Steve Pinker

I'm Steve Pinker and I'm Harvard college professor and Johnstone family professor, Harvard Department of Psychology. The Cognitive Revolution which took place at Harvard was the start after modern scientific study of the mind. Who study something like the mind you like to think that you're a scientist, you face the immediate problem of what we do with these things called mental contents, thoughts, emotions, images, plans, rules, you can't see them, you can't taste them, then you can't feel them. If you're a scientist you are supposed to be studying things that you can see measure and manipulate, how do you even begin with a science of mind. Well, the answer is the dominated psychology in the middle part of the 20th century was to just give up all talks of mental contents. This is the school of behaviorism and came to take over American psychology until the early 1950s when a number of scholars with ties to Harvard started to rethink that whole idea when we talk about how computers work you can't get around computing internal states to them. Computers have memories, they have goal states, they execute plans and if you could do that, about a hunk of metal and you are not being unscientific why should be on the scientific to say those things about a human being. The result was called Cognitive Science included both experimental psychology, people who study other humans in the lab with linguistics, including the famous theories of linguist Noam Chomsky who was here at Harvard as a society fellow, a computer science and artificial intelligence and later neuroscience.