Steven Pinker is Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. 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 eight books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, Words and Rules, The Blank Slate, The Stuff of Thought, and, most recently, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.

• Introduction ; 1. Formal models of language learning ; 2. A computational theory of the mental imagery medium ; 3. Rules and connections in human language ; 4. When does human object recognition use a viewer-centered reference frame? ; 5. Natural language and natural selection ; 6. The acquisition of argument structure ; 7. The nature of human concepts: evidence from an unusual source ; 8. Why nature and nurture won't go away ; 9. The faculty of language: What's special about it? ; 10. So how does the mind work? ; 11. Deep commonalities between life and mind ; 12. Rationales for indirect speech: The theory of the strategic speaker ; 13. The cognitive niche: Coevolution of intelligence, sociality, and language ; Author Biography

Pinker is a star, and the world of science is lucky to have him."