From: rhinoceros (rhinoceros@freemail.gr)
Date: Tue Oct 21 2003 - 18:33:25 MDT
Here is an article starting with an old sin of Pinker's youth. Besides this catchy bit, the article is interesting. It is the second of two articles by Harold Fromm about what evolution has to say about culture. Maybe "Nature or Narture" is not such an "orthogonal" distinction after all...
Full PDFs of the two articles on "The New Darwinism in the Humanities" are available here:
From Plato to Pinker
http://www.hudsonreview.com/frommSp03.pdf
Back to Nature, Again
http://www.hudsonreview.com/frommSu03.pdf
The New Darwinism in the Humanities
Part II: Back to Nature, Again
Harold Fromm
Between the year 1997, when "How the Mind Works" was published, and 2002, the year of "The Blank Slate", Steven Pinker’s treatment of art seems to have undergone a certain amount of refinement. In 1997, far from seeing the arts as "adaptive," in the Darwinian sense of conducive to fitness for survival and reproduction, Pinker described music and fiction as "cheesecake" for the mind that provided a sensual thrill like the feel of fat and sugar on the taste buds. With a view such as this, there wasn’t much difference between the psychological impact of Bach’s "St. Matthew Passion" and pornography off the Web. Pinker made things even worse by adding, "Compared with language, vision, social reasoning, and physical know-how, music could vanish from our species and the rest of our lifestyle would be virtually unchanged. Music appears to be a pure pleasure technology, a cocktail of recreational drugs that we ingest through the ear to stimulate a mass of pleasure circuits at once." Whether the passage of time has ca
used him to reconsider or whether harsh critics such as Joseph Carroll 1 have had a chastening effect, by the time of "The Blank Slate", Pinker remarks,
"Whether art is an adaptation or a by-product or a mixture of the two, it is deeply rooted in our mental faculties." In other words, our response to art is a component of human nature and, even if he still considers it a pleasure-technology or a status-seeking feat, Pinker now seems to see it as more deeply connected with being human. "Organisms get pleasure from things that promoted the fitness of their ancestors," he writes, and he mentions food, sex, children, and know-how as well as visual and auditory pleasure. Not quite "adaptive" but serious nonetheless. If he has not already done so, I figure it is only a matter of time before he abandons the implausible view that nobody would profoundly miss music if it were simply to disappear. The number of totally music-insensitive people I have met during a lifetime would not use up the fingers of one hand.
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