It’s a massive work, a memorable one, but a hard one to come away from with a coherent take. For example, one of my favorite recent books, Thomas Sowell’s A Conflict of Visions, comes up partway through one chapter, is given the most virtuosic analysis imaginable, and then stowed away, just one single prong in an extensive, many-layered argument that Pinker’s making in just one small quadrant of this tour-de-force. There are small chapters – even halves of chapters – that could set me thinking for months. It’s that there’s so much: The Blank Slate is an exhaustive, many-avenued, in-depth, provocative work – friendly and caustic all at once – such a dense, rich mixture of such variety and depth that it’s almost hard to know what I think of it after one reading. It’s not that I didn’t have a strong reaction. His other books include The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, The Stuff of Thought and The Better Angels of Our Nature.Now that I’ve finished Steven Pinker’s momentous 2002 book, The Blank Slate, I find it somewhat hard to write about. In his book, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, Pinker writes about progress - why people are healthier, richer, safer, happier and better educated than ever. He has written books on the language instinct, how the mind works, the stuff of thought and the doctrine of the blank slate, together with a guide to stylish writing that is rooted in psychology. He has documented historical declines in violence and explained them in terms of the ways that the violent and peaceable components of human nature interact in different eras. He has used evolution to illuminate innuendo, emotional expression and social coordination. Pinker developed the first comprehensive theory of language acquisition in children, used verb meaning as a window into cognition, probed the limits of neural networks and showed how the interaction between memory and computation shapes language. He is interested in all aspects of human nature: how we see, hear, think, speak, remember, feel and interact. Steven Pinker grew up in the English-speaking community of Montreal but has spent his adult life bouncing back and forth between Harvard and MIT.

Steven pinker's book the blank slate