@JJ: Great clip, I’m going to use that way of explaining the problem.
I’ll also note that the Blank Slate theory of human psychology plays a huge role in this dichotomy between biological evolution and market-based evolution. The mainstream view asserts that the mind is a blank slate - nearly infinitely malleable - that is filled in by culture. so that there is no such thing as human nature. Hence, there is no reason to expect “good outcomes” from a process of unregulated or decentralized competition for resources between human beings. Because the brain is a blank slate, the laws of biology and culture are fundamentally different.
This is why challenging the blank slate theory of mind is so important to free market theory.
The tabula rasa assumption inevitably leads to the necessity for “society” (i.e. the humans whose slates have been previously properly filled by society) to expend resources toward filling the blank slates with “proper”, “socially beneficial” constructs. Leaving that to the “randomness” of the “market” would risk the very existence of “society” as we know it! Moreover, “society” – via the democratic process – chooses the proper constructs necessary for its own perpetuation and elects individuals with properly filled slates to allocate “societal resources” toward properly filling the blank slates (education) or correcting improperly filled ones (law, enforcement).
I think this may be getting to the root of the differences between the individualist (free, bottom-up, uncoerced, grown-up) and collectivist (controlled, top-down, coerced, infantile) view of humanity. It seems that the individualist vs. the collectivist debate could easily be distilled down to the nature vs. nurture debate: If – as I believe – most of what/who we are is determined by previous natural and social evolution (and is already reflected in our genes) then the fear of the “market” (freedom) is completely unfounded. If however, most of what/who we are is determined by nurture or “society” then I could see how a statist would be afraid to leave this societal process of nurturing (filling the slates) to the vicissitudes of the “market”. For the statist, “society” must guide each person out of his Hobessian beasty self.
EDIT: Even the Keynesian “animal spirits” stem from the above worldview. There’s this animalistic, Hobessian human energy boiling under the “society’s” surface waiting to endanger its structure and viability. That’s why we need central planners and central bankers to make sure that this destructive energy is controlled and harnessed for the good of “mankind”.
I had never even heard the notion that man doesn’t have instincts. That’s the most ridiculous thing I think I’ve heard in a while. I had no idea there was a demand for someone to debunk the idea that newborns are “taught” to suckle or that an infant who essentially can’t communicate was “taught” that he shoudn’t crawl off an obvious ledge.
What a bunch of nonsense.
But it does speak to the “conflict of visions” that Thomas Sowell illucidates in his work:
Well, they try to dance around it - the conventional wisdom accepts that we have a few instincts but these are all non-cognitive, things like your knee jerking when tapped with a mallet.
Really, all modern psychology implicitly denies humans have a nature. Look at all the nonsense surrounding female-male equality, for example. They don’t just mean that men and women should have the same rights, but that men and women are actually the same, mentally. Such an assertion would be laughable except they have battalions of PhDs all saying the same thing. So, we need people like Steven Pinker to go and actually give point-by-point debunking of this nonsense.
Again, I’ve never heard anyone claim a “knee jerk” was an “instinct”. It’s called the “Patellar reflex”. A reflex is not an instinct. Again, who taught a newborn not only how to suckle, but to even try to suckle in the first place??
I call bullshit. I’ve never been in a psychology class that didn’t bring up the “nature vs. nurture” debate. Again I have no idea where any of this is coming from. I could pull out all kinds of textbooks that talk about that.
Do you have any evidence of this? Any sort of professional assertion of this kind? Perhaps a major textbook or something?
The criticisms of EP against the SSSM really have nothing to do with nature versus nurture - everybody recognizes the importance of both. The problem is methodological - how do you reason about the origins and causality of psychological phenomena? The SSSM applies a statistical correlations approach - behavior A is observed to occur in correlation with behavior B. EP, on the other hand, employs an evolutionary argumentative approach - what function did behavior A serve in the ancestral environment where humans spent the majority of their evolutionary history? How has our environment - which behavior A was designed to respond to - changed since we were last in the ancestral environment? What are the consequences of behavior A in the new environment?
JJ - Steven Pinker in The Blank Slate relates some episodes that illustrate the enormous opposition to the idea of innate characteristics within the social sciences (as I recall it; I read the book about 5 years ago).
