Quotessence
Home / Authors / Steven Pinker
Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker Quotes

Psychologist

Filter quotes by topic

AllPeopleHumansLanguageIfsViolencePsychologyWorldHuman NatureThinkingReasonMindBrainEvolutionWayGenesBelieveKnowsMoralIdeasMen

Famous Steven Pinker Quotes

“Left to our own devices, we are apt to backslide to our instinctive conceptual ways. This underscores the place of education in a scientifically literate democracy, and even suggests a statement of purpose for it (a surprisingly elusive principle in higher education today). The goal of education is to make up for the shortcomings in our instinctive ways of thinking about the physical and social world. And education is likely to succeed not by trying to implant abstract statements in empty minds but by taking the mental models that are our standard equipment, applying them to new subjects in selective analogies, and assembling them into new and more sophisticated combinations.”

LanguageEducationLearningMetaphorThoughtEducational PhilosophyThought ProcessAnalogy
Book:The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature
Create image

“Why do we say razzle-dazzle instead of dazzle-razzle? Why super-duper, helter-skelter, harum-scarum, hocus-pocus, willy-nilly, hully-gully, roly-poly, holy moly, herky-jerky, walkie-talkie, namby-pamby, mumbo-jumbo, loosey-goosey, wing-ding, wham-bam, hobnob, razza-matazz, and rub-a-dub-dub? I thought you'd never ask. Consonants differ in "obstruency"—the degree to which they impede the flow of air, ranging from merely making it resonate, to forcing it noisily past an obstruction, to stopping it up altogether. The word beginning with the less obstruent consonant always comes before the word beginning with the more obstruent consonant. Why ask why?”

LanguageLinguisticsPhonetics
Book:The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language
Create image

“Space and force pervade language. Many cognitive scientists (including me) have concluded from their research on language that a handful of concepts about places, paths, motions, agency, and causation underlie the literal or figurative meanings of tens of thousands of words and constructions, not only in English but in every other language that has been studied.”

Has BeensLanguageForceSpacePathEvolutionResearchConceptsScientistIncludingAgencyConstructionHandfulLiteralCognitiveCausation
Book:How the Mind Works
Create image

“I think that metaphor really is a key to explaining thought and language. The human mind comes equipped with an ability to penetrate the cladding of sensory appearance and discern the abstract construction underneath - not always on demand, and not infallibly, but often enough and insightfully enough to shape the human condition. Our powers of analogy allow us to apply ancient neural structures to newfound subject matter, to discover hidden laws and systems in nature, and not least, to amplify the expressive power of language itself.”

ThinkingMindHumansMatterEnoughLawLanguageAbilityConditionsSubjectsKeysShapesDemandStructureAncientMetaphorAppearanceAbstractHuman MindConstructionHuman ConditionExplainingPenetrateSubject MatterAnalogiesSensoryExpressiveAmplifyPower Of Language
Book:The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature
Create image

“Education is a technology that tries to make up for what the human mind is innately bad at. Children don't have to go to school to learn how to walk, talk, recognize objects, or remember the personalities of their friends, even though these tasks are much harder than reading, adding, or remembering dates in history. They do have to go to school to learn written language, arithmetic, and science, because those bodies of knowledge and skill were invented too recently for any species-wide knack for them to have evolved.”

TryingMindHumansChildrenBodySchoolRememberReadingLanguageWalksTechnologyWrittenObjectsPersonalitySkillsTasksHarderSpeciesWideHuman MindArithmeticKnackWritten Language
Author:Steven Pinker
Create image

“Language surely does affect our thoughts, rather than just labeling them for the sake of labeling them. Most obviously, language is the conduit through which people share their thoughts and intentions and thereby acquire the knowledge, customs, and values of those around them."”

PeopleDoeValuesLanguageShareIntentionSakeAcquireCustomsOur ThoughtsLabeling
Book:The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
Create image

“Gossip is certainly one of the things that language is useful for, because it's always handy to know who needs a favor, who can offer a favor, who's available, who's under the protection of a jealous spouse. And being the first to get a piece of gossip is like engaging in insider trading: You can capitalize on an opportunity before anyone else can.”

KnowsNeedsFirstsOpportunityLanguagePiecesOffersAvailableProtectionFavorsGossipJealousSpouseEngagingTradingHandyInsidersInsider Trading
Author:Steven Pinker
Create image

“When a scientist considers all high-tech mental machinery needed to arrange words into ordinary sentences, prescriptive rules are, at best, inconsequential little decorations. The very fact that they have to be drilled shows that they are alien to the natural workings of the language system. One can choose to obsess over prescriptive rules, but they have no more to do with language than the criteria for judging cats at a cat show have to do with mammalian biology.”

LittlesFactsShowsLanguageNaturalJudgingNeededOrdinaryCatScientistSentencesAliensBiologyMachineryCriteriaDecorationInconsequential
Book:The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language
Create image