Human Universals, Human Nature & Kant's Categories
Immortalist
Kant's categories of each. Can someone take a couple of examples from the
list and proceed as if explainning from the perspective of "The Critiques."
After the list I have some links to the background of this debate on
universals/plasticities.
---------------------------
APPENDIX Donald E. Brown's List of Human Universals
THIS LIST, COMPILED in 1989 and published in 1991, consists primarily of
"surface" universals of behavior and overt language noted by ethnographers.
It does not list deeper universals of mental structure that are revealed by
theory and experiments. It also omits near-universals (traits that most, but
not all, cultures show) and conditional universals ("If a culture has trait
A, it always has trait B"). A list of items added since 1989 is provided at
the end. For discussion and references, see Brown's Human Universals (1991)
and his entry for "Human Universals" in The MIT Encyclopedia of the
Cognitive Sciences (Wilson & Keil, 1999).
abstraction in speech and thought
actions under self-control distinguished from those not under control
aesthetics
affection expressed and felt
age grades
age statuses
age terms
ambivalence
anthropomorphization
antonyms
baby talk
belief in supernatural/ religion
beliefs, false
beliefs about death
beliefs about disease
beliefs about fortune and misfortune
binary cognitive distinctions
biological mother and social mother normally the same person
black (color term)
body adornment
childbirth customs
childcare
childhood fears
childhood fear of loud noises
childhood fear of strangers
choice making (choosing alternatives)
classification
classification of age
classification of behavioral propensities
classification of body parts
classification of colors
classification of fauna
classification of flora
classification of inner states
classification of kin
classification of sex
classification of space
classification of tools
classification of weather
conditions coalitions
collective identities
conflict
conflict, consultation to deal with
conflict, means of dealing with
conflict, mediation of
conjectural reasoning
containers
continua (ordering as cognitive pattern)
contrasting marked and nonmarked sememes (meaningful elements in language)
cooking
cooperation
cooperative labor
copulation normally conducted in privacy
corporate (perpetual) statuses
coyness display
crying
cultural variability
culture
culture/nature distinction
customary greetings
daily routines
dance
death rituals
decision making
decision making, collective
directions, giving of
discrepancies between speech, thought, and action
dispersed groups
distinguishing right and wrong
diurnality
divination
division of labor
division of labor by age
division of labor by sex
dreams
dream interpretation
economic inequalities
economic inequalities, consciousness of
emotions
empathy
entification (treating patterns and relations as things)
environment, adjustments to
envy
envy, symbolic means of coping with
ethnocentrism
etiquette
explanation
face (word for)
facial communication
facial expression of anger
facial expression of contempt
facial expression of disgust
facial expression of fear
facial expression of happiness
facial expression of sadness
facial expression of surprise
facial expressions, masking/modifying of
family (or household)
father and mother, separate kin terms for
fears
fears, ability to overcome some
feasting
females do more direct childcare
figurative speech
fire
folklore
food preferences food sharing
future, attempts to predict
generosity admired
gestures
gift giving
good and bad distinguished
gossip
government
grammar
group living
groups that are not based on family
hairstyles
hand (word for)
healing the sick (or attempting to)
hospitality
hygienic care
identity, collective
incest between mother and son unthinkable or tabooed
incest, prevention or avoidance
in-group distinguished from out-group(s)
in-group, biases in favor of
inheritance rules
insulting
intention
interest in bioforms (living things or things that resemble them)
interpreting behavior
intertwining (e.g., weaving)
jokes
kin, close distinguished from distant
kin groups
kin terms translatable by basic relations of procreation
kinship statuses
language
language employed to manipulate others
language employed to misinform or mislead
language is translatable
language not a simple reflection of reality
language, prestige from proficient use of
law (rights and obligations)
law (rules of membership)
leaders
lever
linguistic redundancy
logical notions
logical notion of "and"
logical notion of "equivalent"
logical notion of "general/particular"
logical notion of "not"
logical notion of "opposite"
logical notion of "part/whole"
logical notion of "same"
magic
magic to increase life
magic to sustain life
magic to win love
male and female and adult and child seen as having different natures
males dominate public/political realm
males more aggressive
males more prone to lethal violence
males more prone to theft
manipulate social relations
marking at phonemic, syntactic, and lexical levels
