Interview With Steven Pinker

As always, Pinker is entertaining. This is from the Guardian UK. As I have said before, I like Pinker a lot, even when I disagree with him completely. The great thing is that he makes me think and opens my thinking to other points of view.

Steven Pinker: The evolutionary man

John Crace meets the author and psychologist with a penchant for controversy

Tuesday June 17, 2008
The Guardian


Steven Pinker from Harvard University's department of psychology

Few academics come close to Steven Pinker in his grasp of image and imagery. With his trademark rock-star chic and an ear for a good soundbite, he has risen steadily to the top of the academic pile. In the heavily contested field of evolutionary psychology, Pinker has managed to consistently make sure that his voice is heard above most others, and along the way he has landed one of the top jobs at Harvard, while his books are usually to be found on the bestseller lists. And yet there is a twist. For a man who has dedicated a career to unpicking the secrets of language and thought, he has surprisingly often failed to make himself entirely clear to others. Either that, or he's a person whom some people choose to misunderstand.

You either love Pinker or you hate him. Indifference does not appear to be an option. He's either the welcome breath of fresh air who has blown away the old guard of behaviourist science in favour of an evolutionary, genetic approach to human development and language, or he's some kind of borderline-eugenicist, neo-Darwinian. There's little in-between.

Pinker treats his books, for which he is best known by the general public, as an intellectual and artistic licence, a medium that allows him to explore ideas with a freedom not allowed in peer-reviewed journals. So assertion and fact sometimes get conflated out of a desire to get the message across clearly. Yet the truth is that Pinker is nowhere near as confidently dogmatic as he can appear. Rather than trading in certainties, Pinker's real currency is the far less sexy one of statistical probability.

Certainty or best guess?

There's a telling passage near the beginning of his most recent book on language, The Stuff of Thought, in which Pinker makes the case for the defence of President Bush. There is, he points out, a world of difference between knowing something to be true and believing that you know something to be true. And if Bush believed he knew that Saddam Hussein was trying to stockpile nuclear weapons, then he isn't guilty of lying. For some people, the difference between knowing and believing may be just semantic wordplay, but for Pinker it is key to understanding how we use and understand language. And it applies to him as much as to anyone else. So how much of The Stuff of Thought is certainty and how much is his best guess?

"I'm not sure I'm the best person to ask," he says somewhat awkwardly. "I'm almost bound to inflate the likelihood of being right. But I would say somewhere in the region of 75%-90% is certain." He pauses for a short while. "Actually, I'd like to revise that. I'd say it was more like 25%-90%." That's a hell of a difference and a realistic appraisal of the limits of scientific knowledge at the outer edges of human development. The reality is that we don't know that much about language, thought and consciousness; and all Pinker is doing with his work is presenting his version as loudly and as clearly as possible.

Not that the possible fallout of being wrong is nearly so brutal this time round with The Stuff of Thought, as his exploration of the near universality of metaphor, innuendo and swearing are a comparatively uncontroversial window into human nature. Which cannot be said about two of his previous books, The Language Instinct and The Blank Slate, which argued that language is an evolutionary adaptive response to a set of problems and that human nature is primarily genetically innate. This may not sound that big a deal, but the knock-on ripples are. Follow Pinker's arguments to their logical conclusions, his critics argue, and you quickly reach a world where parents are redundant and biological and racial differences are genetically determined.

"I've never argued that humans are massively hot-wired," he says. "What I was trying to point out was that you can't understand how we learn unless you identify the learning mechanisms. And these have some genetic basis. We are not the same as cats, so it follows we must have some innate circuitry that allows us to talk and to be self-aware. All our behaviours are a result of neurophysiological activity in the brain. There is no reason to believe there is any magic going on. With its 100 billion neurons, the brain is highly complex and unpredictable; so what might look like freewill from the outside and what might feel like freewill from the inside is not some mysterious violation of the laws of physics."

