The Modern Denial of Human Nature an honest acknowledgment of human nature based on science and common sense. Published by Penguin Books Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate exposes the nature nurture debate and examines.
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Ultimately, a common agreeance on a certain topic will be reached, and the findings will translate into well-considered policy. Ideally, that is how it should work, with scientists serving as neutral ob "I'm only human Of flesh and blood I'm made Human Born to make mistakes" --The Human League, Human Most of us instinctively feel the acquisition of scientific knowledge follows a linear path, first operating from a solid factual base, and then modifying itself as it goes along in an objective fashion. Ideally, that is how it should work, with scientists serving as neutral observers, freely informing us, the public, on whatever findings they come across, whatever the implications.
This is not always what actually happens, of course. Not by a long shot. Ironically - also tellingly -, when it comes to the in-depth study of the human animal, there is active, hostile opprobrium by a certain school of social scientists and ideologically motivated activists alike. Scientists who try to find biological causations for certain human behaviours or perceived inequalities are frequently ostracised, pelted by slurs, and made pariah's in their own fields.
The sober truth is that the scientific community is not free at all from anti-intellectualism and bullying tactics. It seems nothing much has changed since the publication of this book, which I'm informed drew out considerable polemical discourse at the time. Anno , the social sciences in Western academia are still infested with social constructivist thinking, with no sign of it abating any time soon.
In fact, it might even have reached its zenith, having entrenched itself even further. It's not difficult to make an analogy with creationists. This exemplifies how far we still have to go as a species to attain a higher level of rational thinking, which means being willing to demolish some of our most cherished beliefs. Ego investment still is riding high, it seems. These terms observably evoke unpleasant feelings in many. However, in order to come face to face with the homo sapiens which, during its brutal evolutionary process, has acquired certain survival - often nasty -instincts, one should let go of such reservations.
Funnily enough, it was some of the most prominent Enlightenment thinkers such as Rousseau who introduced the blank slate theory. But are we blank slates, almost solely informed by the culture that surrounds us? Hardly, as Pinker shows us -with the aid of a plethora of immensely interesting case studies - in this intellectually dense, yet highly accessible book.
Genes and our biological make-up determine our behaviour to a far greater extent than culture or our upbringing ever will. Pinker even goes as far as saying that parental influence on their child ren 's formation is pretty much negligible. Peer group interaction is a far more important determining factor. However, Pinker deftly reasons that even with the ever-expanding, confronting knowledge of the human coming from the exciting fields of neuroscience and evolutionary psychology, there is no need for us to defeatedly resort to fatalism or nihilism.
On the contrary, an intimate, unsentimental understanding of what we are will help us enormously in developing a truly humanistic ethos and thus in crafting a pragmatic society which can be beneficial to all of us. The utopian vision, with its aim to 'mould' the human psyche social constructivism , the 20th century has adequately shown to only lead us into disaster. Jul 14, Daniel rated it it was ok Shelves: Louis Menand has written a typically excellent piece on Pinker's arrogance: I found this book simultaneously interesting and exasperating, because the author is obviously a highly educated, well-read man who thinks he knows everything about every subject.
There is a whole class of these public intellectuals the late Carl Sagan, Richard Dawins, et al who play this game: Most of his scholarly journal output is in psychology and language, according to his cv; his PhD is in experimental psychology. And maybe Pinker has figured it all out, but don't you think he could cut those of us a break who still think we exist?
Each of us there is a single I in control. But that is an illusion the brain works hard to produce Wow, I am glad that's all settled. More generally, it's good to know there's no need for a field like philosophy. Pinker has a footnote to support his claim that the brain has no "I," but one of his sources predictably is Daniel Dennett, the Tufts philosopher and enemy of the mind and Anything Else Immaterial.
Let me take this last nugget for a moment. To those of us who have done some of those things, though, it is not so trivial. Sure, in broad strokes, one can formulate simple statements with confidence e. Most importantly, he uses the word "ensoulment" -- and this is central to his argument at this point in the book -- implying that the Church firmly teaches this concept that he is upset about. I do not know that the RCC says much currently, anyway dogmatically about the philosophical underpinnings of a word like "ensoulment.
So, I am being long-winded, but I am trying to get across that Pinker has these convenient cartoon notions of what other people say and because he is so frightfully intelligent he assumes he has it all figured out. If he would just say to himself, "It is possible that there is one thing I think I know that I do not," I believe his tone would be far more congenial and the book much improved. But then again, there is no self for him to say it to, so what's the point? View all 6 comments. Jan 19, Daniel Clausen rated it it was amazing Shelves: In some ways, this book is both a tragedy and an inspiration.
How is it a tragedy? It's a tragedy because the book is responding to very ideologically-based, simple arguments for the Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine that I think don't really need to be addressed. Many of the points in the book I was thoroughly convinced of before reading the book -- I knew that genetics played some role in determining personality and aptitude; I was convinced of the probabilistic appro In some ways, this book is both a tragedy and an inspiration.
