Steven Pinker is an experimental psychologist who conducts research in visual cognition, psycholinguistics, and social relations. He grew up in Montreal and earned his BA from McGill and his PhD from Harvard. Currently Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard, he has also taught at Stanford and MIT. He has won numerous prizes for his research, his teaching, and his books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate, The Better Angels of Our Nature, The Sense of Style, and Enlightenment Now.

He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, a Humanist of the Year, a recipient of nine honorary doctorates, and one of Foreign Policy’s “World’s Top 100 Public Intellectuals” and Time’s “100 Most Influential People in the World Today.” He was Chair of the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary, and writes frequently for the New York Times, the Guardian, and other publications. His twelfth book, published in 2021, is called Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters.

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Science-popularizing lecture from the series Science at the Prague Castle

Today, humanity is reaching new heights of scientific understanding – and at the same time appears to be losing its mind. Why do we find ourselves flooded with fake news, medical quackery, conspiracy theorizing, and “post-truth” rhetoric? Why do we fail to take advantage of the powerful tools of reasoning our best thinkers have discovered over the millennia: logic, critical thinking, probability, correlation and causation, and optimal ways to update our beliefs? And how does the rational pursuit of self-interest, sectarian solidarity, and uplifting mythology by individuals add up to crippling irrationality in a society? Join cognitive psychologist and popular science author Steven Pinker as he discusses why rationality matters, how it leads to better choices in our lives and in the public sphere, and how it is the ultimate driver of social justice and moral progress.

The lecture will be given in English.

Organized by Prague Castle Administration, Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry  of the CAS, and Charles University. Supported by IOCB Tech Foundation.

Recording of the lecture is available here.