Steven Pinker Quotes - Page 6

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Photography is a kind of virtual reality, and it helps if you can create the illusion of being in an interesting world.

Steven Pinker

Inspiring, Photography, Reality

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The art of photography is all about directing the attention of the viewer.

Steven Pinker

Photography, Art, Attention

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People do not think in English or Chinese or Apache; they think in a language of thought. This language of thought probably looks a bit like all these languagesBut compared with any given language, mentalese must be richer in some ways and simpler in others.

Steven Pinker

Thinking, People, Chinese

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By denying people's sense of visual beauty in painting and sculpture , melody in music , meter and rhyme in poetry , plot and narrative and character in fiction , the elite arts wrote off the vast majority of their audience . They purposely excluded people who approach art in part for pleasure and edification in favour of social one-upmanship and an ever-narrowing, in-crowd elite.

Steven Pinker

Art, Character, People

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No matter how inured you get to atrocities, you're still always stunned and shocked by how cruel and wasteful Homo sapiens can be.

Steven Pinker

Atrocities, Matter, Stills

"Is Human Violence On The Wane?". Science Friday with Ira Flatow, www.npr.org. October 7, 2011.

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An enormous amount of scientific language is metaphorical. We talk about a genetic code, where code originally meant a cipher; we talk about the solar system model of the atom as though the atom were like a sun and moon and planets.

Steven Pinker

Moon, Atoms, Ciphers

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A word is an arbitrary label - that's the foundation of linguistics. But many people think otherwise. They believe in word magic: that uttering a spell, incantation, curse, or prayer can change the world. Don't snicker: Would you ever say, 'Nothing has gone wrong yet' without looking for wood to knock?

Steven Pinker

Prayer, Believe, Thinking

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There's guilt about our treatment of native peoples in modern intellectual life, and an unwillingness to acknowledge there could be anything good about Western culture.

Steven Pinker

Intellectual, Guilt, Western Culture

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Fiction is empathy technology.

Steven Pinker

Technology, Empathy, Fiction

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As technology accumulates and people in more parts of the planet become interdependent, the hatred between them tends to decrease, for the simple reason that you can't kill someone and trade with him too.

Steven Pinker

Technology, Simple, People

Steven Pinker (2003). “The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature”, p.232, Penguin

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Conventions are unstated agreements within a community to abide by a single way of doing things - not because there is any inherent advantage to the choice, but because there is an advantage to everyone making the same choice.

Steven Pinker

Agreement, Choices, Community

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A decent government with an effective, but not gratuitously violent, police force and a fair court system are essential. This deters and incapacitates psychopaths, bullies and hotheads - and if it earns the confidence of the people, they don't have to become violent in self-defence.

Steven Pinker

Government, Self, People

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Maybe philosophical problems are hard not because they are divine or irreducible or meaningless or workaday science, but because the mind of Homo sapiens lacks the cognitive equipment to solve them. We are organisms, not angels, and our minds are organs, not pipelines to the truth. Our minds evolved by natural selection to solve problems that were life-and-death matters to our ancestors, not to commune with correctness ot to answer any question we are capable of asking.

Steven Pinker

Philosophical, Angel, Mind

"How the Mind Works". Book by Steven Pinker, 1997.

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The last 100 years of research into the human brain...sees the brain as an organ that works by physical principles just like the other organs in the body...our emotions and higher callings, such as religion, as well as our grubby low-level physical systems like stereo vision and motor control, are products of a machine.

Steven Pinker

Fear, Years, Brain

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However much we might deplore the profit motive, or consumerist values, if everyone just wants i-Pods we would probably be better off than if they wanted class revolution.

Steven Pinker

Class, Want, Might

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If people are innately saddled with certain sins and flaws, like selfishness, prejudice, sort-sightedness, and self-deception, then political reform would seem to be a waste of time.

Steven Pinker

Self, People, Political

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The moral, then, is that familiar categories of behavior - marriage customs, food taboos, folk superstitions, and so on - certainly do vary across cultures and have to be learned, but the deeper mechanisms of mental computation that generate them may be universal and innate.

Steven Pinker

Culture, May, Superstitions

Steven Pinker (2003). “The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature”, p.66, Penguin

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For example, parents who talk a lot to their children have kids with better language skills, parents who spank have children who grow up to be violent, parents who are neither too authoritarian or too lenient have children who are well-adjusted, and so on.

Steven Pinker

Children, Growing Up, Kids

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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.

Steven Pinker

Agency, Space, Research

Steven Pinker (2009). “How the Mind Works”, p.355, W. W. Norton & Company

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'Capitalism' is a dirty word for many intellectuals, but there are a number of studies showing that open economies and free trade are negatively correlated with genocide and war.

Steven Pinker

War, Dirty, Numbers

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Human nature is complex. Even if we do have inclinations toward violence, we also have inclination to empathy, to cooperation, to self-control.

Steven Pinker

Self, Empathy, Violence

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Most intellectuals today have a phobia of any explanation of the mind that invokes genetics.

Steven Pinker

Mind, Today, Genetics

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The elegant study... is consistent with the themes of modern cognitive neuroscience . Every aspect of thought and emotion is rooted in brain structure and function, including many psychological disorders and, presumably, genius. The study confirms that the brain is a modular system comprising multiple intelligences, mostly nonverbal.

Steven Pinker

Psychological Disorders, Brain, Genius

"On Einstein's brain". The New York Times, June 24, 1999.

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As long as your ideology identifies the main source of the world's ills as a definable group, it opens the world up to genocide.

Steven Pinker

Long, Groups, World

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Language is a window into human nature, but it is also a fistula, an open wound through which we're exposed to an infectious world.

Steven Pinker

World, Language, Human Nature

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Born: September 18, 1954
Occupation: Psychologist
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