Also, I think the methodological errors go far beyond the denial of innate characteristics. The idea that individuals make decisions - regardless of whether these decisions are shaped by nature or nurture - is viewed with contempt, in favour of the belief that all human behaviour (as opposed to Misesian action) is a result of productive or cultural ‘forces’, i.e. that the origin of human behaviour does not occur in the mind at all.
Well I guess that explains part of it: “(SSSM) was first introduced to a wide audience by John Tooby and Leda Cosmides in the 1992 edited volume…”
The how in the hell can it be argued “man has no nature”? (A direct quote from the video you orginally linked.)
What does any of that have to do with the idea of whether humans have nature/instinct? Again,
-“man has no nature”
-“man has no instincts”
-“the human brain is capable of a full range of behaviors and predisoposed to none.”
That’s fine…My whole point is that the existence of this belief is all news to me. I’ve never in my life heard the idea that “man has no nature”, and I certainly had no idea that this was a widely enough held belief that someone needed to write a book as late as 2003 to argue against such a ridiculous notion. Again, throughout my life I’ve never been in any sort of basic discussion of psychology where the phrase “nature vs. nurture” didn’t come into play.
John Colapinto even published the feature story that later became the book As Nature Made Him in 1998, a work which to my understanding just added further and deeper support to an already largely held belief…suggesting that nature played an even greater role than was thought before.
And here we have this guy writing a book and being told he would have to fear for his safety, and giving TED talks, simply trying to suggest that man does have nature and instincts. And what’s more, it gets posted here and someone calls it the “insight of the month.”
I’m sure you’ll find in every post in this thread I’ve said how “I had never even heard the notion”, “I had no idea there was a demand for someone to debunk the idea”, etc. Scroll up to your first response. You even quoted it.
That’s all I was saying all along. And in your effort to make excuses for it even you have to claim they leave room for “some instincts” by alleging that the Patellar reflex is considered one (when, even if it was, it shouldn’t matter, as again, “man has no instincts”.)
I bring up the ever-present phrase “nature vs. nurture” and your response is that the term is “SSSM” and that “The criticisms of EP against the SSSM really have nothing to do with nature versus nurture” and that “everybody recognizes the importance of both.”
But again, “man has no nature”.
So it doesn’t sound like you’re making a very good case for this. It sounds to me that you can’t really provide any support for this idea and have to constantly make concessions that fly directly in the face of the contention of a “blank slate”, yet that you allege “everybody recognizes.”
Read the linked articles by Tooby and Cosmides. They provide cites showing where leading authorities in mainstream social science characterize the human mind as a “general purpose computer”. This is an example of where EP diverges from the mainstream - the brain is not a general-purpose computer that is about as good at solving any problem as another (depending only on how it is programmed by culture). It has specialized, hard-wired modules that evolved to solve specific problems and which are not subject to re-programming by “culture”. The slate is not blank, you can’t rewire human brains with social conditioning in just any way you please.
He has no nature within the confines of the mind. The mind’s contents are “filled in” by culture in his youth and depending on the culture he is born into, he will be a completely different individual. EP disagrees. The chatracteristics of the individual are determined by his genes and those aspects of the environment that the genes respond to. Cosmides and Tooby:
EP rejects the nature versus nurture dichotomy as malformed. This is a crucial point to understanding the whole debate. If you think EP is saying “nature not nurture”, then you’ve missed the whole criticism EP makes of the SSSM.
It seems to me that you keep characterizing EP vs. SSSM as Nature vs. Nurture - or, at least that that is what EPs are trying to say. EP is a rejection of nature/nurture dichotomies because there are no such dichotomies in biology. Genes and environment (gene expression) both play a cooperative role in determining the organism’s phenotype. To completely reject one side or the other is downright silly and even EPs would not accuse the SSSM of actually doing that. The problem is that the SSSM characterizes the issues of human behavior in terms of nature vs. nurture at all.
Well, you’re wrong. I bring up the phrase “nature vs. nurture” to show that nature has long been considured a contributing factor in what makes man the way he is.
And to suggest that “man has no nature”, and “man has no instincts” is not only absurd, but can’t be very popular, and certainly not having a long history. And as your link shows, at least the latter is admittedly the case.
You mean they make excuses for people who claim unequivocally that “man has no instincts” and claim “well, they don’t really mean that like it sounds…of coures they acknowledge man has some instincts…”?
