Steven Pinker: Critical Responses

Steven Pinker is a controversial scholar in many fields and a popular voice on social media. His books and talks are followed by millions of thoughtful readers, not confined to academics. He has written and spoken about violence, rationality, sex differences, human nature, language as a biological instinct, and other topics. Pinker’s many best-selling books include Rationality (2021), Enlightenment Now (2018), The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011), The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (2002), and How the Mind Works (1997). In Steven Pinker: Critical Responses, a number of distinguished writers from various backgrounds give us searching criticisms of Pinker’s theory and world-view, reflecting a diversity of political and scientific perspectives. In different ways they call into question many of Pinker’s methods, assumptions, and conclusions. Steven Pinker: Critical Responses is the fourth volume in the Critical Responses series, which brings together criticisms of famous public intellectuals with a major following on social media, treated seriously but without academic pretensions or trappings. Ray Scott Percival is a philosopher who has taught at Lancaster University and the United Arab Emirates University. He founded the Karl Popper Web and the Enlightenment Defended page on Facebook. He is the author of The Myth of the Closed Mind: Understanding Why and How People Are Rational (2012).