The Blank Slate

Steven Pinker skrev det följande i en artikel i The General Psychologist (2006) 41, 1-8:

"Today the sciences of human nature have threatened the Blank Slate by trying to delineate what has to be present in the mind in order for learning to occur in the first place. My own field cognitive science, has tried to explicate the innate mechanisms that have to be in place in order to do the learning that obviously gets done. They include: the basic concept of an enduring object and lawful causation, which can be seen even in young infants; a number sense that allows us to grasp quantity of number; a number of spatial representations that allow us to negotiate the world and recognize objects and faces; a "theory of mind" or intuitive psychology with which we understand the mental states of other people; a language instinct that allows us to communicate our own thoughts and feeling via words; and the executive system of the frontal lobes of the brain, which recieve information from the rest of the brain and execute decision rules that determines how the person as a whole behaves."

Med andra ord så är det inte bara språkinstinkten som skall förklaras.