Who is Steve pinker?

[Beeth]

I thought he was a leftist - he did say somewhere that our minds are subject to bourgeois ideologies ... or something similar. But it seems he's also attacked Marx, Engels, comparing them to dictators. Others claim he is a racist hiding behind evolutionary psycholgy.

[Dazdra Flynn]

He's a linguist, isn't he? It doesn't strike me as all that odd that he would on the one hand adopt some conclusion of Marxist analysis and then have to sanitize himself by denouncing Engels and Marx. It feels like a lot of Western academics, no matter how left they lean, are compelled to accept the neoliberal conception of communism as a matter of maintaining credibility.

[ÑóẊîöʼn]

Why don't you read him in his own words and judge for yourself?

[Beeth]

Why don't you read him in his own words and judge for yourself?

He confuses me, which is why I asked for clarification.

[Kenco Smooth]

He's a cognitive psychologist and linguist whose best known for his popular works in which he supports cognitivism as the best method of understanding the mind and behaviour, the idea that behaviour amongst all animals including humans is largely hereditary, and the validity of evolutionary psychology. Politically I'd probably place him as a near-centre liberal (not in a pejorative sense). Most certainly not a Marxist.

Not a racist but the simple fact that he's not willing to a priori rule out the possibility of group differences has got him criticism from a lot of people who think that the question shouldn't even be asked.

[smellincoffee]

I don't know what his opinions regarding leftism are, but on the nature/nuture debate, he is decidedly for Nature as the dominant shaper of human minds. He especially likes twin studies that demonstrate that two twins share the same opinions despite being raised in different households.

It's a few years distant now, but I read The Blank Slate and seem to remember him taking issue with the belief in the Soviet "New Man", which makes sense given his stress on genetics.

[Luís Henrique]

According to Wikipedia,


He has said, "I was never religious in the theological sense... I never outgrew my conversion to atheism at 13, but at various times was a serious cultural Jew (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secular_Jewish_culture)."[19] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Pinker#cite_note-Douglas-19) As a teenager, he says he considered himself an anarchist until he witnessed civil unrest (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_unrest) following a police strike in 1969 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray-Hill_riot).[20] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Pinker#cite_note-20) He has reported the result of a test of his political orientation that characterized him as "neither leftist nor rightist, more libertarian than authoritarian".[21] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Pinker#cite_note-genome-21) Pinker confesses to having "experienced a primitive tribal stirring" after his genes were shown to trace back to the Middle East.Wikipedia being what it is, I have checked the sources, and they do support what the article says (except for source #20, which is not online; the reference, however, expands into his thoughts, reporting that he has written that


As a young teenager in proudly peaceable Canada during the romantic 1960s, I was a true believer in Bakunin's anarchism. I laughed off my parents' argument that if the government ever laid down its arms all hell would break loose. Our competing predictions were put to the test at 8:00 A.M. on October 17, 1969, when the Montreal police went on strike. ... This decisive empirical test left my politics in tatters (and offered a foretaste of life as a scientist).

If he indeed wrote that (and, Wikipedia being what it is, it is quite probable that he didn't) then his "true belief" in Bakunin's anarchism was matched by a complete lack of knowledge about it - particularly about the notion that statelessness cannot be achieved without classlessness).

Luís Henrique