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Steven Pinker: 'Who, Me Controversial?'

Professor Steven Pinker, Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and a member of FIRE’s Advisory Council, delivers the keynote address at FIRE’s 2019 Faculty Conference. The keynote was delivered at the Hyatt Regency Cambridge near Boston University, site of this year’s conference, on November 1, 2019.

Pinker’s keynote address draws on his long tenure in academe, touching on several heated controversies within the fields of cognitive science, psychology, and linguistics. Pinker broadens from there to an analysis of the political polarization of higher education and its implications, among them what he refers to as the moralization of intellectual hypotheses, which can both impede rigorous analysis of an idea on its own merits and stifle meaningful, well-intentioned debate.

More information about the conference can be found here.

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