The Blank Slate By Steven Pinker Free Essays.
Steven Pinker's book The Blank Slate argues that all humans are born with some innate traits. Here, Pinker talks about his thesis, and why some people found it incredibly upsetting. You have JavaScript disabled For the best experience, please turn JavaScript on.
Pinker addresses the idea that humans develop purely based on their experiences in the book The Blank Slate, thus called because of the common belief that the mind is a blank slate and the way a person develops is purely a product of culture and socialisation (Rakoff 2002).
Pinker is committed to a range of theories—adaptationism, the massive modularity thesis, reverse engineering, and, most importantly in The Blank Slate, the idea of a universal human nature. He.
Steven Pinker’s believes that human beings are born absent any knowledge of the world, essentially making them a blank slate. He compares it to “play-doh” which comes blank but can be molded and formed into whatever one chooses.
The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature is a best-selling 2002 book by the cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, in which the author makes a case against tabula rasa models in the social sciences, arguing that human behavior is substantially shaped by evolutionary psychological adaptations.
In Steven Pinker’s popular book The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, Pinker characterizes the Blank State as “the idea that the human mind has no inherent structure and can be inscribed at will by society or ourselves.”.
In The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker attempts to refute the theory that we are all born as a tabula rasa and to demonstrate to which extent human behavior is shaped by evolutionary and psychological adaptations. In other words, as far as Pinker is concerned, nature beats nurture by a country mile. And he provides a lot of evidence to corroborate this claim. Part I: The Blank Slate, The Noble.