Me encantó su anterior libro, Cómo funciona la mente (que, por cierto, no explicaba cómo funciona la mente, pero eso no es más que un detallito. Y para aquellos a los que no les gustó, les recomiendo The Mind Doesn’t Work That Way : The Scope and Limits of Computational Psychology de Jerry A. Fodor, que no sólo está bien sino que además es extremadamente divertido. Otro libro interesante sobre estos asuntos es El ordenador y la mente de Philip N. Johnson-Laird ). Y la verdad, estoy deseando leer este último. El viejo debate sobre la existencia o no de la naturaleza humana da mucho juego.
En Amazon.com dicen:
In The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker explores the idea of human nature and its moral, emotional, and political colorings. He shows how many intellectuals have denied the existence of human nature and instead have embraced three dogmas: The Blank Slate (the mind has no innate traits), The Noble Savage (people are born good and corrupted by society), and The Ghost in the Machine (each of us has a soul that makes choices free from biology). Each dogma carries a moral burden, so their defenders have engaged in desperate tactics to discredit the scientists who are now challenging them.
Pinker provides calm in the stormy debate by disentangling the political and moral issues from the scientific ones. He shows that equality, compassion, responsibility, and purpose have nothing to fear from discoveries about an innately organized psyche. Pinker shows that the new sciences of mind, brain, genes, and evolution, far from being dangerous, are complementing observations about the human condition made by millennia of artists and philosophers. All this is done in the style that earned his previous books many prizes and worldwide acclaim: irreverent wit, lucid exposition, and startling insight on matters great and small.
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