In both of them, Pinker lobbed his arguments with verve and alacrity at the most popular alternative view: that the mind is essentially silly putty, and that commonalities and differences in how people think can be traced to commonalities and differences in their environments. Another is that when there are differences across individuals, some (but not all) of these must have genetic origins, since variation in genes is the grist for evolution by natural selection.īoth The Language Instinct and How the Mind Works were aimed at convincing the reader that the human mind has a surprisingly rich innate structure, with various modules custom-built by evolution to serve specific adaptive functions like speaking, seeing, and reproducing. One of the strong implications of this argument is that the human mind works in much the same way for everyone, because all human beings have relatively recent common ancestors. He laid out much of it in How the Mind Works (1998), a more ambitious and somewhat more tedious volume that touched on topics ranging from color vision to phobias and sexual attraction-all allegedly part and parcel of human nature, as designed by natural selection and illuminated by the “reverse-engineering” method of evolutionary psychology.
Since writing that sentence, Pinker has marshaled a panoply of other evidence to support this challenge. Modern intellectual life is suffused with a relativism that denies that there is such a thing as a universal human nature, and the existence of a language instinct in any form challenges that denial. At heart, however, The Language Instinct is about what is both common and unique to human beings. His first nonacademic book, The Language Instinct (1994), was acclaimed for its lucid and witty explanation of an ability that is so central to the human experience that few of us have ever thought about how it works. Pinker, a professor of psychology at MIT, established his academic reputation by studying how children acquire the rules of grammar. Why is the idea of an inborn human nature so controversial? What does it imply about how our society should be organized, about our conceptions of equality and justice, about education, religion, the media, the arts? Would we really be better off if there were no such thing as human nature-or if we chose to ignore it? These are the questions Steven Pinker tackles in a passionately argued defense of the thesis that the natural history of our species places powerful constraints on who we are and how we think.
The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
0 kommentar(er)
