by nature

By its very nature, this argument entails certain others.

People are by nature illiterate and innumerate […] They understand physical things as having hidden essences that obey the laws of sympathetic magic or voodoo rather than physics and biology: objects can reach across time and space to affect things that resemble them or that had been in contact with them in the past […] They think that words and thoughts can impinge on the physical world in prayers and curses. They underestimate the prevalence of coincidence.²³ They generalize from paltry samples, namely their own experience, and they reason by stereotype, projecting the typical traits of a group onto any individual that belongs to it. They infer causation from correlation. They think holistically, in black and white, and physically, treating abstract networks as concrete stuff. They are not so much intuitive scientists as intuitive lawyers and politicians, marshaling evidence that confirms their convictions while dismissing evidence that contradicts them.²⁴ They overestimate their own knowledge, understanding, rectitude, competence, and luck.²⁵ […] For every misfortune they seek a scapegoat. […] But we’re not all bad. Human cognition comes with two features that give it the means to transcend its limitations.²⁹ The first is abstraction […] allowing them to think in metaphors and analogies: heat is a fluid, a message is a container, a society is a family, obligations are bonds. The second stepladder of cognition is its combinatorial, recursive power.

2018, Steven Pinker, “Chapter 2: Entro, Evo, Info”, in Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, Penguin, →ISBN