The Blank Slate

The idea of the Blank Slate, a translation of the Latin phrase tabula rasa or “scraped tablet,” is usually attributed to John Locke. His idea of the Blank Slate supported his political philosophy, which opposed the right of kings to govern (since they are born with no greater wisdom than anyone else) and slavery (since enslaved people are not born inferior to anyone else). By emphasizing that people’s natures are not innate but instead shaped by experience, Locke’s ideas have come to influence the fields of social science and politics.

Discussions of the Blank Slate commonly include two related ideas. The first is the Noble Savage, typically attributed to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, which states that humans are naturally good and selfless and that greed and violence arise from civilization. Rousseau formed his ideas in contradiction to those of John Hobbes, who believed that humanity requires an authority to keep its evil nature in check. The second idea is the Ghost in the Machine, which originated in the writings of René Descartes, and theorizes that the mind is separate from the body and encompasses more than the brain as an organ of the body.

These three philosophical ideas—the Blank Slate (empiricism), the Noble Savage (romanticism), and the Ghost in the Machine (dualism)—have worked together to shape modern understanding of human nature.

Pinker cites social scientists from the 1920s to the 1990s who espoused the ideas that people’s individual beliefs and desires did not exist. In psychology’s terms, people were the result of stimuli and responses; and in other social science fields, cultures and beliefs determined human behavior. For example, Jose Ortega y Gasset wrote in 1935, “Man has no nature; what he has is history.” The metaphor these social scientists used was not the mind as Blank Slate but rather a kind of Silly Putty that could be molded or shaped at will.

Pinker begins the chapter with an excerpt from the writings of Danish philologist Otto Jespersen (1860-1943) to show how standards of intellectual life have changed. Jespersen argues, ridiculously according to Pinker, that English is a more mature, masculine language than Hawaiian because it uses more consonants. Pinker exposes the way 18th and 19th century thinkers obscured racism with a “scientific patina” (15). Pinker contends that the idea of the Blank Slate became more prominent in the early 20th century as eugenics promoted racially motivated atrocities—such as lynching, forced sterilization, and the Holocaust—in Europe, Canada, and the US.

Writing in the 17th century, John Locke viewed the Blank Slate as a defense against the church and monarchy. Later, John Stuart Mill, a proponent of women’s suffrage and the improvement of the working classes, applied Locke’s Blank Slate to politics. In the 1800s, Mill advanced the idea of associationism—a theory that “tried to explain human intelligence without granting it any innate organization” (18)—which is similar to the theory of modern behaviorism that John Watson promoted in the early 1900s. Pinker writes, “In behaviorism, an infant’s talents and abilities didn’t’t matter because there was no such thing as a talent or an ability” (19).

In the hands of American psychologist B.F. Skinner (1904-1990), behaviorism became an important influence on popular culture and shaped ideas about how to raise children. The thinking was that humans were much like laboratory animals, whose behavior was dictated by the associations they made over time. Humans, in other words, were “just rats with bigger blank slates, plus something called ‘cultural devices’” (22).

Culture, as understood by Franz Boas, the father of modern anthropology, explains differences found between groups of humans. Boas’s ideas were essentially antiracist, since he posited that dissimilarities are a result of cultural rather than inherent biological differences. His disciples spread the idea that “every aspect of human existence must be explained in terms of culture” (23). Emile Durkheim, a founder of modern sociology, also helped enshrine the idea that there was no such thing as a fundamental human nature.

Pinker traces the development of a unification of knowledge that started with Newton’s laws of physics and continued through the discoveries of scientists such as Darwin and Watson and Crick, among others. As Pinker writes, these discoveries disrupted the habit of “placing the living and nonliving in parallel universes” (31). He writes that now there is only “one wall standing in the landscape of knowledge”—the wall that divides matter from the mind (31). However, this wall is also on the brink of collapsing.

