Consciousness surely does not depend on language. Babies, many animals, and patients robbed of speech by brain damage are not insensate robots;… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
“The mind is more comfortable in reckoning probabilities in terms of the relative frequency of remembered or imagined events. That can make… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
“We hear speech as a string of separate words, but unlike the tree falling in the forest with no one to hear… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
I never outgrew my conversion to atheism at 13, but at various times was a serious cultural Jew. — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
“Cas Wouters, inspired by conversations with Elias late in his life, suggests that we are living through a new phase in the… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
“If the metaphors in everyday speech are a clue, then all of us associate blankness with virtue rather than with nothingness. Think… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
In the speech sound wave, one word runs into the next seamlessly; there are no little silences between spoken words the way… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
Forcing modern speakers of English to not - whoops, not to split an infinitive because it isn't done in Latin makes about as much… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
Consistent style prevents presentation from getting in the way of content. — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
The supposedly immaterial soul, we now know, can be bisected with a knife, altered by chemicals, started or stopped by electricity, and extinguished by… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
I've never argued that humans are massively hot-wired. What I was trying to point out was that you can't understand how we learn unless… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
As many political writers have pointed out, commitment to political equality is not an empirical claim that people are clones. — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
Since violence is largely a male pastime, cultures that empower women tend to move away from the glorification of violence and are less likely… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
When it comes to explaining human thought and behavior, the possibility that heredity plays any role at all still has the power to shock.… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
Morality is not just any old topic in psychology but close to our conception of the meaning of life. Moral goodness is what gives… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
“The biblical story of the binding of Isaac shows that human sacrifice was far from unthinkable in the 1st millennium BCE. The Israelites boasted… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
Part of the bargain of being alive is that one takes a chance at dying a premature or painful death, be it from violence,… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
In fact, without a specification of a creature's goals, the very idea of intelligence is meaningless. A toadstool could be given a genius award… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
“The obvious cure for the tragic shortcomings of human intuition in a high-tech world is education. And this offers priorities for educational policy: to… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
