Dishonest Zealots Attempt to Destroy the Career of Linguist Steven Pinker

Cognitive linguist Steven Pinker has had an illustrious career as a teacher and prolific author. His politics have often leaned to the left. None of this immunizes him from baseless attacks by hundreds of people who apparently don’t see any value in Pinker’s willingness to contribute his expertise to national conversations on critically relevant issues. They are unwilling to give fair readings to Pinker’s statements. They also appear to be threatened by Pinker’s use of germane statistics in order to shed light on complex claims involving police behavior and racism.

Here is the opening paragraph of a recent letter signed by almost 500 people, many of them grad students and undergrads, then sent to the Linguistic Society of America:

Pinker

In reaction to this letter, Jerry Coyne, eminent Professor of Professor of Ecology & Evolution, concludes as follows at his website: “I’m really steamed when a group of misguided zealots tries to damage someone’s career, and does so dishonestly.”

Linguist John McWhorter has also indicated his enthusiastic support of Steven Pinker:

McWhorter

Here is Jerry Coyne’s full blog post, setting forth the numerous false accusations against Pinker coupled with the evidence clearly demonstrating that these accusations are false. Coyne’s post is titled “The Purity Posse pursues Pinker.”

I invite you to read both sides of this dispute.  I suspect you will be outraged at the way Pinker is being treated.  You might also wonder how it is that hundreds of people who claim to be highly knowledgeable in linguistics are such inept readers.  The phrase “social conflagration” might come to mind as you review the evidence.  The name Robespierre might periodically pop into your thought process.

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Erich Vieth

Erich Vieth is an attorney focusing on civil rights (including First Amendment), consumer law litigation and appellate practice. At this website often writes about censorship, corporate news media corruption and cognitive science. He is also a working musician, artist and a writer, having founded Dangerous Intersection in 2006. Erich lives in St. Louis, Missouri with his two daughters.

This Post Has 30 Comments

  2. Avatar of Erich Vieth
    Erich Vieth February 22, 2021 Reply

    Not all instances of cancel culture are the same. Each one flies or falls on its own facts. The case of Gina Carano is analyzed in Reason:

    Here is what Carano wrote on Instagram:

    Jews were beaten in the streets, not by Nazi soldiers but by their neighbors…even by children. Because history is edited, most people today don’t realize that to get to the point where Nazi soldiers could easily round up thousands of Jews, the government first made their own neighbors hate them simply for being Jews. How is that any different from hating someone for their political views.

    Both Carano and Disney had their facts wrong – -Nazi soldiers did attack Jews in the street and Carano did not denigrate Jews. As stated in Reason:

    Disney is wrong to say that Carano denigrated Jewish people, or that she is “abhorrent” for making such a comparison. She’s a celebrity with an obnoxious political opinion, which is not exactly a rare animal.

    Lessons learned? Time will tell. The main lessons (in addition to getting one’s facts correct) is to avoid hypocrisy. What’s good for the Left-Leaning Goose should be good for the Right-Leaning Gander, As stated by Reason:

    If the studio doesn’t want to work with actors and actresses who make over-the-top Nazi comparisons, it has a major problem on its hands: Pedro Pascal, the star and eponymous character of The Mandalorian, once sent a tweet likening Trump’s immigration policies to Nazi concentration camps.

  3. Avatar of Erich Vieth
    Erich Vieth July 24, 2021 Reply

    Here’s an example a good-hearted intelligent attorney who has been cancelled by fringe left-wing ideologues. This problem started off as a few rain drops (e.g., the case of Steven Pinker), but now we’re in a torrential storm. There are so many other stories emerging too. This is the case of Maud Maron, a Legal Aid Attorney who has had a long and stellar career in NY, but how dare she express an opinion that counters the prevailing narrative! Off with her head! She has filed suit against her office. The allegations are extremely disturbing. https://www.fairforall.org/profiles-in-courage/maron-v-the-legal-aid-society/

  4. Avatar of Erich Vieth
    Erich Vieth January 6, 2022 Reply

    Mount Royal University.

    A tenured Calgary professor who made headlines in 2020 for criticizing the Black Lives Matter movement and espousing the educational benefits of residential schools confirmed Tuesday she has been fired.

    Frances Widdowson had been an associate professor at Mount Royal University in the department of economics, justice and policy studies since 2008.

    She gained notoriety in 2020, when she said the Black Lives Matter movement had “destroyed” the university, that residential schools gave Indigenous children an education that “normally they wouldn’t have received,” and that tens of MRU faculty members had opposed her.

    It prompted more than 6,000 people to sign a petition calling for her firing.

    https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/frances-widdowson-mount-royal-university-fired-1.6303734

  5. Avatar of Erich Vieth
    Erich Vieth December 6, 2022 Reply

    The editor in chief of one of the world’s most prestigious psychology journals, Perspectives on Psychological Science, resigned on Tuesday after the board of directors of the journal’s publisher demanded he step aside—or be fired—for soliciting academic criticism of a black psychologist.

    The editor, the prominent German psychologist Klaus Fiedler, stirred up controversy by agreeing to publish trenchant critiques of a 2020 article by Steven Roberts, a black psychologist at Stanford University, who had argued, among other things, that “color-blind leadership” promotes “structural inequality.

    https://freebeacon.com/campus/prestigious-psychology-journal-demands-editor-resign-for-soliciting-criticism-of-black-psychologist/

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