This book is the third of a three-volume set on the innate mind. It provides an assessment of nativist thought and definitive reference point for future inquiry. Nativists have long been interested in a variety of foundational topics relating to the study of cognitive development and the historical opposition between nativism and empiricism. Among the issues here are questions about what it is for something to be innate in the first place; how innateness is related to such things (...) as heritability, genetic information, and theories of cognitive development; the status of arguments both for and against nativism; and how best to understand the role of genes in development and inheritance. These issues are all explored in one way or another in this book. But the book also looks to the future. Alongside state-of-the-art discussions of such established nativist concerns as language, number, spatial cognition, and social cognition, this book examines nativist work in a variety of areas where detailed nativist exploration is relatively new, including cultural learning, creativity, economic choice, culture, and morality. The expansion of nativist theorizing into all these new areas shows both the power and the promise of nativist approaches, and points the way to the future. (shrink)

This book is the third of a three-volume set on the innate mind. It provides an assessment of nativist thought and definitive reference point for future inquiry. Nativists have long been interested in a variety of foundational topics relating to the study of cognitive development and the historical opposition between nativism and empiricism. Among the issues here are questions about what it is for something to be innate in the first place; how innateness is related to such things (...) as heritability, genetic information, and theories of cognitive development; the status of arguments both for and against nativism; and how best to understand the role of genes in development and inheritance. These issues are all explored in one way or another in this book. But the book also looks to the future. Alongside state-of-the-art discussions of such established nativist concerns as language, number, spatial cognition, and social cognition, this book examines nativist work in a variety of areas where detailed nativist exploration is relatively new, including cultural learning, creativity, economic choice, culture, and morality. The expansion of nativist theorizing into all these new areas shows both the power and the promise of nativist approaches, and points the way to the future. (shrink)

The topic of this dissertation is the nature of linguistic competence, the capacity to understand and produce sentences of natural language. I defend the empiricist account of linguistic competence embedded in the connectionist cognitive science. This strand of cognitive science has been opposed to the traditional symbolic cognitive science, coupled with transformational-generative grammar, which was committed to nativism due to the view that human cognition, including language capacity, should be construed in terms of symbolic representations and hardwired rules. Similarly, (...) linguistic competence in this framework was regarded as being innate, rule-governed, domain-specific, and fundamentally different from performance, i.e., idiosyncrasies and factors governing linguistic behavior. I analyze state-of-the-art connectionist, deep learning models of natural language processing, most notably large language models, to see what they can tell us about linguistic competence. Deep learning is a statistical technique for the classification of patterns through which artificial intelligence researchers train artificial neural networks containing multiple layers that crunch a gargantuan amount of textual and/or visual data. I argue that these models suggest that linguistic competence should be construed as stochastic, pattern-based, and stemming from domain-general mechanisms. Moreover, I distinguish syntactic from semantic competence, and I show for each the ramifications of the endorsement of a connectionist research program as opposed to the traditional symbolic cognitive science and transformational-generative grammar. I provide a unifying front, consisting of usage-based theories, a construction grammar approach, and an embodied approach to cognition to show that the more multimodal and diverse models are in terms of architectural features and training data, the stronger the case is for the connectionist linguistic competence. I also propose to discard the competence vs. performance distinction as theoretically inferior so that a novel and integrative account of linguistic competence originating in connectionism and empiricism that I propose and defend in the dissertation could be put forward in scientific and philosophical literature. (shrink)

The article is dedicated to the popular argument among nativists, who use it against the empiricist approach. We analyze the strongest objection against the poverty of the stimulus argument which is the curry argument. As a result of the critical consideration of the poverty of the stimulus discussion, we conclude that the curry argument is quite sound.

This is the third of a three-volume set on The Innate Mind providing a comprehensive assessment of nativist thought and definitive reference point for future inquiry. Together these volumes point the way toward a synthesis that provides a powerful picture of our minds and their place in the natural order.

The topic of this dissertation is a discussion of the seventeenth century debate between Descartes and Locke over innate ideas. I propose a novel approach to the study of this debate. I argue that their disagreement over innate ideas is directly related to their differing views of how the content of ideas is determined and of what counts as having an idea in the mind. Approaching the controversy between Descartes and Locke from this perspective has allowed me to conclude that (...) Descartes' nativist argument prevail over Locke's arguments to the contrary. ;I begin the discussion, in Chapter One, by examining the anti-nativist arguments offered by Locke in Book I of his Essay concerning Human Understanding and by clarifying the nature of Descartes' dispositional nativism. I conclude that since Locke's arguments rely on a principle whose denial is implied by Descartes' Dispositional Nativism, his arguments at best beg the question against Descartes. I suggest then that discussion of the controversy between Descartes and Locke should shift to the arguments they provide, respectively, for and against the awareness principle. ;In Chapter Two, I argue that Locke's argument for the awareness principle is to be found in the empiricism of Book II of his Essay and, hence, that the anti-nativist arguments of Book I are question-begging since they presuppose the very empiricism they aim to prove. ;In Chapters Three and Four, I argue that Descartes' argument for the denial of the awareness principle is to be found in his rationalist theory of idea-individuation according to which the content of ideas is determined by an intellectual and implicitly known presentation of the object. ;In the final chapter, I argue that Descartes' arguments for nativism are a version of what is known in the literature as "Poverty-of-the-Stimulus Arguments" and conclude that, interpreted this way, they have an edge over Locke's anti-nativist arguments. I contend that whereas Locke's argument for the awareness principle depend on an empiricist theory of idea individuation that assumes that principle, Descartes' argument for the denial of the awareness principle depends on a rationalist theory of idea individuation that argues for the denial of that principle. (shrink)

