An excellent deconstruction of an unworthy review of Stephen Pinker’s The Blank Slate — from Mark Powers, whose blog is generally quite good. Shame about the review, since I otherwise rather like Blackburn. I was similarly disappointed not too long ago when I read a really grossly vicious, misleading, dishonest, and maybe even slanderous review of Robert Nozick’s The Nature of Rationality that had run in the London Review of Books some years back. In a nutshell, the review accused Nozick, without a shred of textual foundation, of holding a quasi-Nietzschean doctrine that permits the more intelligent to run roughshod over the barely-human cognitive underclass. Nozick’s response — one of very few from a guy well known for ignoring critics — was a highbrow bitch-slap of astonishing force. Anyway, the disappointing part was not so much the slander, but that it was penned by the (otherwise) extremely sharp and interesting philosopher of science Ian Hacking.