Many of the points in the book I was thoroughly convinced of before reading the book -- I knew that genetics played some role in determining personality and aptitude; I was convinced of the probabilistic approach to human behavior; and I was convinced that versions of "is" do not automatically translate into "ought".
On top of that, much of the book is spent rehashing the very petty politics of what happens in university departments and on college campuses -- the politicization and tribalization of knowledge. It's a stark reminder that even in environments where people should be better and do better, they often give in to their worst instincts. So, the book is tragic in that much of this material, in a more perfect world, could have just been skipped or ignored.
The author could have begun this book from a different starting place where readers have no ideological axes to grind, open-minded examination of evidence and arguments take place, and we are all intellectually and emotionally ready to live in a world of nuance. But no, that is not the world we live in, so that is not the book we get. And that is tragic. The book, though, is also an inspiration. Because it attempts to lift the conversation to that place where nuance and evidence are grounded in a humanistic understanding of our role as scholars and thinkers.
The author, through his exploration of the various themes and evidence, tries to make us all epistemic creatures -- people who can have beliefs and values but suspend them in order to explore counter-evidence, new theories, and hypotheses, and sharpen our values with our knowledge. As epistemic creatures, we would also be able to ask that all-important question: How do we know something?
In a moment in history where so much discourse is polluted by vulgarity, that is refreshing Because in a world where we are all trained from a young age to have the epistemic and moral habits of scientists, this might have been a more nuanced and at once infinitely shorter book. Dec 17, David rated it it was amazing Shelves: What an impressive book! I have been reading a number of Steven Pinker's books, and they are all excellent.
I was particularly interested in how politics and social activists have worked to slow down the progress of science. The concept of a "blank slate", though socially attractive, has held back science and our understanding of human nature. The chapter on children was especially interesting. Why Children What an impressive book! The subject is not finished, though. It is NOT correlated with home life or parental upbringing.
It seems to be a combination of peer influences, and fickle fate. Apr 18, L. Duncan rated it it was ok.
So here's a case where you have a book about how much of our personalities and, well, nature is innate, rather than nurtured into us by our parents or our environment. If The Blank Slate were two hundred pages and focused just on brain science, it'd be one thing. The trouble is that it ends up reading as if Pinker gathered every single study that seemed to support his position and threw it into a blender, and then threw in a number of screeds against groups he has a bone to pick with.
The result So here's a case where you have a book about how much of our personalities and, well, nature is innate, rather than nurtured into us by our parents or our environment. The result is a somewhat uneven and contradictory book where one chapter asserts that women don't go into math because they are innately unlikely to like it, and another chapter asserts that no one is innately good at complex math, which is why we have school to pound it into kids' little heads.
Pinker's insistence on environment and parenting having minimal influence is sometimes undercut by the studies he presents and his own conclusions. Pinker is quick to say that differences between men and women are innate, whether it's emotional, a difference in a bell curve intelligence spread, or in general interests, but he'll attribute differences between races and ethnic groups to environment or oppression, forces he largely dismisses otherwise.
Or we can note that Pinker asserts first that women are better caretakers then men, then secondly asserts that parenting is fairly irrelevant as long as there's a man to look up to, no comments on where women fall on this influence spectrum , and then thirdly asserts that how well kids get along with parents is predictive of their overall success, which would suggest. He also tends to reduce complex issues, such as art or culture or rule of law to biological imperatives, which is a bit odd when he also asserts human individuality and specialness as long as they also fall within the Norman the Normy Norms that define actual human nature, I suppose.
He'll say art has no influence on anyone, really, so everyone hates modernism and post-modernism because it deconstructs art, which no one needs, because everyone knows art isn't real. Except that human nature is so violent at least, if you're a man and suspicious that of course we will never treat everyone with respect and don't you dare Big Brother us into doing so.
I got carried away. But the book is absolutely exhausting, wheeling from one conclusion to the next in a mixture of hopeless pessimism, wide-eyed futurism, white-knuckled warnings about not screwing up the status quo, and sudden naivete. You can't point out that many media reports of "this causes cancer" or "this proves this parenting tactic successful! I'm not being post-modern here. I'm saying that the very fact I know more about Pinker from this book than I do about human nature is par for the course.
Does any of this matter? Does it matter to a childless female engineer that she's some kind of biological anomaly and is she? Is anything helped by positing that men are naturally violent and competitive, and ignoring the uncountable exceptions, or ignoring that women also compete against other women, for mates and otherwise? Is IQ, like, this magic statistic that determines human worth in society?
Are you sure you aren't a supporter of eugenics?