Historically, the dispute between empiricists and nativists in philosophy and cognitive science has concerned human and animal minds (Margolis and Laurence in Philos Stud: An Int J Philos Anal Tradit 165(2): 693-718, 2013, Ritchie in Synthese 199(Suppl 1): 159–176, 2021, Colombo in Synthese 195: 4817–4838, 2018). But recent progress has highlighted how empiricist and nativist concerns arise in the construction of artificial systems (Buckner in From deep learning to rational machines: What the history of philosophy can teach us about the (...) future of artificial intelligence. Oxford University Press.). This paper uses nativism and empiricism to address questions about the nature of artificial intelligence and its trajectory. It begins by defining the nativism/empiricism debate in terms of the generality of a system. Nativist systems have initial states with domain-specific features; empiricist systems have initial states with only domain-general features. With the debate framed in this way, it then explores a variety of arguments for nativism and empiricism in AI. These arguments revolve around two different questions which must be distinguished: whether nativism the only possible approach to developing human-level AI (HLAI); and whether nativism is the most practical approach to developing HLAI. On the first question, it argues that nativism is quite clearly not the only possible approach to developing HLAI, as is sometimes suggested. It argues that existing arguments for the necessity of nativism are unconvincing, because they analogize from poverty of the stimulus arguments about humans, while AIs often have access to much more data than humans. Then it argues that the case of evolution gives us a compelling argument against nativism. On the second, practical question, the paper argues that there is a tradeoff between the advantages of encoding innate machinery directly, and the advantages of evolving or learning it. However, as the past decade has shown, empiricism is a much more viable path to greater capability levels, given the ‘bitter lesson’ (Sutton in _Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction_. MIT press.) that encoding the ‘correct’ knowledge in AI systems is perennially outperformed by more empiricist methods that leverage large-scale data and computation. (shrink)

Recent philosophical discussions of self-knowledge have focused on basic cases: our knowledge of our own thoughts, beliefs, sensations, experiences, preferences, and intentions. Empiricists argue that we acquire this sort of self-knowledge through inner perception; rationalists assign basic self-knowledge an even more secure source in reason and conceptual understanding. I try to split the difference. Although our knowledge of our own beliefs and thoughts is conceptually insured, our knowledge of our experiences is relevantly like our perceptual knowledge of the external world.

This chapter contains section titled: The Theory Theory The Theory Theory vs. Other Empiricist Alternatives Innate Theories and Starting‐state Nativism Phenomenological and Social Objections Universality, Uniformity, and Learning Theory Formation and Language.

I distinguish between empiricist and rationalist approaches to the idea of the flow of time. The former trace back the idea of the flow of time to the deliverances of our sensory or introspective capacities. According to the latter, the idea of the flow of time is integral to what it is to have a conscious point of view in the first place. I discuss some aspects of what I take to be Ismael’s version of a rationalist approach, which focuses (...) on the point of view of an agent. In particular, I raise some questions as to whether Ismael’s account does succeed in reconstructing the common-sense idea of the flow of time in the sense of Becoming, and where her account leaves us with respect to the ‘two times’ problem regarding the relationship between everyday thought about time and the scientific view of time. (shrink)

This paper discusses the role that appeals to theoretical simplicity have played in the debate between nativists and empiricists in cognitive science. Both sides have been keen to make use of such appeals in defence of their respective positions about the structure and ontogeny of the human mind. Focusing on the standard simplicity argument employed by empiricist-minded philosophers and cognitive scientists—what I call “the argument for minimal innateness”—I identify various problems with such arguments—in particular, the apparent arbitrariness of the relevant (...) notions of simplicity at work. I then argue that simplicity ought not be seen as a theoretical desideratum in its own right, but rather as a stand-in for other desirable features of theories. In this deflationary vein, I argue that the best way of interpreting the argument for minimal innateness is to view it as an indirect appeal to various potential biological constraints on the amount of innate structure that can wired into the human mind. I then consider how nativists may respond to this biologized version of the argument, and discuss the role that similar biological concerns have played in recent nativist theorizing in the Minimalist Programme in generative linguistics. (shrink)

During the second half of the 19th century, in the field of physiological optics, there was a strong controversy between Hermann von Helmholtz and Ewald Hering. This controversy has been usually characterized as “empiricism” vs. “nativism”. In the field of physiology of visual perception, several subjects demanded attention, among them, color vision. Helmholtz and Hering suggested different theories for the physiological correlate of color sensation and different color spaces to give an account of the relationships between colors. In (...) this article, I will argue that the controversy between the two authors could be understood as differences between styles of reasoning, and these different styles express different presuppositions. More specifically, I want to suggest that the disagreements could be linked to the discussions on how vital phenomena should be studied. (shrink)

