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The
Blank
Slate


Friday
May 14th, 2004

Dr. Steve
Pinker
Harvard University
 ?Using our genes
as an excuse
for fatalism
is unwise.
But so is pretending
that they don’t
matter at all.”
Dr. Steven Pinker, Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, a native of Montreal, received his BA from McGill University in 1976 and his PhD in psychology from Harvard in 1979. After serving on the faculties of Harvard and Stanford Universities a year each, he moved to MIT in 1982, where he was Professor of Psychology in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and a MacVicar Faculty Fellow. His research on visual cognition and on the psychology of language has received the Troland Award from the National Academy of Sciences and two prizes from the American Psychological Association. He has also received awards for his graduate teaching at MIT and for his undergraduate teaching at MIT, two prizes for general achievement, an honorary doctorate, and five awards for his popular science books The Language Instinct and How the Mind Works.

Everyone has a theory of human nature. Everyone has to anticipate the behavior of others, and that means we all need theories about what makes people tick. A tacit theory of human nature – that behavior is caused by thoughts and feelings – is embedded in the very way we think about people. We fill out this theory by introspecting on our own minds and assuming that our fellows are like ourselves, and by watching people’s behavior and filing away generalizations. We absorb still other ideas from our intellectual climate: from the expertise of authorities and the conventional wisdom of the day.

Pinker describes the ascendance of The Blank Slate (the mind has no innate traits) in modern intellectual life, and the new view of human nature and culture that is beginning to challenge it. Pinker argues that a richer conception of human nature can provide insight into language, thought, social life, and morality, and how it can clarify controversies on politics, violence, gender, childbearing, and the arts.

Our theory of human nature is the wellspring of much of our lives. We consult it when we persuade or threaten, inform or deceive. It advises us on how to nurture our marriages, bring up our children, and control our own behavior. Its assumptions about learning drive our educational policy; its assumptions about motivation drive our policies on economics, law, and crime. And because it delineates what people can achieve easily, what they can achieve only with sacrifice and pain, and what they cannot achieve at all, it affects our values: what we believe we can reasonably strive for as individuals and as a society. Rival theories of human nature are entwined in different ways of life and different political systems, and have been a source of much conflict over the course of history.