An Open Letter to Remove Steven Pinker from LSA

2u2me

An open letter garnered 480 signatories ranging from lecturers to PhD students to professors.

All in an attempt to remove Dr. Steven Pinker from the Linguistics Society of America.

I know there are similar threads right now, but this is very important as these are highly educated people(I'm guessing largely coming from the humanities).

They say they don't want him cancelled in a letter calling for him to be cancelled.

This is an open letter by members of the linguistics community calling for the removal of Dr. Steven Pinker from both our list of distinguished academic fellows and our list of media experts.
[...] Charge against him*
Dr. Pinker’s behavior is systematically at odds with the LSA’s recently issued statement on racial justice, which argues that “listening to and respecting [the experience of students of color] is crucial, as is acknowledging and addressing rather than overlooking or denying the role of the discipline of linguistics in the reproduction of racism.”
[...]
We want to note here that we have no desire to judge Dr. Pinker’s actions in moral terms, or claim to know what his aims are. Nor do we seek to “cancel” Dr. Pinker, or to bar him from participating in the linguistics and LSA communities (though many of our signatories may well believe that doing so would be the right course of action). We do, however, believe that the examples introduced above establish that Dr. Pinker’s public actions constitute a pattern of downplaying the very real violence of systemic racism and sexism, and, moreover, a pattern that is not above deceitfulness, misrepresentation, or the employment of dogwhistles. In light of the fact that Dr. Pinker is read widely beyond the linguistics community, this behavior is particularly harmful, not merely for the perception of linguistics by the general public, but for movements against the systems of racism and sexism, and for linguists affected by these violent systems.

They present a case against him in the above linked letter. I use those words in the loosest sense possible.
One of the charges is 'Dog-whistling'.

Dr. Pinker also frequently uses the word race in a manner that ‘dogwhistle’ appears far too weak a term for, for instance when claiming that “Every geneticist knows that the ‘Race doesn't exist’ dogma is a convenient PC 1/4-truth.”

One eyed Jack

2u2me wrote: »

All in an attempt to remove Dr. Steven Pinker from the Linguistics Society of America.

I know there are similar threads right now, but this is very important as these are highly educated people(I'm guessing largely coming from the humanities).

What difference does their being highly educated make to this particular instances importance? The thing about all these examples is that the people who are now being shifted from their positions, shifted others from their positions in order to position themselves in the positions they’re in. Essentially - turnabout is fair play. They really aren’t having any effect on wider society as they operate on a whole different level to ordinary society. Academics and high society have always been interlinked, so this appealing to ordinary society in order to claim this latest attempt to oust one of their own is an injustice, rings a bit hollow tbh.

Apart from that, the letter is an irony loaded ball of nonsense, and it being a letter to the Linguistics Society of America, it’s probably best to identify what they’re actually appealing to the LSA for - the removal of Pinker from the LSA Fellows list and the list of media experts, not the LSA itself:


We believe our appeal to remove Dr. Pinker from the LSA fellows list and the list of media experts falls within the purview of the LSA because of the goals that the LSA has set for itself. In its public statement on race, the LSA “encourag[es] linguists to critically reflect on the changing nature of academic, social, cultural, and linguistic understandings of race”, and explicitly states that “there is no linguistic justice without racial justice… [this stance] requires that linguists actively work to promote equity and social justice in ways that benefit underrepresented scholars and communities of color”. We believe that the examples above show that Dr. Pinker's established pattern of behavior stands in direct opposition to the LSA’s publicly stated aims, and the work they call for.


Working link to full letter


In short - hoisted by his own petard.

Annasopra

I dont understand all the obsession with America loads of Irish people have now. Never heard of him. Not bothered.

jam_mac_jam

Chomsky refused to sign it and stood up for him. It's very sinister that people can lose their positions for their opninions.

The best universities in the world that are meant to promote thought and dialogue are becoming echo chambers. It's hard to understand what he has said that is so dangerous.

The idea that universities are some hot bed of racism and sexism is laughable. The danger is not just academia it's spreading to the real world.

Let people think different ideas and discuss them. Is that so hard.

silverharp

Joeytheparrot wrote: »

I dont understand all the obsession with America loads of Irish people have now. Never heard of him. Not bothered.

first they came for the people the Irish havnt heard of.....

Quantum Erasure

"critically reflect on the changing nature of understandings of race"

No, not like that...

2u2me

Joeytheparrot wrote: »

I dont understand all the obsession with America loads of Irish people have now. Never heard of him. Not bothered.

The obsession is that Steven Pinker has been described as one of the world's most influential intellectuals by various magazines.

He has won awards from the American Psychological Association, the National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Institution, the Cognitive Neuroscience Society and the American Humanist Association.

