People are under the impression that dictionaries legislate language. What a dictionary does is keep track of usages over time. — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system, painting and sculpture… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
One can choose to obsess over prescriptive rules, but they have no more to do with human language than the criteria for… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
I spent 20 years doing research on regular and irregular verbs, not because I'm an obsessive language lover but because it seemed… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
As a graduate student, I wrote a long paper connecting the dots between mathematical models of learning and language development in children.… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
“Left to our own devices, we are apt to backslide to our instinctive conceptual ways. This underscores the place of education in… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
I'm very interested in language because it reflects our obsessions and ways of conceptualising the world. — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
Language pedants hew to an oral tradition of shibboleths that have no basis in logic or style, that have been defied by… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
I think that metaphor really is a key to explaining thought and language. The human mind comes equipped with an ability to… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
“Good writers are avid readers. They have absorbed a vast inventory of words, idioms, constructions, tropes, and rhetorical tricks,” — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
It's likely that taboo words are stored in the right hemisphere of the brain. Massive left hemisphere strokes or the entire surgical… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
Space and force pervade language. Many cognitive scientists (including me) have concluded from their research on language that a handful of concepts… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
Galileo wrote that 'the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics; without its help it is impossible to comprehend… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
“As you are reading these words, you are taking part in one of the wonders of the natural world. For you and… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
Indeed, children thrown together in a community that doesn't have a language of its own will invent one in order to communicate… — 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
