The blank slate doctrine, holding that the human mind has no inherent structure and is shaped entirely by experience, is itself a kind of myth — a politically convenient story rather than a scientific finding.
Psychologists
Steven Pinker
Canadian-American cognitive psychologist, psycholinguist, and public intellectual (born 1954). Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard. Across nine general-audience books — including The Language Instinct (1994), How the Mind Works (1997), The Blank Slate (2002), The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011), and Enlightenment Now (2018) — he has carried evolutionary psychology and Enlightenment humanism to a vast global readership. He is also one of the most contested living intellectuals: the 2006 Epstein-defense letter, a 2020 LSA open letter seeking his removal, archaeological pushback on Better Angels, and the gender-essentialism debates have all kept him at the center of academic controversy.
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Steven Pinker's Other Quotes
Language is not a cultural artifact that we learn the way we learn to tell time or how the federal government works. Instead, it is a distinct piece of the biological makeup of our brains. Language is a complex, specialized skill, which develops in the child spontaneously, without conscious effort or formal instruction, is deployed without awareness of its underlying logic, is qualitatively the same in every individual, and is distinct from more general abilities to process information or behave intelligently.
Believe it or not — and I know that most people do not — violence has declined over long stretches of time, and today we may be living in the most peaceable era in our species's existence.
The mind is a system of organs of computation, designed by natural selection to solve the kinds of problems our ancestors faced in their foraging way of life.
Reason, science, humanism, and progress: the Enlightenment values are more relevant today than ever.
Related Quotes
Man is by nature a political animal.
-- Aristotle
All human beings by nature desire to know.
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The feeling of compassion is the sprout of benevolence; shame, of righteousness; deference, of propriety; right and wrong, of wisdom.
-- Mencius
Optimism is invaluable for the meaningful life. With a firm belief in a positive future, you can throw yourself into the service of that which is larger than you are.
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The good life consists in deriving happiness by using your signature strengths every day in the main realms of living.
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