According to Pinker, new ideas connect the mind with matter and culture with biology. Pinker discusses five ideas from what he calls the “cognitive revolution” that have changed how we think about the mind.

First: Like the physical world, the mental world can be explained by information, computation, and feedback. Beliefs and memories are like facts in a database residing in the brain; thinking and planning are cognitive processes like functions in a computer program. This is the computational theory of the mind. It is not the idea that the mind is exactly the same as a computer; rather, principles of computing help us understand the way the mind functions. At the same time, artificial intelligence has shown that non-living matter can function like a living mind—not only by winning chess games but also by carrying out creative tasks such as writing stories or symphonies.

Second: The mind can’t function as a blank slate because blank slates don’t do anything—unlike the mind, which carries out activities such as thinking, seeing, planning, etc. Cognitive scientists still disagree on how much of the mind is innate, but they do not believe the mind is a blank slate.

Third: A finite set of programs in the mind can generate infinite patterns of behavior. This is apparent in Noam Chomsky’s theories of language, which show that while most utterances are brand-new combinations of words, they also obey systems and follow dictates as in a kind of software. As Pinker writes: “A fixed collection of machinery in the mind can generate an infinite range of behavior by the muscles” (37).

Fourth: Universal mechanisms in the brain underlie the variability among cultures. While humans speak some 6,000 languages, the grammatical programs that generate these languages don’t differ as much as the speech they produce. Chomsky developed the idea of Universal Grammar, or the generative pattern from which languages develop. Pinker explains that all languages have the same grammatical principles; they just rely on different structural orders and patterns. This discovery indicates that there is an “innate circuitry” in the brain that facilitates learning (38). In addition, though behaviors that provoke emotions like anger in people can vary across culture, the emotions themselves, many theorists believe, do not. In other words, mental computations underlying behavior are similar across cultures.

Fifth: The mind is made up of different parts that interact with each other to produce a thought or action. A habit arising in one module can be translated into behavior in a different module. Therefore, behavior and action arise from the struggles between different impulses. For example, we may desire to harm someone but choose not to do so.

Cognitive neuroscience studies how thinking and feeling occur in the brain, and the field has contradicted the ideas of the Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine. Scientists can stimulate a part of the brain to produce different experiences. If parts of the brain are injured, people lose certain abilities, such as the ability to recognize faces or empathize with other people. Certain parts of the brain can operate independently of each other. If the prefrontal cortex is injured, aggressive behavior can result. Genes mediate the development of the prenatal brain. All of these examples contradict earlier theories of the self. 

Behavioral genetics studies how genes influence behavior. Many conditions, from autism to learning differences to sexual orientation, run in families thanks to genetics. The effect of genes on brain differences is borne out by twin studies and adoption studies. Genes affect behaviors but in a probabilistic rather than absolute way: For example, if one twin has a trait, there is only a greater probability, not a certainty, that the other twin will have it, too. Environment also plays a role in that it affects genes. Like cognitive neuroscience, behavioral genetics contradicts the ideas of the Blank Slate and the Ghost in the Machine.

Evolutionary psychology is the study of the history of the mind’s adaptations. In other words, cognitive and emotional functions are, like the other body functions, the result of natural selection. Evolutionary biology complements this field and posits that emotions such as guilt and sympathy serve a purpose. Human behaviors are the result both proximate or immediate functions such as eating to sate hunger and ultimate or long-term functions such as eating to provide nutrition. These proximate and ultimate functions also show that our minds are not blank slates.

Researchers are beginning to believe that the mind evolved from a universal complex design that anthropologist Donald Brown has called Human Universals (find a list on page 455). Evolutionary psychology particularly debunks the idea of the Noble Savage, as anthropologists have documented that people are essentially more Hobbesian than Rousseau-like in their natural states. The chart on page 57 shows that men are much more warlike among indigenous tribes than in the US and Europe in the 20th century. However, while conflict is universal, the author points out that so is conflict resolution.