Science Quote by Steven Pinker

Pinker isn’t just staking out a view on human nature; he’s preemptively building a moat around it. The line reads like a credentialed shrug: of course my take is right, because it’s not really mine. By invoking “psychologists, linguists, and biologists” in one breath, he drafts an interdisciplinary coalition meant to feel inevitable, like converging lines of evidence rather than a contested thesis. The add-on - “not to mention philosophers and scholars going back centuries” - widens the appeal from the lab to the library, from data to tradition, suggesting that his position isn’t merely current science but the latest chapter in a long, sensible argument.

The subtext is defensive as much as it is authoritative. Pinker has spent a career arguing against blank-slate accounts of the mind and toward an evolved, structured view of cognition. Those debates routinely carry political heat: ideas about “human nature” get interpreted as excuses for inequality, or as attempts to smuggle ideology through the back door of science. So this sentence does reputational work. It says: I’m not a lone provocateur; I’m speaking from the mainstream of serious inquiry.

It’s also a subtle rhetorical move to shift the burden of proof. If “many” experts agree, dissent starts to look like denial, or at least like intellectual provincialism. The risk, of course, is that the broad name-checking can blur genuine disciplinary disagreements. But as persuasion, it’s efficient: one sentence that turns a controversial claim into a crowded room.