marriage
materialism
meal times
meaning, most units of are non-universal
measuring
medicine
melody
memory
metaphor
metonym
mood- or consciousness-altering techniques and/or substances
morphemes
mother normally has consort during child-rearing years
mourning
murder proscribed
music
music, children's
music related in part to dance
music related in part to religious activity
music seen as art (a creation)
music, vocal
music, vocal, includes speech forms
musical redundancy
musical repetition
musical variation
myths
narrative
nomenclature (perhaps the same as classification)
nonbodily decorative art
normal distinguished from abnormal states
nouns
numerals (counting)
Oedipus complex
oligarchy (de facto)
one (numeral)
onomatopoeia
overestimating objectivity of thought
pain
past/present/future
person, concept of
personal names
phonemes
phonemes defined by sets of minimally contrasting features
phonemes, merging of
phonemes, range from 10 to 70 in number
phonemic change, inevitability of
phonemic change, rules of
phonemic system
planning
planning for future
play
play to perfect skills
poetry/rhetoric
poetic line, uniform length range
poetic lines characterized by repetition and variation
poetic lines demarcated by pauses
polysemy (one word has several related meanings)
possessive, intimate
possessive, loose
practice to improve skills
preference for own children and close kin (nepotism)
prestige inequalities
private inner life
promise
pronouns
pronouns, minimum two numbers
pronouns, minimum three persons
proper names
property
psychological defense mechanisms
rape
rape proscribed
reciprocal exchanges (of labor, goods, or services)
reciprocity, negative (revenge, retaliation)
reciprocity, positive
recognition of individuals by face
redress of wrongs
rhythm
right-handedness as population norm
rites of passage
rituals
role and personality seen in dynamic interrelationship (i.e., departures
from role can be explained in terms of individual personality)
sanctions
sanctions for crimes against the collectivity
sanctions include removal from the social unit
self distinguished from other
self as neither wholly passive nor wholly autonomous
self as subject and object
self is responsible
semantics
semantic category of affecting things and people
semantic category of dimension
semantic category of giving
semantic category of location
semantic category of motion
semantic category of speed
semantic category of other physical properties
semantic components
semantic components, generation
semantic components, sex
sememes, commonly used ones are short, infrequently used ones are longer
senses unified
sex (gender) terminology is fundamentally binary
sex statuses
sexual attraction
sexual attractiveness
sexual jealousy
sexual modesty
sexual regulation
sexual regulation includes incest prevention
sexuality as focus of interest
shelter
sickness and death seen as related
snakes, wariness around
social structure
socialization
socialization expected from senior kin
socialization includes toilet training
spear
special speech for special occasions
statuses and roles
statuses, ascribed and achieved
statuses distinguished from individuals
statuses on other than sex, age, or kinship bases
stop/nonstop contrasts (in speech sounds)
succession
sweets preferred
symbolism
symbolic speech
synonyms
taboos
tabooed foods
tabooed utterances
taxonomy
territoriality
time
time, cyclicity of
tools
tool dependency
tool making
tools for cutting
tools to make tools
tools patterned
culturally
tools, permanent
tools for pounding
trade
triangular awareness (assessing relationships among the self and two other
people)
true and false distinguished
turn-taking
two (numeral)
tying material (i.e., something like string)
units of time
verbs
violence, some forms of proscribed
visiting
vocalic/nonvocalic contrasts in phonemes
vowel contrasts
weaning
weapons
weather control (attempts to)
white (color term)
world view
---------------------
Additions Since 1989
---------------------
anticipation
attachment
critical learning periods
differential valuations
dominance/submission
fairness (equity), concept of
fear of death
habituation
hope
husband older than wife on average
imagery
institutions (organized co-activities)
intention
interpolation
judging others
likes and dislikes
making comparisons
males, on average, travel greater distances over lifetime
males engage in more coalitional violence
mental maps
mentalese
moral sentiments
moral sentiments, limited effective range of
precedence, concept of (that's how the leopard got its spots)
pretend play
pride
proverbs, sayings
proverbs, sayings-in mutually contradictory forms
resistance to abuse of power, to dominance
risk taking
self-control
self-image, awareness of (concern for what others think)
self-image, manipulation of
self-image, wanted to be positive
sex differences in spatial cognition and behavior
shame
stinginess, disapproval of
sucking wounds
synesthetic metaphors
thumb sucking
tickling
toys, playthings
...None of this means that people literally strive to replicate their genes.