Pinker goes on to suggest that we'll probably never really know exactly what part genetics plays in the differences between races and genders - "it's a taboo field of academic research" - but he has been prepared to accept that the claim that men and women's talents - and, by extension, those of different races - overlap but are not identical is quantifiably defensible. "Those who argue this is nothing more than racism or sexism are guilty of statistical illiteracy," he says. "Besides which, just because someone may have a genetic predisposition towards doing a particular thing, it doesn't follow they will automatically do it." Pinker himself is a case in point. While most scientists would accept that humans are genetically programmed to reproduce, Pinker has steadfastly resisted the temptation.

This could well be just a reflection of the relatively low status he gives parents in child development. "The idea that children are passive repositories to be shaped by their parents has been massively overstated," he says. "A child's peer group is a far greater determinant of its development and achievements than parental aspiration." Large parts of government social policy, too, are governed by the principle that parents are central to child development. So what does he suggest government should do instead? "It's a tough one," he admits. "But I think it would be better off looking at how cultural change is effected within society."

His views on parenting don't make him an easy person to interview. The standard practice is to try and draw together various threads from childhood to present a coherent portrait of how a life and ideas have been shaped. Yet all that goes out of the window with Pinker if you want to play by his rules. So what sort of him would be talking to me now if he hadn't had Jewish parents and hadn't been born in Montreal in the 1950s? "You mean if I'd been kidnapped at birth and placed with a working-class family somewhere completely different?" he laughs. "There are a lot of variables, but there's a better than average probability I would have been doing something in much the same scientific and intellectual fields."

Like most kids, Pinker had no real idea of what he wanted to do. "I used to like reading," he offers. "We had a set of encyclopaedias and I must have got through about 90% of them." So he was a bit of a nerd? "Yes. Wait, I mean a bit. I did have friends and I did subscribe to Rolling Stone." He was also a bit of a hippy on the sly - still is, you suspect, as he keeps his hair unfashionably long - and when the time came to go to college, he signed up for the year-old Dawson's College in Montreal. "It promised interdisciplinary courses and alternative styles of learning. I'm glad I went, but I came to realise there was something to be said for more traditional learning."

Cosmic questions

He went on to McGill University to read psychology. "When I heard about cognitive psychology [the study of human thinking and intelligence], I was hooked. Here was a subject situated between the great cosmic questions of human nature and the intractable experimental sciences." From there on in, Pinker had his mind set on a career as an academic. His mother wanted him to become a psychiatrist - "it was the 1970s and there were endless scare stories in the papers about people with PhDs driving cabs, and she wanted me to have something to fall back on". Not for the first time, Pinker chose to underline the futility of parental intervention and his career has since followed a high-flying mainstream trajectory at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford and Harvard.

There's no escaping the sharpness of Pinker's mind and his ideas, but he's also a very skilful agent provocateur, who understands perfectly how controversy can raise the profile. When the late Stephen Jay Gould - "he was the pontiff of US science who was always on the side of the angels. He even got to fill the slot reserved for intellectuals writing about baseball" - attacked evolutionary psychology as fatuous in the New York Review in 1997, Pinker did himself no harm by being the one to take him on. He says now that the spat was blown out of all proportion by journalists - "they just weren't used to anyone criticising Gould" - but he hasn't always seemed that eager to set the record straight in the past.

Pinker certainly shows no signs of abandoning his successful formula of mixing the counter-intuitive with good science. He had sleepless nights before the publication of The Blank Slate - "I knew I was going to get vilified for it in some quarters" - and he'd do well to get in a good supply of sleeping pills before his next book comes out - on how the world is now a far safer place, with fewer wars, genocides and homicides than at any time in its history. But is there a chance his controversy will become the norm and that he'll end up as a national institution just as his old sparring partner once was? "I like ice hockey," he laughs. "No one is ever going to ask me to write about that as a metaphor for life. It's just a bunch of people beating the shit out of each other chasing the puck." Sounds like as good a metaphor as any to me.

Curriculum vitae

Age: 53

Job: Johnstone Family professor of psychology, Harvard University

Books: The Language Instinct; The Blank Slate; The Stuff of Thought

Likes: Ice hockey, photography, kayaking

Dislikes: grading exams, income tax, paying bills

Married to Rebecca Goldstein, no children

Tags: Interview, Steven Pinker, Guardian UK, Psychology, language, neuroscience, linguistics, evolutionary psychology, genetics, The Language Instinct, The Blank Slate, The Stuff of Thought