received the honour of being a Harvard College Professor from 2008 to 2013. At present, he is a lecturer at the New College of the Humanities, a private college in London.

Steven Pinker was still pursuing his doctorate degree when he started his research on visual cognition. Collaborating with Stephen Kosslyn, his thesis advisor, Pinker demonstrated through his research that mental images are scenes and objects as they seem from a specific vantage point and not a snapshot of its intrinsic three-dimensional structure.

Pinker’s findings bear resemblance to neuroscientist David Marr's theory of a "two-and-a-half-dimensional sketch”. However, he contradicted Marr on the concept of object recognition. According to Marr, recognition is enabled by viewpoint-independent representations, whereas Pinker holds the view that specific vantage point representations are deployed in visual attention and object recognition, especially for asymmetrical shapes.

Pinker, in the early days of his career, advocated for the computational learning theory as a method for recognising language acquisition in children. He put out a tutorial review and later published two books on the subject. These books were ‘Language Learnability and Language Development’ (1984) and ‘Learnability and Cognition: The Acquisition of Argument Structure’ (1989).

In 1988, his collaboration with Alan Prince produced a significant critique of a connectionist model of the acquisition of the past tense and went on to cite a series of studies that deal with how people use and acquire a language.

As per his argument, language relies upon two components: the associated memory of sounds, and what they represent in words, and the usage of rules as tools to manipulate grammar.