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Steven Pinker

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

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In The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker, one of the world's leading experts on language and the mind, explores the idea of human nature and its moral, emotional, and political colorings. 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.
From Publishers WeeklyIn his last outing, How the Mind Works, the author of the well-received The Language Instinct made a case for evolutionary psychology or the view that human beings have a hard-wired nature that evolved over time. This book returns to that still-controversial territory in order to shore it up in the public sphere. Drawing on decades of research in the “sciences of human nature,” Pinker, a chaired professor of psychology at MIT, attacks the notion that an infant's mind is a blank slate, arguing instead that human beings have an inherited universal structure shaped by the demands made upon the species for survival, albeit with plenty of room for cultural and individual variation. For those who have been following the sciences in question including cognitive science, neuroscience, behavioral genetics and evolutionary psychology much of the evidence will be familiar, yet Pinker's clear and witty presentation, complete with comic strips and allusions to writers from Woody Allen to Emily Dickinson, keeps the material fresh. What might amaze is the persistent, often vitriolic resistance to these findings Pinker presents and systematically takes apart, decrying the hold of the “blank slate” and other orthodoxies on intellectual life. He goes on to tour what science currently claims to know about human nature, including its cognitive, intuitive and emotional faculties, and shows what light this research can shed on such thorny topics as gender inequality, child-rearing and modern art. Pinker's synthesizing of many fields is impressive but uneven, especially when he ventures into moral philosophy and religion; examples like “Even Hitler thought he was carrying out the will of God” violate Pinker's own principle that one should not exploit Nazism “for rhetorical clout.” For the most part, however, the book is persuasive and illuminating.Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Library JournalPinker moves from How the Mind Works to how human nature works, offering a theory that ably blends instinct and choice. Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Citater

  • Samyam Aryalhar citeretfor 3 år siden
    If an emotion is defined by behavior, then emotions certainly do differ across cultures. The Ifaluk react emotionally to a woman working in the taro gardens while menstruating or to a man entering a birthing house, and we do not. We react emotionally to someone shouting a racial epithet or raising the middle finger, but
    as far as we know, the Ifaluk do not. But if an emotion is defined by mental mechanisms—what psychologists like Paul Ekman and Richard Lazarus call “affect programs” or “if-then formulas” (note the computational vocabulary)—we and the Ifaluk are not so different after all.
  • Samyam Aryalhar citeretfor 3 år siden
    The philosophers Ron Mallon and Stephen Stich, inspired by Chomsky and other cognitive scientists, point out that the issue of whether to call Ifaluk song and Western anger the same emotion or different emotions is a quibble about the meaning of emotion words: whether they should be defined in terms of surface behavior or underlying mental computation.
  • Samyam Aryalhar citeretfor 3 år siden
    For example, Catherine Lutz wrote that the Ifaluk (a Micronesian people) do not experience our “anger” but instead undergo an experience they call song. Song is a state of dudgeon triggered by a moral infraction such as breaking a taboo or acting in a cocky manner. It licenses one to shun, frown at, threaten, or gossip about the offender, though not to attack him physically. The target of song experiences another emotion allegedly unknown to Westerners: metagu, a state of dread that impels him to appease the song-ful one by apologizing, paying a fine, or offering a gift.

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