Quotessence
Home / Authors / Steven Pinker
Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker Quotes

Psychologist

Filter quotes by topic

AllPeopleHumansLanguageIfsViolencePsychologyWorldHuman NatureThinkingReasonMindBrainEvolutionWayGenesBelieveKnowsMoralIdeasMen

Famous Steven Pinker Quotes

“The moral sense is a gadget, like stereo vision or intuitions about number. It is an assembly of neural circuits cobbled together from older parts of the primate brain and shaped by natural selection to do a job. That does not mean that morality is a figment of our imagination, any more than the evolution of depth perception means that 3-D space is a figment of our imagination. [...] But it does mean that the moral sense is laden with quirks and prone to systematic error-moral illusions, as it were just like our other faculties.”

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

“The Blank Slate is today's Great Chain of Being: a doctrine that is widely embraced as a rationale for meaning and morality and that is under assault from the sciences of the day. As in the century following Galilee, our moral sensibilities will adjust to the biological facts, not only because facts are facts but because the moral credentials of the Blank Slate are just as spurious.”

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

“Evolution is central to the understanding of life, including human life. Like all living things, we are outcomes of natural selection; we got here because we inherited traits that allowed our ancestors to survive, find mates, and reproduce. This momentous fact explains our deepest strivings: why having a thankless child is sharper than a serpent's tooth, why it is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife, why we do not go gentle into that good night but rage, rage against the dying of the light”

PsychologyHuman NatureEvolution
Author:Steven Pinker
Create image

“Thinking is computation, I claim, but that does not mean that the computer is a good metaphor for the mind. The mind is a set of modules, but the modules are not encapsulated boxes or circumscribed swatches on the surface of the brain. The organization of our mental modules comes from our genetic program, but that does not mean that there is a gene for every trait or that learning is less important than we used to think. The mind is an adaptation designed by natural selection, but that does not mean that everything we think, feel, and do is biologically adaptive. We evolved from apes, but that does not mean we have the same minds as apes. And the ultimate goal of natural selection is to propagate genes, but that does not mean that the ultimate goal of people is to propagate genes.”

MindPsychologyEvolutionEvolutionary Psychology
Book:How the Mind Works
Create image

“Aside from supplying a direct justification for violent conflict, the ideology of intergroup struggle ignites a nasty feature of human social psychology: the tendency to divide people into in-groups and out-groups and to treat the out-groups as less than human. It doesn't matter whether the groups are thought to be defined by their biology or by their history. Psychologists have found that they can create instant intergroup hostility by sorting people on just about any pretext, including the flip of a coin.”

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

“The alternative, then, to the religious theory of the source of values is that evolution endowed us with a moral sense, and we have expanded its circle of application over the course of history through reason (grasping the logical interchangeability of our interests and others'), knowledge (learning of the advantages of cooperation over the long term), and sympathy (having experiences that allow us to feel other people's pain).”

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

“The history of religion shows that God has commanded people to do all manner of selfish and cruel acts [...]. The recurrence of evil acts committed in the name of God shows that they are not random perversions. An omnipotent authority that no one can see is a useful backer for malevolent leaders hoping to enlist holy warriors. And since unverifiable beliefs have to be passed along from parents and peers rather than discovered in the world, they differ from group to group and become divisive identity badges.”

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

“According to the relativistic wisdom prevailing in much of academia today, reality is socially constructed by the use of language, stereotypes, and media images. The idea that people have access to facts about the world is naïve, say the proponents of social constructionism, science studies, cultural studies, critical theory, postmodernism, and deconstructionism. In their view, observations are always infected by theories, and theories are saturated with ideology and political doctrines, so anyone who claims to have the facts or know the truth is just trying to exert power over everyone else.”

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

“Relativists have a point when they say that we don't just open our eyes and apprehend reality, as if perception were a window through which the soul gazes at the world. The idea that we just see things as they are is called naïve realism, and it was refuted by skeptical philosophers thousands of years ago with the help of a simple phenomenon: visual illusions.”

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

“Violence is a social and political problem, not just a biological and psychological one. Nonetheless, the phenomena we call ‘social’ and ‘political’ are not external happenings that mysteriously affect human affairs… they are shared understandings among individuals at a given time and place.”

PhilosophySciencePoliticsPsychologyViolenceSocietyHuman NatureSociologyEvolutionary PsychologySocial Theory
Book:The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
Create image

“Some people think that evolutionary psychology claims to have discovered that human nature is selfish and wicked. But they are flattering the researchers and anyone who would claim to have discovered the opposite. No one needs a scientist to measure whether humans are prone to knavery. The question has been answered in the history books, the newspapers, the ethnographic record, and the letters to Ann Landers. But people treat it like an open question, as if someday science might discover that it's all a bad dream and we will wake up to find that it is human nature to love one another.”

PeopleIfsThinkingNeedsHumansHas BeensBookDreamMightPsychologyRecordsHuman NatureLettersOppositesScientistTreatsClaimsWake UpSelfishNewspapersWickedSomedayEvolutionary PsychologyResearchersFlatteringLove One AnotherHistory BooksBad DreamKnavery
Author:Steven Pinker
Create image

“The task of evolutionary psychology is not to weigh in on human nature, a task better left to others. It is to add the satisfying kind of insight that only science can provide: to connect what we know about human nature with the rest of our knowledge of how the world works, and to explain the largest number of facts with the smallest number of assumptions.”

KnowsWorldHumansKindFactsLeftNumbersPsychologyHuman NatureTasksAddInsightAssumptionSatisfyingSmallestEvolutionary Psychology
Book:How the Mind Works
Create image