《The Blank Slate》翻书笔记

作者：Steven Pinker
出版社：Viking Adult
副标题：The Modern Denial of Human Nature
发行时间：2002年9月30日
来源：下载的 mobi 版本
Goodreads：4.07（17,605 Ratings）
豆瓣：8.4（125人评价）

概要

This book is about the moral, emotional, and political colorings of the concept of human nature in modern life. I will retrace the history that led people to see human nature as a dangerous idea, and I will try to unsnarl the moral and political rat’s nests that have entangled the idea along the way. Though no book on human nature can hope to be uncontroversial, I did not write it to be yet another “explosive” book, as dust jackets tend to say. I am not, as many people assume, countering an extreme “nurture” position with an extreme “nature” position, with the truth lying somewhere in between. In some cases, an extreme environmentalist explanation is correct: which language you speak is an obvious example, and differences among races and ethnic groups in test scores may be another. In other cases, such as certain inherited neurological disorders, an extreme hereditarian explanation is correct. In most cases the correct explanation will invoke a complex interaction between heredity and environment: culture is crucial, but culture could not exist without mental faculties that allow humans to create and learn culture to begin with. My goal in this book is not to argue that genes are everything and culture is nothing—no one believes that—but to explore why the extreme position (that culture is everything) is so often seen as moderate, and the moderate position is seen as extreme.

本书核心结论：

人格的形成40-50%来自基因，0-10%来自家庭（共享环境），50%来自独特环境（同伴，群体等）

作者介绍

Steven Arthur Pinker (born September 18, 1954) is a Canadian-American cognitive psychologist, linguist, and popular science author. He is Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, and is known for his advocacy of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind.

Pinker was born in Montreal, Quebec, in 1954, to a middle-class Jewish family.

读后感

之前看到 Steven Pinker 的一个 TED 分享《Human nature and the blank slate》，终于在学习了很长时间英语以后，拿起了原著，说实话还是读的磕磕绊绊，但是大体的意思已经能够理解了，略表欣慰，后面还需要继续加油，阅读这样的学术科普，确实比畅销书的单词量大不少，但是学习到的东西，也更有价值和意义

TED《Human nature and the blank slate》：
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuQHSKLXu2c

全书围绕 nature or nurture 的问题展开讨论，条理清晰、论据充分的对白板理论展开批判，并最终得出结论：「人格的形成40-50%来自基因，0-10%来自家庭（共享环境），50%来自独特环境（同伴，群体等）」，这是一种概率上的统计数据，从我个人的观点来看，家庭对于独特环境是有一定的影响力的，所以家庭部分权重或许更大，再是不同的家庭对孩子的影响方式差异极其巨大，也会对这个值的最终结果产生较大的偏差

本书出版于2002年，2016年湛卢引进和翻译（有评论说翻译的不好），本书在 goodreads 有 17605 个评分后得到了 4.07，在豆瓣只有125个评分后得到了 8.4，个人感觉市场在对国外优秀作品的引进方面存在不足，很多时间比较久的经典作品恐怕少会有好的译本，但是这些书又是整个知识体系中不可或缺的根基部分，这种急功近利和注重短期利益的著作引进方式，会最终让我们在基础领域，被打的丢盔弃甲

摘录

For millennia, the major theories of human nature have come from religion. The Judeo-Christian tradition, for example, offers explanations for much of the subject matter now studied by biology and psychology. Humans are made in the image of God and are unrelated to animals. Women are derivative of men and destined to be ruled by them. The mind is an immaterial substance: it has powers possessed by no purely physical structure, and can continue to exist when the body dies. The mind is made up of several components, including a moral sense, an ability to love, a capacity for reason that recognizes whether an act conforms to ideals of goodness, and a decision faculty that chooses how to behave. Although the decision faculty is not bound by the laws of cause and effect, it has an innate tendency to choose sin. Our cognitive and perceptual faculties work accurately because God implanted ideals in them that correspond to reality and because he coordinates their functioning with the outside world. Mental health comes from recognizing God’s purpose, choosing good and repenting sin, and loving God and one’s fellow humans for God’s sake.

