| | Robert,
I can only speak for myself, and I could be in error, but I found it very difficult to get a handle on the point Pinker is trying to make. He reasons that believing in Tabula Rasa leaves us open to all manner of propaganda mongers from Marx to Stalin, proponents of modern art and architecture, radical feminists, and parenting experts. I fail to understand how the public would be immune to these influences if Tabula Rasa as a concept did not exist.
I'm debating the Tabula Rasa theory of the mind on another thread. The Tabula Rasa theory of the mind comes in different forms, as does the innatist position that opposes it.
The form of the Tabula Rasa theory that Pinker was arguing against argues that all differences in individual behavior are a function of learning/environment. In other words, individual behavior has no genetic component. If two boys at random are raised in very similar ways, they should have very similar ideas and behaviors, according to the Tabula Rasa theories. For example, girls are no different from boys, and like dolls because they were raised to like dolls: if girls were raised to like guns, they would. Human beings are taught violence, and men like orgasms because they were trained to do so.
This can be shown to be patent nonsense in a number of ways, but Pinker's method is to build an argument against it by arguing that evolved and selected genetic predispositions in human beings can account for a significant amount of the similarities and differences in individuals' behaviors.
I fail to understand how the public would be immune to these influences if Tabula Rasa as a concept did not exist. In fact, I am sure that the majority of those who sign on to these movements are not even aware of the concept. He does not prove the mind is not a blank slate at birth, his argument is that it is a bad idea to believe it.
When arguments are based on using theories to account for the evidence, there is no "proof" unless you compare what different theories quantitatively and qualitatively predict and see which theory best accounts for the results. Pinker showed all kinds of phenomena (sex differences in behavior, criminal behavior, results of adoption studies and identical twin studies) which are more in line with a combination of genetic and environmental factors influencing individual development than mostly environmental factors.
For example, he also presents the findings that all studied babies who had sex-changes from male to female to fix a birth problem showed male behavior in childhood (like toys like guns and hating dolls, wanting to engage in rough-and-tumble play), even when raised to be females. At least one wanted to commit suicide before he was told the truth. That one, by the way, was for a long time the poster child for the belief that girls and boys were different because of how they were raised.
Now, those facts might not prove anything to you, but when a boy is raised like a girl and turns out to behave like a boy regardless, it proves to me that some differences in behaviors between boys and girls are not mostly determined by learning and are almost certainly influenced by genes (the skepticism is the Popper in me).
If Pinker's methods, which are mostly reports of the methods and results of behavioral geneticists and cognitive scientists worldwide, are specious to you, so be it. Genetics didn't start when the human genome was sequenced, and the influences of genes are not determined only the information acquired from genome sequencing. There have been methods used to test genetic influences (or heritability estimates) and compare them to environmental influences since the pioneering work of the late great Sir Ronald Fisher. The core of the method is to look for genetically similar and dissimilar populations and see how much environmental similarities and differences can explain differences in behavior.
(Edited by Abolaji Ogunshola on 6/19, 8:42am)
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