If that's how the mind worked, men would line up outside the sperms banks
and women would pay to have their eggs harvested and given away to infertile
couples. It means only that inherited systems for learning, thinking, and
feeling have a design that would have led, on average, to enhanced survival
and reproduction in the environment in which our ancestors evolved. People
enjoy eating, and in a world without junk food, that led them to nourish
themselves, even if the nutritional content of the food never entered their
minds. People love sex and love children, and in a world without
contraception, that was enough for the genes to take care of themselves.
The difference between the mechanisms that impel organisms to behave in real
time and the mechanisms that shaped the design of the organism over
evolutionary time is important enough to merit some jargon. A proximate
cause of behavior is the mechanism that pushes behavior buttons in real
time, such as the hunger and lust that impel people to eat and have sex. An
ultimate cause is the adaptive rationale that led the proximate cause to
evolve, such as the need for nutrition and reproduction that gave us the
drives of hunger and lust. The distinction between proximate and ultimate
causation is indispensable in understanding ourselves because it determines
the answer to every question of the form "Why did that person act as he
did?" To take a simple example, ultimately people crave sex in order to
reproduce (because the ultimate cause of sex is reproduction), but
proximately they may do everything they can not to reproduce (because the
proximate cause of sex is pleasure).
The difference between proximate and ultimate goals is another kind of proof
that we are not blank slates. Whenever people strive for obvious rewards
like health and happiness, which make sense both proximately and ultimately,
one could plausibly suppose that the mind is equipped only with a desire to
be happy and healthy and a cause-and-effect calculus that helps them get
what they want. But people often have desires that subvert their proximate
well-being, desires that they cannot articulate and that they (and their
society) may try unsuccessfully to extirpate. They may covet their
neighbor's spouse, eat themselves into an early grave, explode over minor
slights, fail to love their stepchildren, rev up their bodies in response to
a stressor that they cannot fight or flee, exhaust themselves keeping up
with the Joneses or climbing the corporate ladder, and prefer a sexy and
dangerous partner to a plain but dependable one. These personally puzzling
drives have a transparent evolutionary rationale, and they suggest that the
mind is packed with cravings shaped by natural selection, not with a generic
desire for personal well-being.
Evolutionary psychology also explains why the slate is not blank. The mind
was forged in Darwinian competition, and an inert medium would have been
outperformed by rivals outfitted with high technology-with acute perceptual
systems, savvy problem-solvers, cunning strategists, and sensitive feedback
circuits. Worse still, if our minds were truly malleable they would be
easily manipulated by our rivals, who could mold or condition us into
serving their needs rather than our own. A malleable mind would quickly be
selected out.
Researchers in the human sciences have begun to flesh out the hypothesis
that the mind evolved with a universal complex design. Some anthropologists
have returned to an ethnographic record that used to trumpet differences
among cultures and have found an astonishingly detailed set of aptitudes and
tastes that all cultures have in common. This shared way of thinking,
feeling, and living makes us look like a single tribe, which the
anthropologist Donald Brown has called the Universal People, after Chomsky's
Universal Grammar. Hundreds of traits, from fear of snakes to logical
operators, from romantic love to humorous insults, from poetry to food
taboos, from exchange of goods to mourning the dead, can be found in every
society ever documented. It's not that every universal behavior directly
reflects a universal component of human nature—many arise from an
interplay between universal properties of the mind, universal properties of
the body, and universal properties of the world. Nonetheless, the sheer
richness and detail in the rendering of the Universal People comes as a
shock to any intuition that the mind is a blank slate or that cultures can
vary without limit, and there is something on the list to refute almost any
theory growing out of those intuitions. Nothing can substitute for seeing
Brown's list in full; it is reproduced, with his permission, as an appendix.
