Steven Arthur Pinker the 57 year old Canadian-American Professor of experimental psychology and cognitive science has argued in his recent book ‘The Better Angels of Our Nature’ that human violence has fallen drastically over thousands of years. Pinker’s investigation of human violence, one of the base primal aspects of our lives, takes consideration of homicide rates and war casualties as a percentage of national populations. Pinker is renowned for his theory of language acquisition through his research on verbs, morphology and syntax. Pinker is said to have “popularized Noam chomsky’s work on language as innate faculty of mind, with the twist that this faculty evolved by natural selection as a Darwinian adaptation for communication.” Pinker’s work on human cognition suggests that combinatorial symbol manipulation has a significant part to play in the workings of cognition, not just associations among sensory features as many connectionist models argue.

 

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