Rather than make my own post, I’ve placed my personal justification for signing the petition below, as a comment. I’m definitely old enough to count as a “senior scholar”.
Why I signed the petition concerning Steven Pinker’s status as a Fellow of the LSA
Charles Reiss, Concordia University
Steven Pinker is probably the most successful popularizer of modern linguistics and an accomplished scholar and public intellectual. I have learned from reading his work, and I often assign his writings to my students, including his insightful and funny obituary of Roger Brown. The petition does not criticize Pinker’s academic qualifications, and I myself value his academic work. However, I signed the petition asking the Linguistic Society of America to rescind his status as a Fellow for the same reason I stopped reading his books after The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. I heard Pinker lecture on the book and I read it carefully. I do not believe that Pinker is racist or sexist, and I don’t think he is being consciously dishonest. I am willing to admit that some of the charges laid out in the petition may be overblown.
However, I believe that in that book and elsewhere, Pinker has repeatedly been intellectually sloppy in matters of importance, matters on which linguists in general are in agreement. His stature as a public intellectual makes this sloppiness irresponsible, and whatever the explanation, he is not a good representative of the intellectual standards of the LSA. Here is one example of what I mean:
Chapter 1 of another book linking the idea of Universal Grammar (UG) to human nature, Ray Jackendoff’s Patterns in the Mind: Language and Human Nature makes it crystal clear that when linguists extend the idea of Universal Grammar to other aspects of human nature, we are not using this term to understand differences among individuals: NOT “What makes one person fat and another skinny, one sociable and one shy, one good at math and another good at art?” And Jackendoff is equally clear that we are not using this term to understand differences among groups: NOT “Could people differ in intelligence, social behavior, or moral qualities along lines of race or gender or culture?” Jackendoff presents the standard view that, I think, every linguist holds about UG (whether or not that linguist is a sceptic about the whole idea, or maybe about specific proposals): When we linguists talk about UG, we are talking about human nature “at the level of the species: What makes human beings the way they are? How are we different from animals? How are we like other animals and different from computers?”
Pinker’s The Blank Slate, presents itself as belonging to the same intellectual tradition as Jackendoff’s, for example by building on the notion of innate, species wide Universal Grammar as a component of human nature. However, Pinker continually slips and slides between the talk of human nature and innate capacities at the species level and the question of whether certain ethnic groups are innately more gifted than others, and also the question of individual differences, including sex/gender-based ones. What Jackendoff makes clear, Pinker obscures. I remember during the The Blank Slate lecture (almost two decades ago) being drawn in by Pinker’s charisma as a speaker, only to realize that he had just suggested that certain ethnic groups must be innately better at being merchants than others. The passage in the lecture was related to this passage (itself containing some quoted material) on page 151 of the book:
If people are assumed to start out identical but some end up wealthier than others, observers may conclude that the wealthier ones must be more rapacious. And as the diagnosis slides from talent to sin, the remedy can shift from redistribution to vengeance. Many atrocities of the twentieth century were committed in the name of egalitarianism, targeting people whose success was taken as evidence of their criminality. The kulaks (“bourgeois peasants”) were exterminated by Lenin and Stalin in the Soviet Union; teachers, former landlords, and “rich peasants” were humiliated, tortured, and murdered during China’s Cultural Revolution; city dwellers and literate professionals were worked to death or executed during the reign of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. “Educated and entrepreneurial minorities who have prospered in their adopted regions, such as the Indians in East Africa and Oceania, the Ibos in Nigeria, the Armenians in Turkey, the Chinese in Indonesia and Malaysia, and the Jews almost everywhere, have been expelled from their homes or killed in pogroms because their visibly successful members were seen as parasites and exploiters.”
The beginning of the paragraph is about prominent individuals, peasants, teachers, and professionals who were targeted for their success by their (ethnically identical) community. Pinker suggests that they were picked on because communists can’t handle the idea that some people are smarter than others. My understanding of Pinker’s reasoning in the last (quoted) sentence, based on the book as a whole and on his lecture, is that successful ethnic minorities get oppressed and killed because of a similar denial of the possibility that they might just be innately better, have a better “human nature” than that of other groups. I don’t see another plausible reading, but I am happy to be corrected. (Pinker is slippery here, since he refers to the “visibly successful members” of minority groups, but if that’s all that matters, then the whole discussion of ethnic groups is irrelevant.)
Pinker should know better. He surely understands that his discussion of UG in Chapter 3 of The Blank Slate is relevant (by the definition of Universal Grammar) to arguments in favor of “human nature” only at the species level (à la Jackendoff), and definitely not at the individual or group level. Jumping to the end of the wide-ranging book, the final Part VI consists of a single chapter that draws on the earlier Parts as well as some literary vignettes, the whole thing arguing for a mishmash of claims for innate/genetically determined differences among individuals and Jackendoff’s kind of built-in species level capacities. Then there’s an Appendix that follows Part VI is called “Donald E. Brown’s List of Human Universals” and it “consists primarily of ‘surface’ universals of behavior and overt language noted by ethnographers.” So, Part VI is a confusing mixture of two notions of human nature that Jackendoff carefully distinguished (individual vs. species), and the Appendix is all about the species level. Whatever you think about Pinker’s arguments and discussion at the end of the book, one of the hottest issues he touches earlier, that of the potentially innate superiority of certain ethnic groups, doesn’t even arise here. So, the book starts out and ends up looking like a somewhat disorganized mix of arguments concerning species-level and individual-level innate capacities, but in the passage I quoted, and elsewhere in the middle, Pinker sloppily adopts the rhetoric and arguments of those issues to suggest that the denial of the inherent, innate superiority of certain groups can be dangerous.
A second, related way in which Pinker fails, in my opinion, to represent linguistics well, relates to our training to think about how to structure arguments in terms of choosing the “null hypothesis” that should be maintained in the absence of arguments to the contrary. In phonology research (like my own), screwing up the null hypothesis is not a big deal in terms of issues of social justice, but when discussing human nature, thoughtless decisions can be offensive. Maybe accountants of ethnicity X are genetically predisposed to commit tax fraud, or bar owners of ethnicity Y are genetically predisposed to water down their liquor (perhaps a manifestation of the good merchant gene?). Adopting either of these as a null hypothesis would be offensive. Under cover of his slick writing, Pinker sometimes chooses, as his null hypothesis, equally offensive positions. Of course, nobody has shown that there are no genetically based differences in the capacity to be a merchant between, say Armenians and the Inuit, and (referring to Pinker’s discussion with Liz Spelke on this topic) nobody has proved that the under-representation of women in the sciences is actually due to issues like being barred from higher education for most of history and is not due to inherent differences between men and women. But Pinker’s choice of the null hypothesis in such cases has no intellectual justification, and in the context of everything we do know about history, these choices are either naive or offensive.
My decision to sign the petition and support the request to rescind Pinker’s status as a trustworthy representative of the field is based on these two kinds of sloppiness: (i)his failure to use the term human nature in the coherent manner that is universally taken to be relevant in linguistics where we maintain the crucial distinctions that Jackendoff so carefully laid out, and (ii) an irresponsible bias in how Pinker sometimes frames issues of great importance to society at large. This sloppiness can be offensive and dangerous.
