Pinker, Steven (2002) The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. New Delhi: Penguin Books

Preface

This is not going to be one of those books that says everything is generic: it isn’t. The environment is just as important as the genes. – 12

Part 1: The Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine

The blank slate: the idea that the human mind has no inherent structure and can be inscribed at will by society or ourselves. – 21

Chapter 1: The Official Theory

Chapter 2: Silly Putty

There is one expression that continually comes to my mind whenever I think of English language and compare it with others: it seems to be positively and expressly masculine, it is the language of the grown-up man and has very little childish or feminine about it… Otto Jespersen (1905) – 29

Berkley formulated the theory of idealism, the notion that ideas, not bodies and other hunks of matter, are the ultimate constituents of reality. – 35 (23)

Idealism allowed Boas to lay a new intellectual foundation for egalitarianism. The differences among human races and ethnic groups; he proposed, come not from their physical constitution but from their culture, a system of ideas and values spread by language and other forms of social behavior. Peoples differ because their cultures differ. – 35 (23)

Boas wrote, “I claim that, unless the contrary can be proved, we must assume that all complex activities are socially determined, not hereditary.” – 35 (23)

Boas showed that languages of primitive peoples were not simpler than those of Europeans; they were just different. Eskimos’ difficulty in discriminating the sounds of our language, for example, is matched by our difficulty in discriminating the sounds of theirs. True, many non-western languages lack the means to express certain abstract concepts.  They may have no words for numbers higher than three, for example, or no word for goodness in general as opposed to goodness of a particular person. But those limitations simply reflect the daily needs of those people as they live their lives, not an infirmity in their mental abilities. – 35-36 (23-24)

Boas’s students insisted not just that differences among ethnic groups must be explained in terms of culture but that every aspect of human existence must be explained in terms of culture. – 36 (24)

Emile Durkheim – “The determining causes of a social fact should be sought among the social facts preceding it and not among the states of individual consciousness.” – 36 (24)

The Last Wall to Fall

The first bridge between biology and culture is the science of mind, cognitive science. – 43 (32)

Here are five ideas from the cognitive revolution that have revamped how we think and talk about minds. – 43 (32)

The first idea: The mental world can be grounded in the physical world by the concepts of information, computation, and feedback. – 43 (32)

A second idea: The mind cannot be blank slate, because blank slates don’t do anything. – 45 (35)

A third idea: An infinite range of behavior can be generated by finite combinatorial programs in the mind. – 45 (35)

Universal mental mechanisms can underlie superficial variation across cultures. - 48 (37)

Humans speak some six thousand mutually unintelligible languages. Nonetheless, the grammatical programs in their minds differ far less than the actual speech coming out of their mouths. – 48 (37)

A fifth idea: The mind is complex system composed of many interacting parts. – 50 (40)

Spoken language has been a feature of human life for tens or thousands of millennia whereas written language is a recent and slow-spreading invention. – 61 (54)

Culture Vultures

Experiment show that one-and-a-half-year-old babies are not associationists who connect overlapping events indiscriminately. They are intuitive psychologists who psych out other people’s intentions before copying what they do. – 68 (63)

Our minds, then, are filled with mechanism designed to read the goals of other people so we can copy their intended acts. – 69 (64)

Language is re-created every generation as it passes through the minds of the humans who speak out. – 76 (72)

The Slate’s Last Stand

In a section called “Connectoplasm” in How the Mind Works, I laid out some simple logical relationship that underlie our understanding of complete thought (such as the meaning of a sentence) but that are difficult to represent in generic networks. One is the distinction between a kind and an individual: between ducks in general and this duck in particular. - 83 (81)

A second talent is compositionality: the ability to entertain a new, complex thought that is not just a sum of the simple thoughts composing it but depends on their relationships. – 84 (81)

A third logical talent is quantification (or the building of variables): the difference between fooling some of the people all of the time and fooling all of the people some of the time. – 84 (81)

A fourth is recursion: the ability to embed one thought inside another, so that we can entertain not only the thought that Elvis lives, but the thought that the National Enquirer reported that Elvis lives, that some people believe the National Enquirer report that Elvis lives, that it is amazing that some people believe that the National Enquirer report that Elvis lives, and so on. – 84 (81)

A final elusive talent is our ability to engage in categorical, as opposed to fuzzy, reasoning: to understand that Bob Dylan is a grandfather, eventhough he is not very grandfatherly, or that shrews are not rodents, though they look just like mice. – 84 (81)

The Holy Trinity

The Fear of Determinism

The Fear of Nihilism

Part IV: Know Thyself

In Touch with Reality

“We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way – an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language. The agreement is, of course, an implicit and unstated one, but its terms are absolutely obligatory!” – Benjamin Lee Whorf – (208-209)