BB, you dazzle me. I ask for a name, I get not only that but a publishable pamphlet on the topic. Alas, I have no knowledge of Pinker's subject matter (Cognitive Neuroscience), so I can't contribute a thing to this conversation. But now I have a much better understanding of what this thread is all about. Thanks for taking the time to bring me up to speed.
As a rule, I think the physicists are much more rigorous than scientists working in the biological fields, especially the new crop of specialities that have come down the pike, like cognitive neurobiology and evolutionary biology. Somehow or other, these folks seem to like to editorialize about the "nature" of man... and since a great many of them tend to be materialist and determinist philosophically, they assume the universe is a vast machine, the human brain is a machine, man is a machine.
Yuck: They drain all life out of the world and then call what they do "biology." The reduction is breath-taking, but never questioned (nor ever challenged within their own "community" of like-minded).
Morality and free will are dead under such a regime -- so long live utility! This is, of course, potentially a highly productive blueprint for manipulating human beings. And some of these people seem to want to be the manipulators....
If they could just stick with Niels Bohr's elegantly restrained and rigorous epistemological model, all would be well. Bohr said (I'm paraphrasing) that if something can't be observed, then essentially it isn't a problem for science. He said science was about making good descriptions, not about philosophizing about "how" the natural world is, and certainly not about editorializing regarding the "nature" of things. Given those assumptions, one can't make too much mischief....
Thanks so much for writing, Patrick!