I mean EPs are trying to be fair and intellectually honest - the opposition to EP really has no methodology and that’s why there are as many opinions about the importance of nature versus nurture as there are social scientists. EP begins by placing the human brain in its evolutionary context, just like any other part of our anatomy. The brain is subject to the same laws of biology as the rest of our body. Nature and environment (nurture) each play the same role in determining the structure and organization of the brain (mind) as they do in determining the structure and organization of the pancreas.
Pinker specifically calls out anthropologists in one of his TED lectures (it may be the one I linked above, not sure) - anyway, he says it’s kind of an “occupational pleasure” of anthropologists to discover cultures which are purportedly incomprehensibly different from our own. But he asserts that closer examination invariably shows that such discoveries are exaggerations and that the fact is that every culture without exception has many features in common with every other culture. Every human culture is recognizably human. There are laws of human nature to which there are no exception in any culture.
It should be obvious how this conflicts with dominant ideas across the social sciences.
I still don’t see where any of this removes fault and flaw from (apparently) prominent people in the field who say:
-“man has no nature”
-“man has no instincts”
-“the human brain is capable of a full range of behaviors and predisoposed to none.”
Those were statements quoted by Pinker in the lecture that you linked that started this entire discussion. Indeed he began his lecture with those quotes to illustrate the opinion that he was going to spend the next 23 minutes claiming was false. He says he wrote a book basically going against the sentiment expressed by those quotes, and passed it around to colleagues and was in turn warned to fear for his job and his physical safety.
And throughout this thread you’ve been telling me that these people don’t really mean exactly what they’ve said. So either,
a) You’re wrong
or
b) Pinker took their quotes out of context (to a ridiculous and dispicable level) not only to build a straw man, but to literally put words in their mouth (as in, imply that they made assertions that they in fact did not really make…like if someone said “It is absurd to say that man has no nature”, and then someone else comes along and puts the phrase “man has no nature” in quotes and puts that person’s name next to it.)
EP’s criticisms of the SSSM are primarily concerned with the methodology - the bad conclusions that SSSM draws (for example, that man has no nature or other less absurd but still wrong conclusions) are the result of their bad methodology. Not everyone who falls under the broad umbrella of the SSSM says man has no nature.
You started off this thread expressing amazement that there are people who believe man has no nature. I explained that the SSSM itself doesn’t say man has no nature, as in nature plays no role at all. There are some who are that extreme (Gould’s is notable), but they are not representative of the SSSM establishment, only its fringes. But the very fact that such “fringe” beliefs are possible is an indictment of the methodology itself. If you had a physics theory where some physicists who hold to that theory believe that you can freely float by the power of your will, that would be a pretty good indictment of the validity of the theory and its methodology, even if most who hold to the theory do not believe such ridiculous things.
This is important because, with the rise of EP, some of the SSSM defenders are now trying to say that EP is straw-manning SSSM with these extreme positions and that they have always acknowledged that nature plays a role in human behavior. It is true that the SSSM has always reserved some role for nature. But this defense misses the point that EP’s criticism is not merely that SSSM sees too little role for nature in human behavior but that SSSM has no methodology and nature-vs-nurture is a false dichotomy.
If you think you can refute SSSM by simply pointing out that nature plays a role in determining human behavior, you are mistaken. You’re only refuting a few extremists on the fringe.
The root dispute is whether the laws of biology (in particular, evolutionary theory) extend to the study of the mind. In SSSM literature, you will never find discussion of the evolutionary origins of human behaviors. In fact, this is precisely what sets EP apart from the SSSM. As soon as you ask the question, “Does this behavior have an evolutionary origin and, if so, what are its origins?”, you are following EP methodology, not SSSM.
I have done nothing of the kind. I’d never ever heard the term “SSSM” until you introduced it here. (And evidently, no one had ever heard it before the early 90s.)
Even Pinker didn’t even bring this thing up. Indeed, it has only appeared in this thread as you have tried to sidestep what it sounded like Pinker’s point was. Again, he was the one who quoted those statements. He was the one who used them as examples and the basis for his talk (and apparently his book.)
So I take it this means you are suggesting Pinker is one of these people “straw-manning” the “real” issue?
I’m just a spectator to this thread but I’m just trying to be clear on something really quickly.
Clayton, are you saying that in Pinker’s attempt to summarize this “SSSM” that he has misrepresented the position of that school of thought or are you saying that his position is actually not well encapsulated by the title of his book?
EDIT: Nevermind I think I get it now. Thanks for clearing that up for me.