What he's said isn't particularly offensive, in fact it's mostly just claims that are objectively true.

jam_mac_jam

It's cultural revolution stuff. The reason that people in Ireland should be so worried about it is that it is already starting to happen in the UK where people have lost their jobs for their opninions and will happen here in the next few years.

I could see the point if he was running around with a Confederate flag but this is for discussing subjects which are by their nature subjective.

If intellectuals cannot have opinions which so not agree with a certain political point of view then the strengths of our society are in serious danger.

francois

Oh goody another culture war thread

Quantum Erasure

'acknowledge and address role of linguistics in the reproduction of racism'

Is this more blacklisting words and phrases that are now seen as 'problematic'?

I thought linguistics had moved away from being a prescriptive discipline, to a more descriptive one, describing how we use words rather than telling us how to use them

jam_mac_jam

I just had the quickest read I could over the "letter" and it seems their issue is not with his body of work as a whole but with 5 tweets he has made over the years and - my favourite part - a single word in one of his books. And they seem to be misrepresenting all 6 of these things in the "letter".

jam_mac_jam wrote: »

The reason that people in Ireland should be so worried about it is that it is already starting to happen in the UK where people have lost their jobs for their opninions and will happen here in the next few years.

I could see the point if he was running around with a Confederate flag

I was just today thinking about a relatively well known Irish singer with a few number 1 albums to his name who includes an old Confederate Song in his set when he plays live. Or at least he used to. Solely because he likes the rhythm of the song.

I wonder when the mob will be coming for him.

biko

Joeytheparrot wrote: »

I dont understand all the obsession with America loads of Irish people have now. Never heard of him. Not bothered.

"First they came for the Americans, but I did nothing because I wasn't American"

2u2me

One eyed Jack wrote: »

Apart from that, the letter is an irony loaded ball of nonsense, and it being a letter to the Linguistics Society of America, it’s probably best to identify what they’re actually appealing to the LSA for - the removal of Pinker from the LSA Fellows list and the list of media experts, not the LSA itself:

Doesn't fellow mean 'member of a society' hence removing him as a fellow is removing him from being a member of the society. Perhpas I can't keep up with this doublespeak.

riffmongous

So what did he actually say? Why did you leave that out of the OP?

sydthebeat

2u2me wrote: »

Doesn't fellow mean 'member of a society' hence removing him as a fellow is removing him from being a member of the society. Perhpas I can't keep up with this doublespeak.

No. A "fellow" is just a higher level within the membership (usually the highest level)

So removing him from the fellowship list would essentially be a demotion of status within the organisation

Quantum Erasure

Joeytheparrot wrote: »

I dont understand all the obsession with America loads of Irish people have now. Never heard of him. Not bothered.

I hope you're not whistling dixie when they come for you...

2u2me

riffmongous wrote: »

So what did he actually say? Why did you leave that out of the OP?

Well obviously because I was trying to hide his heinous crimes!

In reality I figured the OP was already long enough; but here it is for anyone having difficulty clicking that link I provided

The fascinating thing about this attempt to cancel Steven Pinker is the Orwellian slenderness of the evidence.

In 2015, Dr. Pinker tweeted “Police don’t shoot blacks disproportionately”, linking to a New York Times article by Sendhil Mullainathan.

Let the record show that Dr. Pinker draws this conclusion from an article that contains the following quote: “The data is unequivocal. Police killings are a race problem: African-Americans are being killed disproportionately and by a wide margin.” (original emphasis) We believe this shows that Dr. Pinker is willing to make dishonest claims in order to obfuscate the role of systemic racism in police violence.

In 2017, when nearly 1000 people died at the hands of the police, the issue of anti-black police violence in particular was again widely discussed in the media. Dr. Pinker moved to dismiss the genuine concerns about the disproportionate killings of Black people at the hands of law enforcement by employing an “all lives matter” trope (we refer to Degen, Leigh, Waldon & Mengesha 2020 for a linguistic explanation of the trope’s harmful effects) that is eerily reminiscent of a “both-sides” rhetoric, all while explicitly claiming that a focus on race is a distraction. Once again, this clearly demonstrates Dr. Pinker’s willingness to dismiss and downplay racist violence, regardless of any evidence.



