No One Defended the Pinker Open Letter? Really??

9 min readAug 11, 2020

By way of background, on July 6, 2020, an open letter was sent to the Linguistic Society of America which garnered over 600 signatures. The open letter (TOL) requested the removal of Professor Steven Pinker from the Media Advisory panel of the LSA, and for the Association to rescind his distinguished Fellow status, both for behaviour that is inconsistent with the LSA code of conduct on racial justice, as circulated on 3 June, 2020. TOL has been massively discussed in the media, and this note is to set the record straight, following a recent comment by Pinker in an interview with Campus Reform, according to which ‘he has not seen anyone defending the letter’. The comment, charitably characterised, is inaccurate. Less charitably, it is a falsehood. A list of supportive articles, with links, is at the end of this article.

TOL, even before its submission to the LSA, was greatly maligned in much of the mainstream press primarily, but not exclusively in the USA and in the UK (Mother Jones, NYT, Atlantic, The Times of London, The Telegraph, BBC, and quite a few others). All these established media venues without exception adopted Pinker’s perspective that what is at stake is Academic Freedom and Freedom of Speech, and that TOL is an attempt to ‘cancel’ him. Few engaged with the actual content of the allegations. Not a single one attempted to include the view of the TOL signatories. In fact, altogether, and with the exception of Pinker himself, the only linguist directly interviewed in much of this mainstream coverage is John McWhorter, who supports Pinker’s perspective (while a couple of other linguists supportive of Pinker were occasionally quoted, they were not directly interviewed; one exception is Charleen Adams, a post-doctoral fellow at Pinker’s own Harvard University, who was interviewed by the Chilean newspaper La Tercera). From the perspective of TOL signatories, however, the issue has nothing to do with Academic Freedom or Freedom of Speech, and has everything to do with public presentation and democratic representation.

Any unbiased reading of TOL would reveal directly that it does not propose a gag order on Steven Pinker, and in fact disassociates itself explicitly from any such action. Nor does it disclaim the value of any of his linguistic work. There is no proposal to curtail Pinker’s free access to the media, including 662.2K twitter followers and his employers were not approached. Nor does TOL advocate expelling Pinker from the LSA. It is fair to say, I believe, that the majority, if not the totality of TOL signatories are very committed to preserving academic freedom and the right to free speech. The letter signatories, however, are also committed to the basic democratic principle of their right to representation. What the letter is about, in a nutshell, is whether or not the linguistic community at large, and members of the LSA in particular, can have a say on the public face of their professional association.

Media experts as well as Fellows of any professional association constitute an important, possibly the most important, public face of that association. The role of media experts in shaping the public view of the association is self-evident. As for Fellows, they are the recipients of a prestigious recognition award, which marks them as particularly esteemed by their association. Using a somewhat provocative metaphor, we could view each Fellowship award as a statue, and the list of our Fellows as our statue gallery — a representation of what, as a professional association, we cherish and esteem, and what we want to be publicly seen to cherish and esteem. The question now on the table is whether statues of individuals who merited the award when it was received, may nonetheless be taken down because of subsequent actions, and if so, whose decision it is to do so. TOL signatories believe that Pinker’s actions subsequent to his award receipt, none of which concern linguistics, are inconsistent with the letter and the spirit of the code of conduct on racial justice adopted by the LSA, and that such inconsistency warrants a re-evaluation of his continuing place in our award gallery. Considerably more importantly, TOL signatories believe that whether to undertake such action or not is a democratic decision to be made by the LSA membership. Freedom of speech is, therefore, entirely orthogonal to the matter, as it is to any act of public recognition or denial, thereof (for some important elaborations on this topic see G. Ramchand as well as J. Rett (Open Letter) and J. Rett (Code of Conduct). What Pinker is seeking, differently put, is not free speech, which he has and which no one is proposing to take away, but our continuing esteem for whatever he chooses to publicly say. That, TOL signatories feel, he cannot have.

It is possible, of course, to question the validity of our view, or to believe that other considerations should be brought to bear on the issue which are overlooked by this particular framing. It is entirely clear, however, that not a single mainstream venue was interested in airing our views in any form whatsoever, let along engaging with them (one possible exception is an article by Smith–Lang in the Daily Telegraph, which falls short of endorsing the letter, but which is extremely critical of Pinker’s ‘cancellation’ angle). In some cases, journalists did interview signatories, but then proceeded to summarily ignore their input (e.g. La Tercera, August 7. See Rett and Hammerly for interview notes). Beyond the slew of articles presenting only one side of the issue, the NYT, the Atlantic, Science, and the Chronicle of Higher Education, at the very least, turned down op-eds or articles attempting to address the imbalance, or correct some inaccuracies. With one exception, the NYT ignored multiple letters to the editor, and the one answer received was extremely dismissive. Noteworthy, finally, is an attempt to introduce some more information and correct inaccuracies on TOL on Steven Pinker’s Wikipedia’s page, which encountered persistent resistance at every step of the way. It wasn’t even possible to specify that 7 of the TOL signatories are themselves LSA Fellows.

