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WHY PINKER NEEDS BEHAVIORISM: A CRITIQUE OF THE BLANK SLATE
A review of The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker. New York: Viking Press, 2002, 528pp.
In his most recent oeuvre, Steven Pinker challenges what he perceives as a growing dogma within the social sciences to attribute all aspects of human behavior to environmental causes, and the insidious public policy decisions that arise therefrom. He makes the important argument that growing evidence for genetic and evolutionary contributions to human behavior should inform our perspectives on numerous topics ranging from child-rearing to violence to gender equity. The overall message of the book remains unconvincing, however, because its psychological foundations collapse under closer scrutiny. In this review, I will argue that Pinker misunderstands and misconstrues Behaviorism and fails to appreciate the insights of more than 80 years of hard-wrought Behaviorist research. As a result, he is left with an internally inconsistent psychology that provides little insight beyond the intuitive folk psychology we already enjoy, and he does not offer a framework for understanding the effects of unique experiences in the life of an individual.
Missing the Point: Building a Behaviorist Strawman
The crux of Pinker's book is a negative argument: the "blank slate" of the title is a position he attempts to discredit, not defend. In outlining this "blank slate" position Pinker places much of the blame for its prevalence on the Behaviorist program that dominated psychological thinking from the 1930s through the 1960s. To illustrate how Behaviorists defended and lauded this hypernurturist approach, Pinker quotes the famous line from John Watson's Behaviorism that reads: "Give me a dozen healthy infants, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select-doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief, and[,] yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors" (Pinker, 2002, p. 19). Reading these lines, I too am struck by the extreme "blank slate"-ism espoused by this founding father of Behaviorist thought. Pinker, however, does not immediately include the subsequent lines from this quotation; Watson continues, "I am going beyond my facts and I admit...