The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

by Steven Pinker

Both psychology and the other social sciences, then, denied that the minds of individual people were important, but they set out in different directions from there. Psychology banished mental entities like beliefs and desires altogether and replaced them with stimuli and responses. The other social sciences located beliefs and desires in cultures and societies rather than in the heads of individual people. The different social sciences also agreed that the contents of cognition—ideas, thoughts, plans, and so on—were really phenomena of language, overt behavior that anyone could hear and write down. (Watson proposed that “thinking” really consisted of teensy movements of the mouth and throat.) But most of all they shared a dislike of instincts and evolution.