The idea that natural selection has endowed humans with a universal complex
mind has received support from other quarters. Child psychologists no longer
believe that the world of an infant is a blooming, buzzing confusion,
because they have found signs of the basic categories of mind (such as those
for objects, people, and tools) in young babies. Archaeologists and
paleontologists have found that prehistoric humans were not brutish
troglodytes but exercised their minds with art, ritual, trade, violence,
cooperation, technology, and symbols. And primatologists have shown that our
hairy relatives are not like lab rats waiting to be conditioned but are
outfitted with many complex faculties that used to be considered uniquely
human, including concepts, a spatial sense, tool use, jealousy, parental
love, reciprocity, peacemaking, and differences between the sexes. With so
many mental abilities appearing in all human cultures, in children before
they have acquired culture, and in creatures that have little or no culture,
the mind no longer looks like a formless lump pounded into shape by culture.
FROM: The Blank Slate:
The Modern Denial of Human Nature
by Steven Pinker
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0142003344/
----------------------------------------
The ethnographic evidence overwhelmingly shows that a universal human nature
does exist. Brown lists nine pages of traits common to all known societies,
such as prestige, gossip, humorous insults, rhetoric, terms distinguishing
male and female, sexual regulations, kinship terms, property, rules
proscribing violence and rape, and many more.
This is hardly surprising. Human beings all have the same genomes. Genes
build bodies and bodies build brains and brains build minds. Ergo, human
beings are basically the same in the Amazon rainforests and the metropolitan
cities. Differences in behaviour, beliefs and habits - i.e. culture - are
mainly the result of ecology, geography and technology
The biology of culture
http://www.caribscape.com/baldeosingh/social/sober/2000/culture2.html
--------------------------------
The impression from anthropology that humanity is a carnival where anything
is possible came in part from a tourist mentality: when you come back from a
trip, you remember what was different about where you went, otherwise you
might as well have stayed at home. That is, many anthropologists exaggerated
the degree to which the tribes they studied were exotic and strange, both to
justify their profession and to raise people's consciousness about human
potential. But many of their claims have turned out either to be canards,
like Margaret Mead's claims about Samoa, or to miss the forest for the
trees: the anthropologists spent so much time looking for differences that
they didn't notice basic categories of human experience that are found in
every culture, like humor, love, jealousy, and a sense of responsibility.
Language is simply the most famous example of a human universal. Donald
Brown, an anthropologist at UC Santa Barbara, wrote a book called Human
Universals, in which he scoured the archives of ethnography for well
substantiated human universals. He came up with a list of about a hundred
and fifty, covering every sphere of human experience. That's my
interpretation of the main lessons of anthropology. The interesting
discoveries aren't about this kinship system or that form of shamanry.
Underneath it all — just as, in the case of language, there's a universal
design Chomsky called universal grammar — there is in the rest of culture
what Donald Brown calls the universal people. He characterized the human
species much the way a biologist would characterize any other species.
Chapter 13 - STEVEN PINKER
"Language Is a Human Instinct"
http://www.edge.org/documents/ThirdCulture/u-Ch.13.html
--------------------------------
Innateness
In linguistic and in non-linguistic domains, a central question is to what
degree "universals" that we observe are due to some innate property of human
brains, or to some kind of environmental influence -- the classic
nature/nurture problem.
Some things are obviously environmental. It's universally true that all
languages have a word for "mother" and "water", but this is because all
humans have these as part of their environment. But only some languages have
a word for "snow" or "alligator" because those are not universally present
features of the environment.
On the other hand, the general ability to learn language isn't
environmental -- otherwise any animal that grows up with humans would learn
to understand language (even if pronouncing it presented a problem). Recall
also that languages can be created spontaneously, as by deaf children with
limited sign systems who work together to make a fully functioning language
from these raw materials.
The important question is just how the universal language ability should be
characterized -- in essence, how detailed the instinct is. For example, are
we born with notions of hierarchical syntactic structure, or is this
something that we figure out based on more general notions of "kind" and
"superordinate"? Many researchers, inluding Pinker, believe that the
instinct is rather specific. Others look for more general explanations in
human cognition.
Analogies can be made to many other aspects of human behavior. Pinker
summarizes at length from Donald Brown's characterization of "universal
people", including things that are surely not innate, and others that likely
are.
