Criticism
The Language Instinct has been criticized by Geoffrey Sampson in his book, The 'Language Instinct' Debate. The assumptions underlying the nativist view have also been subject to sustained criticism in Jeffrey Elman's Rethinking Innateness: A Connectionist Perspective on Development (Neural Networks and Connectionist Modeling), which defends the connectionist approach that Pinker has criticized.
David Shenk has criticized Pinker for an article he wrote in The New York Times which addressed the nature versus nurture debate. He criticized him for siding with the "nature" argument and for "never once acknowledge gene-environment interaction or epigenetics." Shenk contends that because of these factors the debate over nature versus nurture has been "rendered obsolete." Pinker responded to a question about epigenetics as a possibility for the decline in violence in a lecture for the BBC World Service. Pinker said it was unlikely since the decline in violence happened too rapidly to be explained by genetic changes.
Read more about this topic: Steven Pinker
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“A bad short story or novel or poem leaves one comparatively calm because it does not exist, unless it gets a fake prestige through being mistaken for good work. It is essentially negative, it is something that has not come through. But over bad criticism one has a sense of real calamity.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)
“It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)
“I hold with the old-fashioned criticism that Browning is not really a poet, that he has all the gifts but the one needful and the pearls without the string; rather one should say raw nuggets and rough diamonds.”
—Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889)