“BLANK SLATE” IS a loose translation of the medieval Latin term tabula rasa—literally, “scraped tablet.” It is commonly attributed to the philosopher John Locke (1632–1704), though in fact he used a different metaphor. Here is the famous passage from An Essay Concerning Human Understanding:

Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper void of all characters, without any ideas. How comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, from EXPERIENCE.

THE BLANK SLATE is often accompanied by two other doctrines, which have also attained a sacred status in modern intellectual life. My label for the first of the two is commonly attributed to the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), though it really comes from John Dryden’s The Conquest of Granada, published in 1670:

I am as free as Nature first made man,
Ere the base laws of servitude began,
When wild in woods the noble savage ran.

The concept of the noble savage was inspired by European colonists’ discovery of indigenous peoples in the Americas, Africa, and (later) Oceania. It captures the belief that humans in their natural state are selfless, peaceable, and untroubled, and that blights such as greed, anxiety, and violence are the products of civilization. In 1755 Rousseau wrote:

So many authors have hastily concluded that man is naturally cruel, and requires a regular system of police to be reclaimed; whereas nothing can be more gentle than him in his primitive state, when placed by nature at an equal distance from the stupidity of brutes and the pernicious good sense of civilized man….

The more we reflect on this state, the more convinced we shall be that it was the least subject of any to revolutions, the best for man, and that nothing could have drawn him out of it but some fatal accident, which, for the public good, should never have happened. The example of the savages, most of whom have been found in this condition, seems to confirm that mankind was formed ever to remain in it, that this condition is the real youth of the world, and that all ulterior improvements have been so many steps, in appearance towards the perfection of individuals, but in fact towards the decrepitness of the species.

First among the authors that Rousseau had in mind was Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), who had presented a very different picture:

Hereby it is manifest, that during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war as is of every man against every man….

In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

The associationism of Locke and Mill has been recognizable in psychology ever since. It became the core of most models of learning, especially in the approach called behaviorism, which dominated psychology from the 1920s to the 1960s. The founder of behaviorism, John B. Watson (1878–1958), wrote one of the century’s most famous pronouncements of the Blank Slate:

Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select—doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief, and yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors.

In behaviorism, an infant’s talents and abilities didn’t matter because there was no such thing as a talent or an ability. Watson had banned them from psychology, together with other contents of the mind, such as ideas, beliefs, desires, and feelings. They were subjective and unmeasurable, he said, and unfit for science, which studies only objective and measurable things. To a behaviorist, the only legitimate topic for psychology is overt behavior and how it is controlled by the present and past environment. (There is an old joke in psychology: What does a behaviorist say after making love? “It was good for you; how was it for me?”)

Behaviorism not only took over psychology but infiltrated the public consciousness. Watson wrote an influential childrearing manual recommending that parents establish rigid feeding schedules for their children and give them a minimum of attention and love. If you comfort a crying child, he wrote, you will reward him for crying and thereby increase the frequency of crying behavior. (Benjamin Spock’s Baby and Child Care, first published in 1946 and famous for recommending indulgence toward children, was in part a reaction to Watson.) Skinner wrote several bestsellers arguing that harmful behavior is neither instinctive nor freely chosen but inadvertently conditioned. If we turned society into a big Skinner box and controlled behavior deliberately rather than haphazardly, we could eliminate aggression, overpopulation, crowding, pollution, and inequality, and thereby attain utopia.15 The noble savage became the noble pigeon.

At one end are the philosopher Jerry Fodor, who has suggested that all concepts might be innate (even “doorknob” and “tweezers”), and the linguist Noam Chomsky, who believes that the word “learning” is misleading and we should say that children “grow” language instead. At the other end are the connectionists, including Rumelhart, McClelland, Jeffrey Elman, and Elizabeth Bates, who build relatively simple computer models and train the living daylights out of them.11 Fans locate the first extreme, which originated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, at the East Pole, the mythical place from which all directions are west. They locate the second extreme, which originated at the University of California, San Diego, at the West Pole, the mythical place from which all directions are east. (The names were suggested by Fodor during an MIT seminar at which he was fulminating against a “West Coast theorist” and someone pointed out that the theorist worked at Yale, which is, technically, on the East Coast.)