Steven Pinker: recommendation

Transcript context

…I’ve been reading through a lot of different aspects of your work, a lot of your books — reading or rereading. I’ve been trying to figure out to myself what’s the underlying unity in the thought and writing of Steven Pinker, from irregular verbs to world peace, and yes we’ll get to that. Let me try to give you my account of what I’ve taken away, which I’m sure is not the same as yours, but it’s a way of prompting you to tell us your view of the underlying unity in all of the things you did. I see you as very often trying to stake out a midway position. If there are people out there, say like the blank-slate theorists, who don’t see much structure to the natural world or the social world or the linguistic world, then you reject that. Then on the other hand there are people who postulate too much structure. And (at least early) Chomsky would be an example there. You’re trying to create some kind of intermediate position where there’s room for reason to operate, but within laws of nature. You’re trying to rearticulate this modern 21st- and 20th-century vision of what does the Enlightenment mean for now, and how might we apply Enlightenment kinds of reasoning across all the different areas you’ve written on. Then figuring out, shown in all these books, what are the methodological prerequisites for that. It’s levels at which we’re willing to talk about structure, and levels at which we’re not willing to talk about structure; and you staking out this intermediate — what you might call voluntarist — pro‑reason, pro‑science position. That’s what I took away from the whole corpus of Steven Pinker. Tell me, what is your take on that? I think that’s not too far from the way I would see myself. Not so much in taking an intermediate position that’s just “find the Goldilocks zone.” Like, “Oh, the truth is always halfway in between two extremes.” It isn’t always. On the other hand, I do believe in the Enlightenment vision that by understanding our world, that the world is intelligible, that we can understand it. That progress in understanding and therefore progress in rational action are possible. Including, pointedly, ourselves. That is, there is such a thing as human nature. It can be studied scientifically the way other phenomena are studied. That it’s good to understand human nature because then we can discount, when necessary, illusions that are quirks of our own makeup. That we can understand what it is that gives humans fulfillment and satisfaction and pleasure, what are the resources that we have to work with in improving a political system. I also think that often — going back to finding a middle ground — the middle ground isn’t finding, say, the arithmetic mean between the two extremes. But rather it’s trying to go down a level of more finer-grain causal mechanisms underneath the phenomena. To state a position that may not look like either of the original extremes, because it’s more precise. In the case of language, for example, I’ve always been bored by the idea of “is language innate or is it learned.” It’s neither. It’s not halfway in between because that doesn’t give you any insight either. Rather there is an innate structure that does the learning, because learning doesn’t happen by magic. There has to be something in place that does the learning. Let’s characterize the nature of the learning mechanism in terms of its information-processing abilities. What is its computational architecture, as the computer scientists say? Once you have that, that is the solution to the nature-nurture problem; namely, what’s innate is an ability to learn. Since any mechanism does some things well and some things not so well, that gives you insight as to what and how we learn. That makes irrelevant the question of “is it innate or is it learned?” There is something that’s innate, but the innate stuff allows us to learn. It gets beneath a dichotomy into something that I like to think is more intellectually satisfying. Here’s one difference between us perhaps, and we discussed this earlier in the green room. I think of you as believing more strongly in the powers of human reason than I do. When we hit upon these various (you might call them) antinomies — What does consciousness really mean? Is the world really free? How do we think about time? — you’re quite willing to pull a Kantian or Wittgensteinian move and say, “Well, it all collapses into contradiction. Colin McGinn, that’s knowledge forever denied to us.” Then there’s this other sphere in which reason operates quite well. I tend to think of that more as a continuum: if we can’t understand some truly fundamental things, the problems in our thinking will bleed into everything we try to analyze. I tend to think of reason as being fairly weak. Maybe I’m more Hayekian in this way than you are: people being ruled by their passions, as David Hume might have thought. In this sense I’m more skeptical about the Enlightenment. What can you say to talk me out of this skepticism and back into the truly Pinkerian view?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.