Steven Arthur Pinker is a prominent Canadian-American experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, and author of popular science. Pinker is known for his wide-ranging explorations of human nature and its relevance to language, history, morality, politics, and everyday life. He conducts research on language and cognition, writes for publications such as the New York Times, Time, and The New Republic, and is the author of numerous books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, Words and Rules, The Blank Slate, The Stuff of Thought, The Better Angels of Our Nature, The Sense of Style, and most recently, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.
Books in order of publication:
Language Learnability and Language Development. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 1984.
Visual Cognition (1st MIT Press ed.). Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. 1985.
Connections and Symbols (1st MIT Press ed.). Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. 1988.
Learnability and Cognition: The Acquisition of Argument Structure. 1989.
Lexical and Conceptual Semantics. 1992.
The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language. 1994.
How the Mind Works. 1997.
Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language (1999)
The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (2002)
The Best American Science and Nature Writing (editor and introduction author, 2004)
The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature (2007)
The Seven Words You Can’t Say on Television (2008)
The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (2011)
Language, Cognition, and Human Nature: Selected Articles (2013)
The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century (September 30, 2014)
Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (February 13, 2018)
Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters (September 28, 2021)
When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows…: Common Knowledge and the Science of Harmony, Hypocrisy and Outrage. London: Allen Lane. 2025.
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