waystatus:

nostalgebraist:

lambdaphagy: there’s a lot of content in your latest response and I may not be able to give a proper response today.  Here are a few quick notes, though, on things that may have just been misunderstandings (I was not writing very clearly):

[snip]

My memories of Pinker seem very different than yours.  To be clear, what I’m complaining about here is the gap between actually existing EP and the kinds of “we have discovered human nature, behold!” claims that I remember Pinker (and at times Tooby and Cosmides? … but these memories are all from many years ago, I could just be full of shit) making.

Yes, Pinker is entitled to his politics, but I remember him being very forceful about the notion that if we accept the scientific evidence, we have to accept something like the politics.  Saying “Pinker is entitled to his politics” feels to me a bit like saying “Rawls and Nozick are entitled to their politics,” which they are, but they also claim they’ve derived (parts of) their politics from first principles, and challenge you to reject the deduction, reject the principles, or accept the politics.  Pinker isn’t that direct, of course, but he’s more direct that I’d like one to be on the basis of any academic psychology in its current state (WEIRD problems, replication problems, etc.)  Note that much of this may just be that as a teenager I had never read anyone with this kind of forcefulness, and so it struck me as a model of forcefulness, perhaps more than it was.

[snip]

As someone of an aside to the overall argument, I remember Pinker being very much like you think he was, which I specifically remember finding off-putting because prior to reading The Blank Slate I had read some of his stuff on linguistics, and frankly he’s a much better linguist than psychologist.

I’ll also have access to a copy of The Blank Slate later today, if you want me to check.

No pressure, but if you’re intrinsically motivated to look through the book for relevant bits, I’d be interested in what you find.  (As I said, the book as I remember it was full of very forceful stuff.)

(via waystatus)