The result is that although multiple articles of various lengths and scope have been written in defence of different aspects of TOL, they all appeared as Medium posts, as Facebook statements, or as blog posts. Articles and posts supporting TOL that I am aware of are listed, with links, at the bottom of this article. They range from expressing general support (including on the part of non-signatories, Portner, Hammerly), and additional articulation and augmentation of the case made by TOL for the removal of Pinker (Esipova, Adger, Reiss), to the highlighting of the representation issue, which is at the core of TOL (Ramchand, Rett (Open Letter), Rett (Code of Conduct)). Some analyses of the press biases and inaccuracies are offered by Green, Snider, and Stalley. The debate on TOL within the linguistic community and the power differentials it exposed are discussed in Borer, and an additional open letter to the LSA is here (Punske). Finally, Dow and Kastner provide a detailed analysis of the demographics of TOL signatories.

Given this massive positive response, Pinker’s statement that ‘he has not seen anyone defending the letter’ is surprising, to say the least. While there is no way to be sure what Pinker did or did not see of writings supportive of TOL, I do know for fact that he was aware of at least some of it (see Response to Reiss ), and I would be frankly surprised if he were not aware of anything and everything that has been said publicly on the issue. Just in case, a link to this particular post will be sent to him by email and through Twitter. This notwithstanding, it does appears that when Pinker claims that he hasn’t seen any defence of TOL, what he really means is that there was no defence of TOL in the established, mainstream press (much as he is happy to trumpet his own non-mainstream support). This focus on the established press echoes earlier and continuing Pinker assertions constantly repeated by the established press, whereby ‘no established linguists’ endorsed TOL (“Don’t blame established linguists: I recognise only one name among the signatories” @sapinker July 5; “There were several hundred names on it. Very few of them were well-known linguists”, UnHerd, 7/8; and again: “the other signatories, most of them were graduate students and lecturers. In fact, they could be anyone who identified as a linguist. So this is by no means an indication of the sentiment among professional linguists.” BBC, 7/22).

In actuality, the overall statistical breakdown of TOL signatories mirrors fairly closely that of the LSA membership, with its over 30% membership from graduate students. Approximately 20% of TOL signatories (119 individuals) are tenured or retired from a tenured position, many full professors with stellar scholarly standing, and including 7 LSA Fellows and 2 Fellows of the British Academy.

That notwithstanding, it is correct that TOL signatories, as a collective, do not represent the academic establishment, linguistic or otherwise, just as it is true that the actual claims in TOL as well as the TOL signatories themselves have been summarily brushed off, not to say abused, by the established media. Unlike Pinker, however, I believe there is something fundamentally wrong with this picture. First, to the extent that Pinker can count on the establishment to cheer-lead his case without a single critical statement, one wonders what, in essence, remains of the rather hyped claim that he is being ‘cancelled’. Second, to the extent that it takes a PR firm and inside connections to actually get listened to by the established media, and to the extent that the established media therefore appears to be structurally incapable of listening to voices that come from outside the establishment, one does have to wonder who, exactly, is doing the cancelling here, and to whom.

To at least some of us observing, the single uniform choir of the establishment here has been, how shall we say, impressive? All the more so in the face of such a minor challenge to a public intellectual who holds a gigantic megaphone broadcasting to 662.2K followers on Twitter, not to mention the established press. In the public debate now unfolding on the issue of ‘cancel culture’ many have pointed out that quite a few of those who decry ‘cancellation’ (e.g. the signatories of the Harper’s letter of July 7, including Pinker) are, in fact, defending their own privileged right to continue to dominate the public discourse (e.g. here and here). The same point has been made regarding the established media itself, attempting to preserve its own historically privileged access in the face of the proliferation of less established platforms. What has been unfolding in our own little linguistic backyard, then, is no more than a relatively minor case of targeted debate suppression, the one nowadays trumpeted under the heading ‘cancellation’. Hardly surprising, in the overall scheme of things. For after all, why should the privileged surrender their privilege without a fight?

Hagit Borer is a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America and a Fellow of the British Academy