10/30/2002
WBUR
Headline: Tabula Pinker: In his latest book, linguist Steven
Pinker calls for a scientific revolution
"The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human
Nature," By Steven Pinker, Viking, 528 pages.
In his earlier volumes, "The Language Instinct"
and "How the Mind Works," Steven Pinker won critical and popular
acclaim for his lucid expositions of how language and the brain function.
Surprisingly, his new book is an overgrown broadside, by turns dull and
illuminating. What happened?
Pinker assumes the mantle of bellicose and ambitious
prophet, proclaiming, as the century starts, that mankind is in for a
transformation of Copernican proportions. There is a shorter, more modest, and
more trustworthy volume huddling in the folds of this one, but maybe it's
better that it had not been written. Since this book is nothing less than a
manifesto for a scientific revolution, we might as well have the whole agenda
on the table, prejudices and all.
