On Language

Steven Pinker is a professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, and in 1994 will become director of its McDonnell-Pew Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. He received his B.K from McGill University in 1976 and his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1979, both in experimental psychology, and taught at Harvard and Stanford before joining the faculty of MIT in 1982. He has done research in visual cognition and the psychology of language, and is the author of Language Learnability and Language Development (1984) and Learnability and Cognition (1989) and the editor of Visual Cognition (1985), Connections and Symbol (1988, with Jacques Mehler), and Lexical and Conceptual Semantics (1992, with Beth Levin). He was the recipient of the Early Career Award in 1984 and the Boyd McCandless Award in 1986 from the American Psychological Association, a Graduate Teaching Award from MIT in 1986, and the Troland Research Award from the National Academy of Sciences in 1993. His newest book, The Language Instinct, will be published by William Morrow & Company in January 1994.Psycholog

Indirect Speech, Politeness, Deniability, and Relationship Negotiation: Comment on Marina Terkourafi's “The Puzzle of Indirect Speech”

Psycholog

George A. Miller (1920–2012)

Presents an obituary for George A. Miller (1920—2012). Miller ranks among the most important psychologists of the 20th century. In addition to writing one of the best known papers in the history of psychology (“The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information,” published in Psychological Review in 1956), Miller also fomented the cognitive revolution, invented psycholinguistics and cognitive psychology, imported powerful ideas from the theories of information, communication, grammar, semantics, and artificial intelligence, and left us a sparkling oeuvre that proves that a rigorous scientist needn’t write in soggy prose. Honors rained down on Miller. APA gave him the Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions (1963), the American Psychological Foundation Gold Medal Award for Life Achievement in Psychological Science (1990), the William James Book Award (1992, for The Science of Words), and the Award for Lifetime Contributions to Psychology (2003), and named a prize after him, as did the Cognitive Neuroscience Society. Miller was also honored by the Association for Psychological Science and the American Speech and Hearing Association. In 2000, he won the John P. McGovern Award in the Behavioral Sciences from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and in 1991, the National Medal of Science, the country’s highest scientific honor.Psycholog

Decline of Violence: Taming the Devil Within Us

We are getting smarter, and as a result the world is becoming a more peaceful place, says Steven Pinker.Psycholog

Representations and Decision Rules in the Theory of Self-Deception

Self-deception is a powerful but overapplied theory. It is adaptive only when a deception-detecting audience is in the loop, not when an inaccurate representation is invoked as an internal motivator. First, an inaccurate representation cannot be equated with self-deception, which entails two representations, one inaccurate and the other accurate. Second, any motivational advantages are best achieved with an adjustment to the decision rule on when to act, not with a systematic error in an internal representation.Psycholog

Why Nature & Nurture Won't Go Away

Psycholog

Żegnaj, przemocy

Od wieków przemocy jest coraz mniej. Prawdopodobnie żyjemy dziś w najspokojniejszej epoce w dziejach człowieka na ziem

Social inequality, poverty and social redistribution

In this essay, I review developments in the ongoing debate about the causal connections between poverty, personal behaviour and social inequality. I also discuss the normative issues that arise in defining poverty and in deciding what role redistributive social policies ought to play in its prevention and relief.I go on to compare the behavioural explanations of the causes of poverty that are normatively associated with theories of economic market liberalism and the structural explanations that are grounded in theories of socialism and other more pluralist forms of social-democratic collectivism.I conclude that these two unitary ideologies of individualism and collectivism are reaching the end of their useful lives as exclusive guides in shaping the ends and means of social policies. In democratic societies, compromises have to be made between radically different views about what constitutes an equitable distribution of wealth and income, and what kind of balance should be struck between the claims of freedom and welfare. Viable compromises on these divisive issues can only be reached in the mixed economies of democratic pluralist societies