GNXP And Pinker

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You know, I liked The Blank Slate when I first read it, but the more I think about it, the more it seems that Pinker is really just confused on a lot of notions. He says he's disproving noble savages, Hobbessian men, and ghosts in the machine, but he really doesn't have any thing to substitute in their place.

but he really doesn’t have any thing to substitute in their place.

two words: evolutionary psychology.

Maybe, razib, but even if we can present a picture of how people have evolved to think and act, it still takes another argument to say that therefore they should act that way.

In fact, even the idea that we can choose whether or not to follow how we have evolved to act and think suggests to me the existence of something more in the psyche than Pinker acknowledges: a ghost in the machine. Pinker gets lost along similar lines when he starts talking about expanding and shrinking the moral circle---never analyzing what it is that is doing the expansion if not the aforementioned machine-bound ghost.