Pinker has written about language and cognitive science for both specialist and popular audiences. He is most famous for his work on how children acquire language and for his skillful popularisation of Noam Chomsky's work on language as an innate faculty of mind. Pinker has suggested an evolutionary mechanism for this faculty, but his idea remains controversial.
Gen Kuroki's Unofficial Web Page about Steven Pinker (http://www.math.tohoku.ac.jp/~kuroki/Pinker/)
Criticisms of Evolutionary Psychology (http://www.psy.plym.ac.uk/year3/psy364criticisms-evolutionary-psychology/psy364criticisms-evolutionary_psychology.htm)
Negative evidence refers to information about which strings of words are not grammatical sentences in the language, such as corrections or other forms of feedback from a parent that tell the child that one of his or her utterances is ungrammatical.
Many models of language acquisition assume that the input to the child consists of a sentence and a representation of the meaning of that sentence, inferred from context and from the child's knowledge of the meanings of the words (e.g.
Still, Pinker insists that the doctrine of the blank slate is one of a trio of views that have dominated modern life, wreaking havoc in education, politics, and culture generally.
Pinker thinks that this bad idea has obstructed the emergence of a genuine science of the mind, which is still struggling to emerge from its oppression.
Pinker notices the problem, but minimizes it on the grounds that if you think there is nothing there to begin with, then at least you think there is nothing harmful there, and that is half-way to accommodating the idea of innate purity and nobility.
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