From: Peter C. McCluskey (pcm@rahul.net)
Date: Sat Mar 29 2003 - 09:17:32 MST
mez@apexnano.com (Ramez Naam) writes:
>I'm a big fan of Pinker's. Honestly though, he's tilting at
>windmills. The "blank slate" idea may have been big 30 years ago, but
>it's been dead as a doornail (in scientific circles) for quite some
>time now.
I thought Pinker made a good case that there's a widespread bias towards
a blank-slate worldview.
But I agree that when dealing with serious scientific literature, Pinker's
attempts to find clearcut enemies are mistaken.
Pinker's attacks on Gould's quasi-defense of the blank slate mainly
convinced me that Gould didn't want to think clearly about the subject,
probably because he considered that any mechanistic explanation of the
mind (genetic or environmental) was demeaning.
Pinker's claim that "The second scientific defense of the Blank Slate comes
from connectionism" is pretty puzzling. This "defense" consists of modelling
the mind as "a general-purpose learning device". But the books that Pinker
references (Rethinking Innateness, and Parallel Distributed Processing), are
both carefull to point out why their models are completely consistent with
the kind of genetic influences on behavior that evolutionary psychologists
are talking about. Their disagreements with Pinker seem to be confined to
how those influences are implemented.
-- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Peter McCluskey | "To announce that there must be no criticism of http://www.rahul.net/pcm | the President, or that we are to stand by the | President right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic | and servile, but morally treasonable to the | American public." - Theodore Roosevelt
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