The existence of shelter in every society is easily attributable to the
existence of dangers or inclement weather that can be mitigated by housing;
we probably don't need to propose a "shelter instinct" as different from a
general instinct for self-preservation.
The existence of facial expressions of various kinds is probably innate,
since they're the same across cultures, and in at least some cases seem to
be related to facial expressions in other primates (i.e. they've evolved
genetically).
The Standard Social Science Model (SSSM) assumes that human culture varies,
in principle, without limit.
http://www.ling.upenn.edu/courses/Spring_2003/ling001/14b.html
-----------------------------------
he most compelling attempt to date to build a thorough inventory of
humanity's basic toolbox comes from the anthropologist Donald Brown.
Inspired by Chomsky's idea of a "universal grammar"--the deep syntax shared
by all human languages--Brown set out to document the basic social patterns,
beliefs and categories shared by all known human societies, without
exception. Pinker devotes an entire appendix to Brown's list, which has a
strangely moving, abbreviated style: "cooking; cooperation; cooperative
labor; copulation normally conducted in privacy; corporate (perpetual)
statuses; coyness display; crying; cultural variability; culture;
culture/nature distinction; customary greetings; daily routines; dance;
death rituals..."
There is much for the left (and the right) to both condemn and admire in
this litany; for every "cooperative labor" there is a "females do more
direct childcare." But the first thing that should be noted about Brown's
list is its inclusiveness: We may in fact possess an innate tendency to
divide the world into "in groups" and "out groups," but the first instinct
of evolutionary psychology is to group us all together in the shared family
of human universals. Even if we don't always like the traits we find there,
that unifying impulse should be at the heart of any progressive politics,
not an outcast from it. Pinker quotes Chomsky on this very point:
A vision of a future social order is...based on a concept of human nature.
If, in fact, man is an indefinitely malleable, completely plastic being,
with no innate structures of mind and no intrinsic needs of a cultural or
social character, then he is a fit subject for the "shaping of behavior" by
the State authority, the corporate manager, the technocrat, or the central
committee. Those with some confidence in the human species will hope this is
not so and will try to determine the intrinsic characteristics that provide
the framework for intellectual development, the growth of moral
consciousness, cultural achievement, and participation in a free community.
Of course, the one place in which the neo-Darwinians have in fact emphasized
differences over commonalities is the fraught world of the sexes. Because so
much of natural selection is predicated on reproductive success or failure,
and because men and women have such differing biological stakes in the act
of reproduction, it is inevitable that natural selection would craft
slightly different toolboxes for each sex. This is no problem for the many
schools of feminism that embrace the "different but equal" assessment of the
sexes, but it is a major irritant for those on the left who imagine all
gender differences to be the product of cultural biases. I suspect, though,
that the sexual blank slate isn't long for this world, for several reasons.
Sociobiology and You
http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/slate_reviews_file/nation_johnson3.htm
----------------------------------------
Universals, Human Nature, and Anthropology
From HUMAN UNIVERSAL, Donald Brown (1991)
http://citd.scar.utoronto.ca/ANTB25/SCMEDIA/Readings/Brown.html
N
(Goodness! what an interesting list!...but they're only the
ones they know about so far !!)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
(I'm is a sour mood this morning so excuse me !)
I feel that the list refers to things that are
mostly private to the majority of individuals.
Describing personal experiences, private moments
e.g. 'empathy', and/or tastes using a medium that
is ill suited to ones natural individual expression
must lead to an awful lot of....'paperwork'
Ample scope for a fascinating occupation though !
E.G. 'EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITIES'
for voyeurs and critics
of other peoples literary
or verbal inadequacies'
N
The Immortalist
> FROM: The Blank Slate:
> The Modern Denial of Human Nature
> by Steven Pinker
> http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0142003344/
>
poking around at people's opinions
pro/con from the above link...
Pinker moves from How the Mind Works to how human nature works,
offering a theory that ably blends instinct and choice. We don't just
inherit certain personality traits or physical features. We inherit
human-ness itself.
