User:Ryguasu/Blank Slate

...a book to try to make (more) possible/acceptable the scientific study of human nature.... There is human nature, given by biology. it is not all we might ask for, but it's ok.

Pinker compares arguments by contemporary scientists that people are not just "blank slates" to Galileo's arguments that the Sun does not revolve around the Earth. In both cases, the new ideas have to be justified by showing not only how they explain the phenomena under investigation better than their competitors, but also how they do not, as they are commonly perceived, signal the end of either human dignity or the moral order (Pinker 2002, pp. 137-8).

(part of this is combatting shoddy scholarship and misunderstandings)

Also:

for various reasons, some disciplines (e.g. sociology, perhaps anthropology) want to be completely severed from biology: "turf wars". artificial sealing off of disciplinary boundaries
misc. people rejecting things because they make them feel bad (e.g. lefties, p. 121): "people taking offense at claims about behavior that make them uncomfortable"

there is human nature: behavioral genetics, evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, and linguistics

the blank slate, the noble savage, the ghost in the machine: these issues can be settled based on scientific evidence, but politics, ideology, and tradition keep interfering.

problems include:

people think that morality will collapse without these things
- people are justifying their current beliefs via "is implies ought", or "what is natural is good"
people think that meaning will collapse without these things

the preface likens reactions to some science as religion's reactions to heretics

p. 122: Disembodied *culture* quote