Steven Pinker, being a public intellectual, may expect readers of his Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters (RAT) to bring certain hopes and expectations to the task. They know Pinker as a distinguished expert on linguistics, communication, and cognitive science, a scholar with a deep knowledge of many theories from evolution to cognitive dissonance, a child of the Enlightenment and a prophet of progress. They will not be disappointed.
Readers with sensitivity and memory may recall that Pinker sometimes oversells his message. How the Mind Works (Pinker, 1997), for example, was a wild and fun ride through the cognitive science of that time, but it did not reveal how the mind really works. As far as I can see, there are two main reasons for this shortcoming. One reason is the impossibility of omniscience (Felin, Koenderink, & Krueger, 2017). We will never know...