We can all agree that people are not meant to be programmed, that we should not force people who want to be poets to become mathematicians to fill a quota, and we should treat people well even when they're not like us. View all 7 comments. Nov 14, Owlseyes rated it really liked it Shelves: Steven Pinker in Oporto, on the 11th of November H Steven Pinker in Oporto, on the 11th of November Those political fears are meant to be refuted. The singularity is at hand at any moment. Again, this is truly a case against empiricism, against those like John Stuart Mill and John Watson, who were proponents of a major role of experience in Psychology.
The book of Pinker is a huge amalgamation of proof that psychopathology, personality traits, as well as love, consciousness and will, are biologically determined. Well, I know Pinker is an atheist and a lover of the beauty of Darwin's theory of evolution. He's so hopeful regarding the completion of the Human Genome Project, one which may uncover the roots of the intellect and emotion. I think a few years ago I've bought that Time magazine issue. So much so for a biological determinism, I wonder how would Pinker deny refute a God Gene? It's, really, no monkey business.
I'm not sure whether Pinker has read the book by Dean Hamer: Maybe some have it; maybe some don't. I've got to grab that magazine again. View all 3 comments. Jun 26, Ezra rated it it was ok. THAT kind of crap. Jul 13, Sundus HameedUllah Khan rated it really liked it. Wow What an interesting and exquisitely written book!!! He is a psychologist and author of several books and articles on cognition and linguistics. In The Blank Slate: He further explained that neither genetics nor environmental conditions are solely respon Wow What an interesting and exquisitely written book!!!
He further explained that neither genetics nor environmental conditions are solely responsible for determining a person's behavior instead; individuals are created by a combination of both innate human nature and the conditions of upbringing and environment. A must read for those who want to be introduced to the nature-nurture debate by examining scientific evidence. Some of my favorite parts from the book: Dec 29, Gendou rated it it was amazing Shelves: Pinker argues cleanly and decisively against the theory of the Blank Slate and its corollary, the Noble Savage.
You might say he wipes the Blank Slate clean. Or that he breaks it over his knee. He examines how motivations for wanting to believe in a Blank Slate come from four fears of human nature: The Fear of Inequality: But people are, in fact, different. Ignoring this fact doesn't h Pinker argues cleanly and decisively against the theory of the Blank Slate and its corollary, the Noble Savage. Ignoring this fact doesn't help address the real cause of discrimination, which is to judge people as a member of their group, instead of as an individual.
It also opens up rational against discrimination to attack by any evidence against the blank slate. The Fear of Imperfectibility: Ignoring human nature doesn't make people any less likely to commit crimes. When they do, it doesn't help us decide when and how harshly to punish them. Ignoring human nature is especially foolish in the case of rape. Denying that rape is a sexual crime, and insisting that it's only a violent crime which it is, also isn't going to deter any would-be rapists, who, as it happens, are motivated by sexual urges, not the urge to commit violence.
The Fear of Determinism: The Fear of Nihilism: He attacks proponents of the Blank Slate like Stephen Jay Gould, parts of the political left, some feminists, etc. He draws an important distinction between gender and equity feminism. He draws an interesting distinction between the Utopian vs. Tragic vision, and how these influence political leanings.
The Blank Slate
He even calls out modern and post-modern art for their philosophical denial of human nature! Jul 21, David Redden rated it liked it. The Blank Slate was an informative, thought-provoking and polemic book designed to refute ordinary conceptions and intellectual arguments which cut against a sociobiological understanding of humans and human society.
I detected a couple instances in which the author, Stephen Pinker, overstated scientific conclusions, leading me to doubt the accuracy of his other scientific evidence. I also have reservations about the rational-actor lens through which he interprets human nature. On the other hand The Blank Slate was an informative, thought-provoking and polemic book designed to refute ordinary conceptions and intellectual arguments which cut against a sociobiological understanding of humans and human society.
On the other hand, the writing is good and many of his points are well taken. In sum, this book amounts to an interesting point of view that, while not entirely accurate, helps us see human society in a different light. In the couple areas of social science with which I'm somewhat familiar, he sometimes overstates the scientific research he uses as support.
For instance, he briefly qualifies research suggesting inheritable differences between male and female brains but then proceeds to lay it all out as unqualified fact. All of this research was done on adults, which means that some of the differences might be hereditary, but this is far from established fact. The same charge has been laid against his sister Susan, which, interestingly enough, may support some of his other arguments about intra-family similarity in tendencies.
His hypothesis about hereditary differences between male and female brains may in fact be true, and it definitely matches up with most peoples' intuitive observations of their own children.
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In any case I agree with him that it should make no difference when it comes to placing value on males or females, but none of this excuses the fact that he overstates the scientific conclusions. In Chapter 12, Pinker similarly runs roughshod over stereotypical associations. In fact, subsequent studies suggest otherwise, because stereotypical associations effect more than just memory recall; they effect perception, interpretation and memory encoding. Academic social psychologists who profess otherwise are mostly legal defense experts and corporate human resource consultants.
