The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature - Softcover

Pinker, Steven

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0713996722 ISBN 13: 9780713996722

Publisher: Allen Lane, 2002

Synopsis

What is the truth about human nature? Are we each born a blank slate upon which experience is written? Steven Pinker here argues that our usual explanations of human behaviour - stated most clearly in the human sciences of psychology, ethics and politics - tend to deny what is now undeniable: the role of an inherited human nature. Differences in personality or achievement, whether seen among races, ethnic groups, sexes or individuals, are routinely explained away as due not to differences in innate constitution but differences in experience. This work argues otherwise.

About this title

Review:

In The Blank Slate, the bestselling author Steven Pinker produces his most polemical and convincing attack upon the nurture side of the nature versus nurture debate. Pinker's previous books The Language Instinctand How the Mind Works have already attracted huge praise and controversy in arguing that language and cognition are natural rather than cultural. In The Blank Slate he refines and extends his arguments.

The book is aimed at "people who wonder where the taboo against human nature came from", and promises to explain "the moral, emotional and political colorings of the concept of human nature in modern life". For Pinker, the belief that we are all born as "blank slates" upon which culture places its decisive imprint is not only wrong but dangerous. He persuasively argues that "the conviction that humanity could be reshaped by massive social engineering projects led to some of the greatest atrocities in history". This is all very well, but at over 500 pages it can also be daunting for the general reader, as Pinker takes on all-comers, from biologists and sociologists to a dizzying array of classical thinkers from Calvin and Hobbes to Marx and Dawkins. The sections on gender will undoubtedly inflame many feminist writers (the most persuasive of which Pinker sadly neglects to discuss), and the criticisms of modern art are flimsy, but The Blank Slate is an impressive and sustained broadside that cannot be ignored. -–Jerry Brotton

Review:

"Sweeping, erudite, sharply argued, and fun to read. It's also highly persuasive."

"Sweeping, erudite, sharply argued, and fun to read. It's also highly persuasive." ("Time")

"Steven Pinker has written an extremely good book-clear, well argued, fair, learned, tough, witty, humane, stimulating." ("The Washington Post")
"Sweeping, erudite, sharply argued, and fun to read. It's also highly persuasive." ("Time")

"An extremely good book-clear, well argued, fair, learned, tough, witty, humane, stimulating." (The Washington Post)

"Pinker makes his main argument persuasively and with great verve...ought to be read by anybody who feels they hav had enough of the nature-nurture rows." (The Economist)

"Stylish...what a superb thinker and writer he is." (Richard Dawkins, TLS)

"Required reading...an unanswerable case for accepting that man can be, as he is, both wired and free." (Frederick Raphael, Los Angeles Times)

About this edition

• Publisher: Allen Lane
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0713996722
• ISBN 13: 9780713996722
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 528