Pinker Blank Slate Epub To Pdfl
Emmanuelle Riker
Pinker claims these fears are non sequiturs, and that the blank slate view of human nature would actually be a greater threat if it were true. For example, he argues that political equality does not require sameness, but policies that treat people as individuals with rights; that moral progress does not require the human mind to be naturally free of selfish motives, only that it has other motives to counteract them; that responsibility does not require behavior to be uncaused, only that it respond to praise and blame; and that meaning in life does not require that the process that shaped the brain must have a purpose, only that the brain itself must have purposes. He also argues that grounding moral values in claims about a blank slate opens them to the possibility of being overturned by future empirical discoveries. He further argues that a blank slate is in fact inconsistent with opposition to many social evils since a blank slate could be conditioned to enjoy servitude and degradation.
In the first few chapters, Pinker shows that three ideas held to be true by many social scientists (in 2006, and up to two-thirds in 2016) are false: the blank slate, the noble savage, and the ghost in the machine. He contrasts these ideas with evolutionary psychology: Our brains are composed of different modules (contra the blank slate) that are evolved, which is all our psychology is (contra the ghost in the machine). Adding in the fact that humans haven't diverged many generations ago, this means human nature should be something common to all humans (contra the noble savage). These commonalities between all humans is attached as an appendix, and can also be found here. (Warning: garish color scheme and pretty bad formatting.)
Pinker also dealt with the problem of how the blank slate trifecta arose, namely, if everyone is innately identical, then there is no rational reason for discrimination. This seems to be an assumption made by many on the modern western left as well, which can explain the vigor with which they attack evo psych and other genetic factors (not determinants!) of behavior. However, Pinker suggests an easy way out: Insist on equal opportunity regardless of what the science says. After all, one cannot derive an action from a fact (unless that fact is the action). The facts do not compel us to perform some action unless you already accept that the fact implies you should perform that action. This means we can act morally regardless of what the facts say about the ability of people. He spends most of the book hashing out the consequences of our evolved psychology and what it means for how we should act. He doesn't let the religious right off the hook either, with its creationism and "God-given" regressive morality (e.g. on stem cell research). He also takes the blank slate to task for enabling the large-scale social engineering (if people are blank slates, they are free to be molded however one wants) of authoritarian governments in the 20th century, left or right, and disregarding the individual, a theme he revisits in the final part of the book through quotes from 1984.
Language is maybe the perfect illustration of an ability of culture that is learned; also, it displays to people that kids need to come to this world owning further things than blank slates. If brains were empty, everything it could do is submissively track sounds and views similar to a camera. However, a child needs to possess a cognitive tendency for making sense of the vocabulary they receive because they will immediately know and create new phrases that they have not heard.
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