Pinker (2011:107) provides another example of Dr. Pinker downplaying actual violence in a casual manner: “n 1984, Bernhard Goetz, a mild-mannered engineer, became a folk hero for shooting four young muggers in a New York subway car.”---Bernhard Goetz shot four Black teenagers for saying “Give me five dollars.” (whether it was an attempted mugging is disputed). Goetz, Pinker’s mild-mannered engineer, described the situation after the first four shots as follows: “I immediately looked at the first two to make sure they were ‘taken care of,’ and then attempted to shoot Cabey again in the stomach, but the gun was empty.” 18 months prior, the same “mild-mannered engineer” had said "The only way we're going to clean up this street is to get rid of the sp*cs and n*****s", according to his neighbor. Once again, the language Dr. Pinker employs in calling this person “mild-mannered” illustrates his tendency to downplay very real violence.
In 2014, a student murdered six women at UC Santa Barbara after posting a video online that detailed his misogynistic reasons. Ignoring the perpetrator’s own hate speech, Dr. Pinker called the idea that such a murder could be part of a sexist pattern “statistically obtuse”, once again undermining those who stand up against violence while downplaying the actual murder of six women as well as systems of mysogyny.


On June 3rd 2020, during historic Black Lives Matter protests in response to violent racist killings by police of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and many many others, Dr. Pinker chose to publicly co-opt the academic work of a Black social scientist to further his deflationary agenda. He misrepresents the work of that scholar, who himself mainly expressed the hope he felt that the protests might spark genuine change, in keeping with his belief in the ultimate goodness of humanity. A day after, the LSA commented on its public twitter account that it “stands with our Black community”. Please see the public post by linguist Dr. Maria Esipova for a more explicit discussion of this particular incident.
On June 14th 2020, Dr. Pinker uses the dogwhistle “urban crime/violence” in two public tweets (neither of his sources used the term). A dogwhistle is a deniable speech act “that sends one message to an outgroup while at the same time sending a second (often taboo, controversial, or inflammatory) message to an ingroup”, according to recent and notable semantic/pragmatic work by linguistic researchers Robert Henderson & Elin McCready [1,2,3]. “Urban”, as a dogwhistle, signals covert and, crucially, deniable support of views that essentialize Black people as lesser-than, and, often, as criminals. Its parallel “inner-city”, is in fact one of the prototypical examples used as an illustration of the phenomenon by Henderson & McCready in several of the linked works.[1]


We believe our appeal to remove Dr. Pinker from the LSA fellows list and the list of media experts falls within the purview of the LSA because of the goals that the LSA has set for itself. In its public statement on race, the LSA “encourag[es] linguists to critically reflect on the changing nature of academic, social, cultural, and linguistic understandings of race”, and explicitly states that “there is no linguistic justice without racial justice… [this stance] requires that linguists actively work to promote equity and social justice in ways that benefit underrepresented scholars and communities of color”. We believe that the examples above show that Dr. Pinker's established pattern of behavior stands in direct opposition to the LSA’s publicly stated aims, and the work they call for.


We want to note here that we have no desire to judge Dr. Pinker’s actions in moral terms, or claim to know what his aims are. Nor do we seek to “cancel” Dr. Pinker, or to bar him from participating in the linguistics and LSA communities (though many of our signatories may well believe that doing so would be the right course of action). We do, however, believe that the examples introduced above establish that Dr. Pinker’s public actions constitute a pattern of downplaying the very real violence of systemic racism and sexism, and, moreover, a pattern that is not above deceitfulness, misrepresentation, or the employment of dogwhistles. In light of the fact that Dr. Pinker is read widely beyond the linguistics community, this behavior is particularly harmful, not merely for the perception of linguistics by the general public, but for movements against the systems of racism and sexism, and for linguists affected by these violent systems.

Sincerely,
The Linguistics Community

ronivek

Some are claiming it is an attempt at 'cancelling' him; which to me implies complete removal from some forum. As others have stated this is about removing his fellowship status and not removing him from the organisation or from academia in general.

The argument from the members of the Linguistics Society seems to be that Pinker's publicly expressed views are contrary to both the stated aims of the Linguistics Society and also display at best a lack of critical examination of the sources he's using for his views.

To me it seems reasonable that the members of an organisation have the right to petition for the demotion of someone whose views don't appear to align with those of the organisation in question.

riffmongous

Seems for a linguistics fellow he's not very careful about his use of language eh

biko

Pinker is right
As I have posted before the evidence points to US police be less likely to fire upon a black suspect, not more likely as the narrative goes.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2016/07/19/academic-research-on-police-shootings-and-race/


I suppose the main body of the LSA don't like people with different opinions. They only like one type of diversity.

2u2me

ronivek wrote: »

The argument from the members of the Linguistics Society seems to be that Pinker's publicly expressed views are contrary to both the stated aims of the Linguistics Society and also display at best a lack of critical examination of the sources he's using for his views.

The problem is that they are being disingenuous. The New York Times article they link to for example is making exactly the point that Pinker made.

