Reactions to "The Blank Slate" (Part One)
I'm currently reading Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate - recently published in paperback. Even though I'm only a fraction of the way through it, I can already recommend it. Part of me is prejudiced, of course. During the time I was failing to complete my doctorate, I spent a lot of time working with Freud. Many people are rightly suspicous of Freud - I would argue that you can't employ his work effectively if you are not suspicious. You have be prepared to investigate some of the cultural baggage of his period and to be aware of some of the science and philosophy that has emerged since he died. But whether you're suspicious or not - I asserted then and I still assert now that there is more value in having an explicit model of the mind to play with than to generate a fresh bastardisation on the fly every time you approach a problem which involves human agency. I suppose that's why I'm quite keen on this quote:
"The interplay of mental systems can explain how people can entertain revenge fantasies that they never act on, or can commit adultery only in their hearts. In this way the theory of human nature coming out of the cognitive revolution has more in common with the Judeo-Christian theory of human nature, and with the psychoanalytic theory proposed by Sigmund Freud, than with behaviorism, social constructionism, and other versions of the Blank Slate. Behavior is not just emitted or elicited, nor does it come directly out of culture or society. It comes from an internal struggle among mental modules with differing agendas and goals."
If I get a chance later I'll stick up a reaction paper I gave internally at Bristol University years ago about Haydn White's The Content of the Form. It's related. Honest.
Comments
Please stay on-topic, informative and polite. I reserve the right to remove comments for whatever vague capricious reasons seem reasonable at the time.
It seems your infatuation with Freud is spoiling a good read for you. No real psychologist of any worth pays much attention to Freud. In University courses the Psychologists do psychology and it's only the poor English undergrads who try to use Freud seriously.
Pinker is no exception. He said:
"[psychonalysis] was grounded in Lamarckism, nineteenth-century hydraulic models of the mind, and Freud's idiosyncratic beliefs ... the hypotheses from evolutionary psychology are testable and routinely tested, whereas Freud's were notoriously unfalsifiable."
→ Posted by: David at June 13, 2003 2:24 AM
Thanks for your comment. It was Karl Popper who originally wrote about how Freud was not writing science because psychoanalysis was unfalsifiable. Interestingly Popper also said the same things about Darwin's theories of evolution.
In fact, I wasn't writing to defend Freud in any methodical way, I was writing to celebrate the use of a universalising model rather than social constructivist theories of the mind, which I would have thought would have been an approach that you would have approved of. I also think - by the way - that you're confused when you use Alan Sokal as a rebuttal to my comments (elsewhere), since (although I don't particularly like his approach - one journal isn't the same as an entire tradition of thinkers, philosophers and critics) I think I was basically agreeing with some of his thoughts around this area - particularly that many of cultural studies/philosophies social constructivist ideologies can be terribly dangerous and unscientific.
→ Posted by: Tom Coates at June 13, 2003 8:49 AM
Excuse me for for butting in...But does it matter if a theoretical framework is unfalsifiable? I can't think of any theory as broad as Darwinism or Freudianism that could be falsified directly. Surely the important thing is falsifiable hypotheses derived from the uber-theory, and then the uber-theory is refined or degenerates (a la Lakatos). It would be nice if evolutionists and evolutionary psychologists were a little less triumphalist - it opens us up to misdirected criticism (e.g. from creationists).
→ Posted by: Tom Stafford at June 13, 2003 11:33 AM
In later life, Popper changed his mind about Darwinism and decided that it was falsifiable after all.
→ Posted by: Richard Carter at June 15, 2003 9:28 AM
I'm currently about a hundred pages into "The Blank Slate".
I think Pinker's main gripe is that many modern sociologists, anthropologists, and psychologists ("Pure Social" scientists) refuse to consider the weight of new evidence showing that humans come at least 'partially programmed' and that Noble Savages exist only in literature and philosophy. Many critiques of him on the web are blank-and-white, "he's a racist/sexist/homophobe/fascist" because he fights the notion that ALL human behavior emerges from the socialization process.
This is threatening to radical lefties and some righties because human nature not infinitely mallable may present a mighty obstacle for their theories.
→ Posted by: Van at December 7, 2004 4:56 PM