Editing Steven Pinker (section)

==Linguistic career==
[[File:Steven Pinker 2011.jpg|thumb|Pinker in 2011]]
Pinker's research on visual cognition, begun in collaboration with his thesis adviser, Stephen Kosslyn, showed that mental images represent scenes and objects as they appear from a specific vantage point (rather than capturing their intrinsic three-dimensional structure), and thus correspond to the neuroscientist [[David Marr (neuroscientist)|David Marr]]'s theory of a "two-and-a-half-dimensional sketch."<ref name="GjI4r">The nature of the language faculty and its implications for evolution of language</ref>  He also showed that this level of representation is used in visual attention, and in [[object recognition]] (at least for asymmetrical shapes), contrary to Marr's theory that recognition uses viewpoint-independent representations.

In psycholinguistics, Pinker became known early in his career for promoting [[computational learning theory]] as a way to understand [[language acquisition]] in children. He wrote a tutorial review of the field followed by two books that advanced his own theory of language acquisition, and a series of experiments on how children acquire the passive, dative, and locative constructions. These books were ''Language Learnability and Language Development'' (1984), in Pinker's words "outlin[ing] a theory of how children acquire the words and grammatical structures of their mother tongue",<ref name="LongBiog">{{cite web | url=http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/about/longbio.html | title=Steven Pinker: Long Biography | publisher=Harvard University | access-date=May 18, 2014 | author=Pinker, Steven | url-status=dead | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20051229054325/http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/about/longbio.html | archive-date=December 29, 2005}}</ref> and ''Learnability and Cognition: The Acquisition of Argument Structure'' (1989), in Pinker's words "focus[ing] on one aspect of this process, the ability to use different kinds of verbs in appropriate sentences, such as intransitive verbs, transitive verbs, and verbs taking different combinations of complements and indirect objects".<ref name="LongBiog" /> He then focused on verbs of two kinds that illustrate what he considers to be the processes required for human language: retrieving whole words from memory, like the past form of the [[Regular and irregular verbs|irregular verb]]<ref name="YxzxZ">Pinker has written a piece on [http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/media/2000_03_landfall.html The Irregular Verbs] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140606015902/http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/media/2000_03_landfall.html |date=June 6, 2014}}, stating that "I like the Irregular verbs of English, all 180 of them, because of what they tell us about the history of the language and the human minds that have perpetuated it.</ref> "bring", namely "brought"; and using rules to combine (parts of) words, like the past form of the regular verb "walk", namely "walked".<ref name="LongBiog" />

In 1988 Pinker and [[Alan Prince]] published a critique of a connectionist model of the acquisition of the past tense (a textbook problem in language acquisition), followed by a series of studies of how people use and acquire the past tense. This included a monograph on children's [[regularization (linguistics)|regularization]] of irregular forms and his popular 1999 book, ''[[Words and Rules|Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language]]''. Pinker argued that language depends on two things: the associative remembering of sounds and their meanings in words, and the use of rules to manipulate symbols for grammar. He presented evidence against connectionism, where a child would have to learn all forms of all words and would simply retrieve each needed form from memory, in favour of the older alternative theory, the use of words and rules combined by [[generative phonology]]. He showed that mistakes made by children indicate the use of default rules to add suffixes such as "-ed": for instance 'breaked' and 'comed' for 'broke' and 'came'. He argued that this shows that irregular verb-forms in English have to be learnt and retrieved from memory individually, and that the children making these errors were predicting the regular "-ed" ending in an open-ended way by applying a mental rule. This rule for combining verb stems and the usual suffix can be expressed as<ref name="WRessay">{{cite web | url=http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/papers/Edinburgh.pdf | title=Words and rules (essay) | publisher=Harvard University | access-date=May 24, 2014 | author=Pinker, Steven | url-status=dead | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140830145603/http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/papers/Edinburgh.pdf | archive-date=August 30, 2014}}</ref> V<sub>past</sub> → V<sub>stem</sub> + d, where V is a verb and d is the regular ending. Pinker further argued that since the ten most frequently occurring English verbs (be, have, do, say, make ... ) are all irregular, while 98.2% of the thousand least common verbs are regular, there is a "massive correlation" of frequency and irregularity. He explains this by arguing that every irregular form, such as 'took', 'came' and 'got', has to be committed to memory by the children in each generation, or else lost, and that the common forms are the most easily memorized. Any irregular verb that falls in popularity past a certain point is lost, and all future generations will treat it as a regular verb instead.<ref name="WRessay" />

