Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence
Steven Pinker in conversation with Tyler Cowen at George Mason University, November 2016. Episode 14 of Conversations with Tyler. Recorded as Pinker was drafting what became Enlightenment Now; the conversation previews that project’s central claims alongside a wide-ranging tour of his earlier work on language and cognition.
Key ideas
- Language rests on two competing systems — rote memory (irregular forms stored item by item) and a combinatorial rule system (add -ed). Irregular verbs erode over generations because they can only survive if heard often enough to memorise; frequency is their only protection. This dual-mechanism view dissolves the nature-nurture debate: what is innate is an ability to learn, not a stock of memorised words. See Levels of Explanation for the broader principle that different mechanisms can operate at different levels of description.
- The hard problem of consciousness may be permanently insoluble — not because the solution requires new physics, but because the mind reflecting on itself hits an inherent wall. All conscious experience has a physical correlate; what remains puzzling is why there is any subjective experience at all. Pinker calls this position ‘mysterianism,’ following Colin McGinn and Tom Nagel’s ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’ Neither materialism nor dualism: physical all the way down, but intuition runs out.
- Reason is committed by any act of questioning — Hume’s point that reason is a slave to the passions is a conceptual claim (you can’t derive goals from logic), not the psychological claim that people are permanently irrational. The very act of argument presupposes rationality. Backcasting from reduced violence, reduced poverty, and expanded freedom, Pinker argues that reason has improved the world across long timescales.
- The Enlightenment manifesto in preview — Pinker announces his next book (The New Enlightenment, later published as Enlightenment Now): the Enlightenment philosophers got a lot right; quantified dimensions of human well-being are going in a good direction; the case is empirical, not utopian. This is the 2016 statement of the thesis he would defend at length in 2018.
- Group selection is a category error — in the Q&A, Pinker rejects group selection as a Darwinian mechanism. Declines in violence operate on timescales too short (Germany: one generation from most militarist to most pacifist culture) to be explained by gene-frequency change; the mechanisms are cultural and institutional, not evolutionary in the biological sense.
Sections
- Irregular verbs as window into the memory-rule dichotomy in language
- Chomsky’s universal grammar: what remains, what does not
- Theory of mind; modularity versus a unified cognition
- The hard problem of consciousness and mysterianism (Nagel, McGinn, Dennett)
- Determinism, chaos, and practical free will
- The Enlightenment case for reason and progress; Hume, Hayek, and limits of rationality
- Underrated/Overrated: rap, aerobic exercise, behavioural economics, the passive voice
- Future of violence; existential threats; the Fermi paradox
- Bioengineering and CRISPR: the polygenic reality
- Q&A: language extinction; euphemism treadmill; group selection; next book
Cross-references
- Levels of Explanation — the dual-mechanism account of language is a worked example
- Hemisphere Lateralisation — consciousness; the hard problem surfaces in both Pinker and McGilchrist but with different conclusions
- Panpsychism — Pinker rejects any non-physical residue; compare the Lennox and McGilchrist positions
- John Lennox on Has Science Buried God, Levels of Explanation, and Evidence-Based Faith — Lennox raises the same ‘hard problem’ against pure materialism