I doubt that Pinker cherry-picked or intentionally misrepresented the science, leaving me with the conclusion that he again overstated scientific conclusions. As another minor but related point, Pinker might be misusing quotes, taking them out of context or reading too much into them. This may all be true, but after catching him overstating scientific conclusions I started to notice that many of these quotations could contain different, more nuanced meanings than Pinker squeezes out of them.
The idea that we inexorably act rationally is not a necessary conclusion from our status as products of a mercilessly rational evolutionary process, but I understand how this can be a reassuring conclusion for people uncomfortable with ambiguity. The Modern Denial of Human Nature. Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate has many virtues: As its title indicates, the purpose of Pinker's book is to counter the to him prevailing modern notion that humans have no intrinsic natures.
But Pinker's attempt at debunking this notion of "the blank slate" by conflating it unhelpfully with "the Noble Savage" and "The Ghost in the Machine" is decidedly problematic. Let us take the notion of "The Blank Slate": Hume and Locke proceeded from the same premise which the phenomenologists advanced, and which remains unrefuted philosophically or psychologically, that all knowledge of external reality is acquired through the senses, and that, insofar as these senses are unreliable, each human being is "impressionable"—like a blank slate.
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Neither Hume nor Locke, however, ever denies that human beings have innate propensities, or, to pursue the metaphor, they acknowledge that the slate has inherent properties of its own. Yet, Pinker imputes to them the assumption that human behavior is determined only by the environment, highlighting nurture over nature.
He also assumes that "the blank slate" thesis entails the assumption that all human beings have equal traits, abilities, potential "a blank slate is a blank slate is a blank slate". This assumption is particularly problematic in his critique of gender feminists and radical scientists, and their alleged claim that all individuals are equal in ability—although I suspect that they are referring to potential rather than natural endowments.
Aug 26, Pages. With characteristic wit, lucidity, and insight, Pinker argues that the dogma that the mind has no innate traits-a doctrine held by many intellectuals during the past century-denies our common humanity and our individual preferences, replaces objective analyses of social problems with feel-good slogans, and distorts our understanding of politics, violence, parenting, and the arts.
Injecting calm and rationality into debates that are notorious for ax-grinding and mud-slinging, Pinker shows the importance of an honest acknowledgment of human nature based on science and common sense. Pinker argues that intellectuals have ignored what we are when talking about who we are, denying what is at the very heart of our being—our innate human nature. How much of an influence was Chomsky on you? What does he think of your recent work? I never studied with Chomsky, though I did attend lectures by him when I was in graduate school down the river at Harvard.
We are colleagues at MIT, though in different departments. We both study language, though using the tools and standards of different fields I am a psychologist, he is a linguist. Intellectually, Chomsky influenced me in at least two profound ways: We differ in important ways as well. I believe that language, and human nature in general, should be understood in a Darwinian framework, whereas Chomsky does not believe that evolutionary biology provides much if any insight. As such our conceptions of human nature—and perhaps, as a result, our politics—differ.
I take a more jaundiced view of human nature, which is more compatible with a classical liberal sympathy toward conventional democracy and market economies. Do you think The Blank Slate will be more controversial to American readers where evolutionary theory has perhaps been slower to permeate popular thinking? How long will it take our intellectual communities to weed out the fallacies of the noble savage, the ghost in the machine and the blank slate from their thinking? Yes, I think that the traditional American antipathy to evolution, partly influenced by the fundamentalist religious right, will make the book more controversial in the US than in the UK.
Another reason is the greater American sensitivity to issues surrounding race, which makes any kind of innatism seem to veer too close for comfort to hypotheses about innate racial differences. Are you confident that evolutionary psychology will soon provide an account of human nature that is satisfactorily scientific? Yes, I am confident. The comparison with Freud is just wrong. When Freud predicted that little boys have an unconscious desire to have sex with their mothers, you had to take it or leave it.
The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature - Steven Pinker - Google Книги
In contrast, when Donald Symons predicted that geometrically average faces should be more sexually attractive, evolutionary psychologists got out their computers, generated morphed faces, showed them to people, and measured their judgments of how attractive they were. Are there any limits in your opinion to the extent to which science can be ethically prescriptive rather than empirically descriptive?
And that probability is an average computed over the other genes that have accompanied it over evolutionary time, and over the environments that the organisms possessing the gene have lived in. It is vitally important that science make itself properly understood to the wider public for two reasons. Second, science confronts us with challenges to our belief systems, and with new technologies, and we have to understand these innovations in order to deal wisely with them.
A major theme of The Blank Slate is that science, by itself, cannot be ethically prescriptive at all—it can only be empirically descriptive. Ethical judgments require both scientific facts and human values, which cannot be dictated by science though they can be informed by it.