In 1990 Pinker, with [[Paul Bloom (psychologist)|Paul Bloom]], published a paper arguing that the human language faculty must have evolved through [[natural selection]].<ref name="vmLIS">Pinker,&nbsp;S. & Bloom, P. (1990). Natural language and natural selection. Behavioral and&nbsp;Brain&nbsp;Sciences&nbsp;13&nbsp;(4):&nbsp;707‐784</ref> The article provided arguments for a continuity-based view of language evolution, contrary to then-current discontinuity-based theories that see language as suddenly appearing with the advent of ''Homo sapiens'' as a kind of evolutionary accident. This discontinuity-based view was prominently argued by two main authorities, linguist [[Noam Chomsky]] and [[Stephen Jay Gould]].<ref name="journey">{{cite web | url=http://www.humanjourney.us/firstWord3.html | title=Language Development:The First Word. The Search for the Origins of Language | first=Christine | last=Kenneally | author-link=Christine Kenneally | url-status=dead | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140714214704/http://www.humanjourney.us/firstWord3.html | archive-date=July 14, 2014}}</ref> The paper became widely cited and created renewed interest in the evolutionary prehistory of language, and has been credited with shifting the central question of the debate from "did language evolve?" to "''how'' did language evolve?"<ref name="journey" /><ref name="PDAvj">{{cite journal | url=http://www.replicatedtypo.com/2612/2612.html | publisher=Replicatedtypo.com | title=The 20th Anniversary of Steven Pinker & Paul Bloom: Natural Language and Natural Selection (1990) | journal=Behavioral and Brain Sciences | year=1990 | volume=13 | issue=4 | pages=707–726 | last1=Pinker | first1=Steven | last2=Bloom | first2=Paul | doi=10.1017/S0140525X00081061 | s2cid=6167614 | access-date=June 9, 2014 | archive-date=July 14, 2014 | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140714140204/http://www.replicatedtypo.com/2612/2612.html | url-status=live }}</ref> The article also presaged Pinker's argument in ''The Language Instinct''.

In 2006 Pinker provided to [[Alan Dershowitz]], a personal friend of Pinker's who was [[Jeffrey Epstein]]'s defense attorney, Pinker's own interpretation of the wording of a federal law pertaining to the enticement of minors into illegal sex acts via the internet. Dershowitz included Pinker's opinion in a letter to the court during proceedings that resulted in a plea deal in which all federal sex trafficking charges against Epstein were dropped.<ref name="auto1">{{Cite web|url=https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/jeffrey-epstein-alan-dershowitz-steven-pinker|title=Jeffrey Epstein's First Criminal Case Was Helped By A Famous Harvard Language Expert|website=BuzzFeed News|date=July 12, 2019 |access-date=July 9, 2020|archive-date=June 15, 2020|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200615004817/https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/jeffrey-epstein-alan-dershowitz-steven-pinker|url-status=live}}</ref> In 2019, Pinker stated that he was unaware of the nature of the charges against Epstein, and that he engaged in an unpaid favor for his Harvard colleague Dershowitz, as he had regularly done. He stated in an interview with [[BuzzFeed News]] that he regrets writing the letter.<ref name="auto1" /> Pinker says he never received money from Epstein and met with him three times over more than a dozen years,<ref name="xGqbx">{{Cite news|url=https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/jeffrey-epstein-the-academy-and-questions-about-male-dominance-in-science/2019/09/17/0b546dd6-d965-11e9-bfb1-849887369476_story.html|title=Jeffrey Epstein, the academy and questions about male dominance in science|first1=Carolyn Y.|last1=Johnson|first2=Susan|last2=Svrluga|date=September 17, 2019|newspaper=Washington Post|access-date=July 13, 2020|archive-date=June 4, 2020|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200604005029/https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/jeffrey-epstein-the-academy-and-questions-about-male-dominance-in-science/2019/09/17/0b546dd6-d965-11e9-bfb1-849887369476_story.html|url-status=live}}</ref> and said he could never stand Epstein and tried to keep his distance.<ref name="auto1" />