Yeah, I enjoy Pinker's writing immensely. I've "browsed" The Blank Slate (read bits and pieces at friends houses and the library), and it just fell right into that "Pinker is so brilliant so how is he so wrong" category for me.
I think what bothered me, specifically here, about The Blank Slate, was that Pinker seems to have this intent of reconstructing the conceptual foundations that post-modernism smashed apart and left in a mess on the floor.
But as obnoxious as the post-modernists can get (reading even two sentences by Derrida makes me want to stab myself in the eye with an ice-pick), they had one fundamental thing going for them, which was their willingness to set aside the fear of a sloppy, disconnected world, and really explain why that's ok anyway.
Pinker, it seems, really wants to be back in a world where scientists KNEW how the world works, and the things they didn't know were just things they didn't know YET, but would find out in due course.
But I don't think we can get back to that world, because it was, essentially, a lie.
The Uncertainty Principle in Science. The Incompleteness Theorems in Math. The Is-Ought Gap in Logic.
A lot of people like Pinker--people who are so incredibly curious and crave knowledge and want to know the world so they can love it and fix it and help it and improve it--they don't like those concepts, because those concepts put humanity and existence in a permanent state of partial blindness. We can get close to understanding. We can approximate it really well. But we can never reach it...not really.
Pinker, in almost everything he does, is a kind of push back against that.
The Blank Slate is an attempt to show that actually, yes, human beings do have a definitive certain nature that can be explained by science. Pinker wants to show that the old scientists had the solution in front of them, but they just weren't understanding what they were seeing.
Except at every turn, Pinker has to fall back onto the same uncertain assumptions and unjustified assertions that he wants to get rid of, to make his case.
He gets credit for trying. It's not like people shouldn't make the attempt to get at some kind of understanding of "human nature" such as it is, because we will get a lot of valuable information from the attempt itself, even while it ultimately fails.
Which is why I love people like Pinker. He's so brilliant and he's doomed to always fail to prove what he wants to prove, necessarily, but we are all enriched by his brave and strenuous attempts.