The human mind didn't just happen -- it evolved. It has been evolving
for 100,000 to 500,000 years -- depending on which orgnanisms you wnat
to call human -- and shares many more features with older apes, and
mammals in general. Humans are born with a sort of "pre-packaging" of
software that can be examined and studied to find out why we do the
things we do.
--------------------------
It seems clear that undoing that which was written into our genes by
nature's crude and inefficient brush over hundreds of thousands of
years may well require such a level of effort that it is effectively
unattainable.
--------------------------
In The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker explores the idea of human nature
and its moral, emotional, and political colorings. 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.
--------------------------
...an extremely eloquent, well reasoned, comprehensive and
entertaining renunciation of the holy trinity of social science - the
blank slate, noble savage, and ghost in the machine; ideologies that
have created serious obstacles to the application of modern scientific
research in genetics, biology and psychology to a better understanding
of who we really are.
-------------------------
...Pinker...has rehabilitated the notion that there is a human nature,
that homo sapiens is a species with some basic patterns of perception
and response. The idea that the human race can be molded beyond its
species-capacity meets with damaging evidence to the contrary. We are
very adaptable but we are not blanks slates. A good reminder to "know
your species and know yourself".
Highly recommended
---------------------------
They are apparently willing to accept the innate physical differences
of the various races: the oriental eye-fold of the Asian, the longer
limbs and typical steatopygia of the African, and the various skin
color differences--and probably they will even acknowledge the
undeniable genetically generated athletic prowess of African,
but--heaven forbid!--one should never acknowledge that there may be
racial mental propensities as well!
---------------------------
Pinker clearly gives evidence to the contrary: that our children
become the way they are primarily from their genes (not quite the
blank slate, is it?) and from the specific experiences in their lives,
not necessarily just THE environment, but from the way the environment
has specifically interacted with us.
---------------------------
This book is a must read for any young student. I say this because if
you are a young student, anywhere in the western world, you will no
doubt be soon indoctrinated into a worldview that is based primarily
on the very ideas that this book refutes with a mountain of scientific
evidence. It just might save you from a great deal of anguish, lost
time and wasted money.
------------------------
This book blows the lid off the Boasian perspective on human nature
and its censorious effect on real scholarship in the social sciences.
In my own counseling studies I have witnessed first hand how
professors immediately intercept, interrupt, and re-interpret any
conversation that even hints at man having innate abilities, even
though cognitive science has made great and historic advances in terms
of how the brain works and operates. I read this book because I refuse
to walk in ingnorace, even though the more "politically correct" view
is that man is by nature, infinately perfectable. Hogwash!
--------------------------
__________________________
[dude!&$^%+*&^$%] stick with what you know..., January 22, 2004
Reviewer: Doug Peters (see more about me) from Montreal, Canada
Pinker attempts to do four things in "The Blank Slate":
1. demolish "the blank slate" concept
2. demolish "the noble savage" concept
3. demolish "the ghost in the machine" concept
4. use statistics according to Disraeli.
Strawman-baiting notwithstanding, Pinker makes a good show toward his
first two goals. He only deserves partial credit, however, as those
ideas have far outlasted their intrinsic value and deserve the burial
he gleefully supplies.
Unfortuately for Pinker, the same cannot be said of "the ghost in the
machine". That it should be conflated with the previous two over-ripe
ideas is odd. While the "ghost" has appeared in many dubious
incarnations, some of which Pinker uses as foils, "the ghost in the
machine" can be reduced to the idea that "there is something about
human nature that is beyond our ability to understand (AKA
'science')". Put in those terms, the concept resists sophisticated
attempts at dismissal, let alone the light-weight ones Pinker employs.
A clause like "we have every reason to believe that" (consciousness
[derives from] neural networks in the brain - p.240) really means "we
cannot conceive other than that" or "our faith affirms that".
Apparently, what should be obvious is not: science is unable to define
its own limits.
Pinker also gets the proverbial raspberry for playing fast-and-loose
with statistics in the final chapters. At least he is honest enough to
mitigate his stance with some necessary caveats. He admits that
prizing apart genetics and environment can be a tricky business. He
admits that the adopting demographic has huge correlation within it.
