Language, Cognition, and Human Nature

Steven Pinker is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, an eminent cognitive scientist, and the author of many popular books that synthesize large bodies of knowledge of cognitive science, evolutionary biology, and behavioral genetics into a comprehensive picture of how the mind works, how it evolved, and how we ought to bring these ideas to bear on theories of politics and morality. His scholarly work has won many prizes, including the Troland Award from the National Academy of Sciences, the Henry Dale Prize from the Royal Institution of Great Britain, the George Miller Prize from the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, and the Early Career Award and McCandless Prize from the American Psychological Association. He is Chair of the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary, and also writes frequently in the popular press, including The New York Times, Prospect, Slate, and The New Republic.

Introduction ; 1. Formal models of language learning ; 2. A computational theory of the mental imagery medium ; 3. Rules and connections in human language ; 4. When does human object recognition use a viewer-centered reference frame? ; 5. Natural language and natural selection ; 6. The acquisition of argument structure ; 7. The nature of human concepts: evidence from an unusual source ; 8. Why nature and nurture won't go away ; 9. The faculty of language: What's special about it? ; 10. So how does the mind work? ; 11. Deep commonalities between life and mind ; 12. Rationales for indirect speech: The theory of the strategic speaker ; 13. The cognitive niche: Coevolution of intelligence, sociality, and language ; Author Biography