This is the claim

In 2015, Dr. Pinker tweeted “Police don’t shoot blacks disproportionately”, linking to a New York Times article by Sendhil Mullainathan.

Let the record show that Dr. Pinker draws this conclusion from an article that contains the following quote: “The data is unequivocal. Police killings are a race problem: African-Americans are being killed disproportionately and by a wide margin.” (original emphasis) We believe this shows that Dr. Pinker is willing to make dishonest claims in order to obfuscate the role of systemic racism in police violence.

"But this data does not prove that biased police officers are more likely to shoot blacks in any given encounter"-The New York Times.

Earthhorse

So, at worst, he has mildly misrepresented the contents of a few articles he has linked to. I'm not sure that merits a demotion in the LSA, I don't know enough about it's workings to say but I'm not sure why the matter isn't being handled internally.

One thing's for sure though; the world is slowly eating itself.

2u2me

I write with concern and disappointment having had the misfortune of seeing a letter
signed by colleagues asking for Prof Pinker’s removal from certain aspects of the LSA.
While my doctorate is in genetics, I also have an MA-TESL degree in applied linguistics
from Northern Arizona University and am part of the linguistics community.

I have long-prided myself in having gained knowledge of how language works and apply
this knowledge, as a geneticist, to study the causes of disease in humans. Linguists are some
of the most enlightened and informed people on the planet, due to a uniquely specialized
understanding of social discourse and being culturally meta-literate. But on this matter, our
colleagues who went after Prof Pinker appear caught up in a discourse they do not understand.
Their actions, which seem deeply clouded by ignorance and cultural illiteracy, can cause harm to
the academic community in proportion to the power that linguists hold. For this reason, I am
concerned about the reactive and authoritarian demands set out in the letter.

Specifically, the signers engaged in a performative ritual, demanding Prof Pinker’s credentials
in the group be removed (ritually exiled), so as to purify the LSA from ideological crimes they
hold him to have committed. The evidence for the supposed thought-crimes are a handful of
cherry-picked tweets they claim "inevitably" mean what they think they mean. The signers try
to paint a story of guilt, more strained and more painful than an exegetical work of art, worse
(and more embarrassing) than an uncompromising, literalistic claim that the Bible is a cohesive,
singular narrative. Having scoured Prof Pinker’s tweets back six years, they plucked a few,
divined, and gave them their least-charitable reading possible: they claim, with their omnipotent
powers of interpretation, that the tweets downplay racism. "Downplaying racism", is, of course,
a sin, and euphemistically tantamount to calling Prof Pinker a racist.

There isn’t a more serious non-criminal accusation. Going after Prof Pinker, who has spent
years documenting declines in violence concomitant with a rise in heightened moral sensitivity is
an unconscionable waste of resources and unethical. As linguists, at least those of us in applied
linguistics, should be focused with laser precision on the causes of suffering and how we can
use our knowledge of language to intercede. It’s a distraction from our goal of using language
to help the world to kill off one of our own. To sacrifice someone who has worked his entire
life to understand the roots of the very things we as linguists try our hardest to understand is
irresponsible and a squandering of our time and talent. We can do better.

The fields of linguistics are known to question orthodoxies. But the letter of demands
demonstrates that the signers lack awareness of their involvement in a quintessential (and
defining) cultural moment.

I believe it is a mistake to cave to the pressure of authoritarian demands that characterize
academia at present, and I sincerely hope that the LSA listens to the voices of reason and not
those of mobs with minds set on ritual purification.

Let’s return our focus to where it should be: on how we can use language to do something
good.

Sincerely,
Charleen Adams, PhD MPH MA-TESL
Harvard School of Public Health

http://www.charadams.com/letter-to-lsa.html#

Donald Trump

riffmongous wrote: »

Seems for a linguistics fellow he's not very careful about his use of language eh

Would you say that he's not a very cunning linguist?

riffmongous

Donald Trump wrote: »

Would you say that he's not a very cunning linguist?

I'd say he's more of a master debater

suicide_circus

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5TVLEaqqdI

Quantum Erasure

Donald Trump wrote: »

Would you say that he's not a very cunning linguist?

He was engaging in some antics anyway

Gruffalux

Pinker is a public intellectual. He thinks about things out loud and people can either agree or disagree by using their own brains. Personally I hated his flippant intellectual investigation of the possible moral neutrality of infanticide in the 1990s but I agree with him recently that police killings of blacks are more a function of activity than of race. I am sure I agree and disagree with him profoundly on everything in between and somehow it does not implode my head that he has the right to think and speak freely.

These people calling for censure because they disagree with him are lazy nincompoops. Do not practice cowardly mob-rule censorship, instead sharpen the sword of your own counter argument.