He mentions the crucial differences between "determines/affects" and
"variance/outcome" but appears to have trouble interpreting these
differences on occasion. He mentions the necessity of systematic
influence. He could have mentioned the sample set size problem for
twins-reared-apart studies, studies that have shown as much as 25%
environmental influence, linearity and independence assumptions, free
will as a source of measurement noise, etc. I suppose that the glosses
were made in an attempt to make the whole more accessible to the
masses, but the end result is that conclusions derive more from the
assumptions than from the evidence itself.
Finally, Pinker also indulges in the just-so-story-making that true
believers have gobbled up throughout history. Passive? Aggressive? Got
them both covered. Ethical? Violent? No problem. We can "explain" them
both with ease. If a theory can explain any two conflicting phenomena
without so much as a flinch, it is non-falsifiable and hence
non-scientific.
Bottom line: I learned precious little about human nature from this
book. Plenty about the foibles of academia, the politics of science,
and the inertia of dogma -- but I was already familiar with all those
topics. Recognizing this weakness in his book, Pinker defers, in
closing, to the real experts on human nature: poets and novelists.
Wanna learn about human nature? Read Tolstoy, Austen, Dickens, Hardy,
Dostoevsky... --This text refers to the Hardcover edition
[reanimaterLOL]
------------------------
The fact that nobody actually beleives in the idea that humans are a
blank slate doesn't stop Pinker from acting as if they do. Over and
over again in this book, Pinker quotes his purported opposition and
follows up his quotation with an interpretation which is clearly a
distortion.
This book is merely a diatribe: I can read "adaptionist" books with
great pleasure when they are written by people with some subtelty of
mind--Richard Dawkins or EO Wilson, say. But Pinker, either through
willfulness or incapacity, utterly misses the nuance in arguments made
by anyone for whom he considers to be an enemy.
A witless, unsubtle and closing-in-on-useless book.
Of course, if what you are interested in is seeing Pinker take a
bludgeon to a bunch of strawmen, then you'll probably like this book.
(------------------------
------------------------)
Anthropologists and other social scientists are troubled because they
are married to the "blank slate model." They seem incapable of
thinking outside of that box. Pinker shreds the box and sets it on
fire. In many cases, they also have academic turf to defend.
Scientific psychology is stuck in a dreadful swamp of theoretical
confusion, contradictory findings, and low quality science. It's stuck
because the "blank slate" model just doesn't work. It doesn't "fit the
data" about what people are really like, and what human history really
has been. Psychologists have trouble understanding that human history
didn't begin 150 years ago in Vienna, or 5,000 years ago when the
pyramids were built. That was just the last 1 to five percent of human
history.
------------------------
I teach evolutionary psychology in college, and I think I can make a
fair claim to know the literature fairly well. The study of the mind's
evolution has hardly begun in earnest, and you'd never get a whiff of
the huge number of controversies "within" the field from reading
Pinker. For instance, there are, in fact, both good evolutionary
reasons and lab-derived evidence to suggest that attachment is
important--though there is also evidence that traditional notions of
attachment were mistaken. Pinker pays attention to the latter, never
even lets you know that the former exists, and draws a highly partisan
conclusion not shared by a huge number of scientists with reputations
at least as good as his *within* the *research* community.
I found myself quickly growing tired of him building up strawmen only
so that he can knock them down. I am not a scholar but even I could
tell that his descriptions of opposing philosophical theories are
shallow and designed to prove his point. Mr. Pinker obviously has deep
convictions about human nature. This book reminds me of being forced
as a student to listen to a professor profess his pet theories before
a captive audience. I found no great exploration of ideas here but
just a declaration of Pinker's beliefs. I kept thinking of strawmen
and fish in barrels while I read this...
LEFT OFF
http://tinyurl.com/2odrm
Immortalist
"N" <nicc...@yahoo.co.uk> wrote in message
news:200065dc.04012...@posting.google.com...
> "Immortalist" <Reanima...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:<1015bc1...@corp.supernews.com>...
>
> (Goodness! what an interesting list!...but they're only the
> ones they know about so far !!)
>
How many do we need to know before we can proceed in a legitimate fashion as
you prescribe?
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> (I'm is a sour mood this morning so excuse me !)
>
Me too but I would rather take it out on bad drivers than people in here.