Pinker may be one of these scientific propagandists who make great claims for the latest research of science and its applicability to life. Iconoclasm, overconfidence, arrogance and prickliness, are common traits of this sort of person. When a new idea or scientific finding comes along it's seen as the big answer to everything. After the dust clears, we may find out that Pinker was right about some things and wildly wrong about others.
Perhaps we will, x. It's certainly possible that Pinker is right about some things. I think you already know that I think he is "wildly wrong" about others. Dumping the psyche -- Huxley's "ghost in the machine" -- is the preeminent example. For Pinker, there is only the machine: The "ghost" has been "evicted," by simple fiat. What Hegel "did" to God, Pinker does to man....
But this seems so silly. Pinker simply refuses to acknowledge that he's "got" a "ghost", so to speak, stipulating its nonexistence as the "pre-analytical notion" upon which to erect his system. Yet absent his "ghost," there would be no possible motive for his work. And lacking that, its mere existence would be inexplicable: Machines do not "do science."
The point seems to me so basic; perhaps that is the reason it is so easy to overlook. Yet perhaps this is not a mere methodological mistake; perhaps Pinker really is a willful denizen of Second Reality. In which case, we can be informed by his discoveries to the extent that his argument remains rational -- that is, to the extent that there is overlap between his Second Reality and First Reality, and only to that extent. Otherwise, the guy is floating in a dream world that is hitched to Nothing.
As Eric Voegelin points out, the imaginators and projecters of Second Realities can adduce important information about facts, and often perform brilliant intellectual feats of analysis. But we must be aware that, for them, facts and the thought process itself are subordinated to the requirements of their imaginative constructions. Truth will have to take a back seat if there is a conflict of reality with the construction.
Thanks for writing, x. Happy New Year!
Yes, x, the evolution of the main idea seems to involve a certain amount of "hucksterism" in this day and age.
Speaking of T.H. Huxley, recently I found this gem, which corroborates your observation:
“The [Protestant] Reformation was the scraping of a little rust off the chains which still bind the mind…. Darwinism is the New Reformation.”
Huxley penned these lines about the turn of the 20th century.
At the turn of the 19th century, Hegel – apparently in a fit of some kind of “religious” ecstasy – penned these lines in regard to the French Revolution of 1789:
“As long as the sun stands in heaven and the planets revolve around it, has it not happened that man stood on his head, that is on his thought, and built reality in conformity to it. Anaxagorus had been the first to say that Nous governs the world; but only now has man gained the insight that thought should govern spiritual reality. This was a splendid surprise; all thinking beings shared in celebrating the epoch. The age was ruled by a sublime emotion, the world trembled as the enthusiasm of the spirit pervaded it, as if only now the divine had been truly reconciled to the world.”
I don’t even want to get into problems of meaning here, WRT these two statements. (Though I might want to revisit this problem later on if there’s a reason to do that.)
All I want to know is two things. (1) Is there anybody out there in Freeperland who can detect one single FACT in either of these statements? It seems to me we are not dealing in the world of objective fact here, but in a more subjective world governed by personal taste, predilection, and preference. In short, the universe of rhetoric.
The other thing I want to know is: (2) Do people generally, these days, consider such “nit-picking” as to facts as raised in (1) unimportant or irrelevant to their actual lives? Is rhetoric finally annointed king of reality?
As far as I can tell, neither of the above reports deals with factual reality at all. And yet these two thinkers preeminently have managed to constitute a “style of thinking” that has moved humanity, arguably against its own best interests, for nigh-on two centuries by now. JMHO FWIW.
Please share your thoughts on this question, x…if you have the time and interest.
Happy 2003, x!!!