The Blank Slate
Ratings23
Average rating4.1
In The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker, one of the world's leading experts on language and the mind, explores the idea of human nature and its moral, emotional, and political colorings. With characteristic wit, lucidity, and insight, Pinker argues that 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. Injecting calm and rationality into debates that are notorious for ax-grinding and mud-slinging, Pinker shows the importance of an honest acknowledgment of human nature based on science and common sense.
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It's not often that I read a book and can honestly say it changed my outlook on life, but The Blank Slate is definitely one of them (trite, I know). In the book, Steven Pinker analyzes the current concepts of human nature, of culture and heritability, and reveals why in both popular and intellectual circles the prevailing viewpoints are flawed, and indeed detrimental to both research and society.
Brief summary:
The first section of the book introduces Pinker's three fallacies, which contribute to our misunderstanding of human nature. These are the Blank Slate, the tabula rasa, which considers each human being to be a moldable clay at birth, intrinsically shaped by their environment and culture.
I'm fascinated with why people do what they do.
This book reinterates over and over how much
of human nature is determined before we are born.
