The Blank Slate

“The doctrines of the Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine—or, as philosophers call them, empiricism, romanticism, and dualism—are logically independent, but in practice they are often found together” 

Pinker notes that these three ideas often appear together, though they are separate. They are found in similar defenses of the modern view of human nature which Pinker argues is not supported by science.

“Humans, then, are just rats with bigger blank slates, plus something called ‘cultural devices’” 

In an ironic tone, Pinker summarizes the conclusions of a study by psychologists David Rumelhart and James McClelland. Pinker notes that modern psychology often relies on animal testing to support its theories about human nature, but it fails to distinguish meaningfully between laboratory animals and people. For Pinker, each are governed by their own their own impulses and instincts. It is these impulses—which cannot be explained through culture alone—that we should seek to understand. 

“A fixed collection of machinery in the mind can generate an infinite range of behavior by the muscles” 

Pinker writes about how Noam Chomsky’s revolutionary concepts of language have helped us understand that the mind that can generate infinite numbers of outputs. In other words, language follows a system of governing patterns, and the creative possibilities of these patterns is essentially endless.