Description

CONTENTS
PREFACE vii

PART I The Blank Slate, the Noble Savage,
and the Ghost in the Machine 1
Chapter 1 The Official Theory 5
Chapter 2 Silly Putty 14
Chapter 3 The Last Wall to Fall 30
Chapter 4 Culture Vultures 59
Chapter 5 The Slate's Last Stand 73

PART II Fear and Loathing 103
Chapter 6 Political Scientists 105
Chapter 7 The Holy Trinity 121
PART III Human Nature with a Human Face 137
Chapter 8 The Fear of Inequality 141
Chapter 9 The Fear of Imperfectibility 159
Chapter 10 The Fear of Determinism 174
Chapter 11 The Fear of Nihilism 186

PART IV Know Thyself 195
Chapter 12 In Touch with Reality 197
Chapter 13 Out of Our Depths 219
Chapter 14 The Many Roots of Our Suffering 241
Chapter 15 The Sanctimonious Animal 269

PART V Hot Buttons 281
Chapter 16 Politics 283
Chapter 17 Violence 306
Chapter 18 Gender 337
Chapter 19 Children 372
Chapter 20 The Arts 400

PART VI The Voice of the Species 421

Appendix: Donald E. Brown's List of Human Universals 435

notes 441

references 461

INDEX 491

THE BLANK SLATE

Steven Pinker is Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. His research on visual cognition and the
psychology of language has earned prizes from the National Academy of Sciences and the American Psychological
Association. Pinker has also received many awards for his teaching at MIT and for his books How the Mind Works
(which was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize) and The Language Instinct. He is an elected fellow of several
scientific societies, associate editor of Cognition, and a member of the usage panel of the American Heritage
Dictionary. He has written for The New York Times, Time, The New Yorker, The New Republic, Slate, and
Technology Review

Praise for The Blank Slate

“A brilliant and forceful summary... A well-informed and well-written account of [human] limitations, [written with]
a graceful interleaving of scientific and literary sources.... [This] fine book helps with a task that we all must begin to
take seriously... Can it be that we have finally grown up?”
— Melvin Konner, The American Prospect

“This is a brilliant book. It is beautifully written, and addresses profound issues with courage and clarity. There is
nothing else like it, and it is going to have an impact that extends well beyond the scientific academy.”
— Paul Bloom, Trends in Cognitive Sciences

“Steven Pinker has written an extremely good book — clear, well argued, fair, learned, tough, witty, humane,
stimulating. I only hope that people study it carefully before rising up ideologically against him. If they do, they will
see that the idea of an innately flawed but wonderfully rich human nature is a force for good, not evil.
— Colin McGinn, The Washington Post

“Steven Pinker is a man of encyclopedic knowledge and an incisive style of argument. His argument in The Blank
Slate is that intellectual life in the West, and much of our social and political policy, was increasingly dominated
through the twentieth century by a view of human nature that is fundamentally flawed; that this domination has been
backed by something that amounts to academic terrorism (he does not put it quite so strongly): and that we would
benefit {ii} substantially from a more realistic view. Pinker's exposition is thoroughly readable and of enviable
clarity. His explanation of such a difficult technical matter as the analysis of variance and regression in twin studies,
for example, would be very hard to better. He is not afraid of using strong language... in addition, parts of the book
are delightfully funny.”
— John R. G. Turner, The Times Literary Supplement

“Anyone who has read Pinker's earlier books — including How the Mind Works and The Language Instinct — will
rightly guess that his latest effort is similarly