All knowledge 'begins with experience,' but it does not therefore 'arise' from experience.The classical American pragmatists are usually considered to be either empiricists or heirs to the empiricist tradition in philosophy. This is unsurprising given the nature of the pragmatist philosophical program as a late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century reaction against transcendental idealism. Pragmatists sought to ground their inquiry resolutely in experience sans speculative metaphysics. However, the pragmatists were also stridently opposed to certain doctrines and epistemological tendencies in British empiricism (...) that they regarded as either implicitly idealist, or as laying a groundwork that stood as the .. (shrink)

According to the received view, Hume is a much more rigorous and consistent concept-empiricist than Locke. Hume is supposed to have taken as a starting point Locke's meaning-empiricism, and worked out its full radical implications. Locke, by way of contrast, cowered from drawing his theory's strange consequences. The received view about Locke's and Hume's concept-empiricism is mistaken, I shall argue. Hume may be more uncompromising (although he too falters), but he is not more rigorous than Locke. It is (...) not because of (intellectual) timidity that Locke does not draw Hume's conclusions from his empiricism. It is, rather, because of his much sounder method. (shrink)

According to the received view, Hume is a much more rigorous and consistent concept-empiricist than Locke. Hume is supposed to have taken as a starting point Locke's meaning-empiricism, and worked out its full radical implications. Locke, by way of contrast, cowered from drawing his theory's strange consequences. The received view about Locke's and Hume's concept-empiricism is mistaken, I shall argue. Hume may be more uncompromising (although he too falters), but he is not more rigorous than Locke. It is (...) not because of (intellectual) timidity that Locke does not draw Hume's conclusions from his empiricism. It is, rather, because of his much sounder method. (shrink)

Davidson has famously argued that conceptual relativism, which, for him, is based on the content-scheme dualism, or the “third dogma” of empiricism, is either unintelligible or philosophically uninteresting and has accused Quine of holding onto such a dogma. For Davidson, there can be found no intelligible ground for the claim that there may exist untranslatable languages: all languages, if they are languages, are in principle inter-translatable and uttered sentences, if identifiable as utterances, are interpretable. Davidson has also endorsed the (...) Quinean indeterminacy-underdetermination distinction. The early Quine, as well as the later Quine, believe that the indeterminacy of translation casts serious doubt on the existence of facts of the matter about correct translation between languages. In this paper, I will argue that Quine cannot be the target of Davidson’s argument against conceptual relativism, and that Davidson’s argument is in conflict, among others, with his endorsement of the Quinean indeterminacy-underdetermination distinction. I will show how this conflict results in a radical departure from Quine with respect to the matter of factualism about fine-grained meanings. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In this article, the author wishes to defend a naturalistic version of phenomenology rooted in and expropriated from William James’s radical empiricism against Max Scheler’s non-naturalistic phenomenology. By drawing from Jack Reynolds’s arguments for a minimal phenomenology, the author posits that radical empiricism is a middle way between the misguided self-sufficiency of transcendental phenomenology and the misguided self-sufficiency of ontological naturalism. The orthodox reading of Scheler as a dualist is found problematic, and in outlining four propositions characteristic (...) of Scheler’s positions, the author motivates resources from Jamesian thought to argue for the superiority of a naturalistic phenomenology. (shrink)

One of the most important recent developments in the study of concepts has been the resurgence of interest in nativist accounts of the human conceptual system. However, many theorists suppose that a key feature of neural organization—the brain’s plasticity—undermines the nativist approach to concept acquisition. We argue that, on the contrary, not only does the brain’s plasticity fail to undermine concept nativism, but a detailed examination of the neurological evidence actually provides powerful support for concept nativism.

This paper takes a fresh look at the nativism–empiricism debate, presenting and defending a nativist perspective on the mind. Empiricism is often taken to be the default view both in philosophy and in cognitive science. This paper argues, on the contrary, that there should be no presumption in favor of empiricism (or nativism), but that the existing evidence suggests that nativism is the most promising framework for the scientific study of the mind. Our case (...) on behalf of nativism has four parts. (1) We characterize nativism’s core commitments relative to the contemporary debate between empiricists and nativists, (2) we present the positive case for nativism in terms of two central nativist arguments (the poverty of the stimulus argument and the argument from animals), (3) we respond to a number of influential objections to nativist theories, and (4) we explain the nativist approach to the conceptual system. (shrink)

The rise of Bayesianism in cognitive science promises to shape the debate between nativists and empiricists into more productive forms—or so have claimed several philosophers and cognitive scientists. The present paper explicates this claim, distinguishing different ways of understanding it. After clarifying what is at stake in the controversy between nativists and empiricists, and what is involved in current Bayesian cognitive science, the paper argues that Bayesianism offers not a vindication of either nativism or empiricism, but one way (...) to talk precisely and transparently about the kinds of mechanisms and representations underlying the acquisition of psychological traits without a commitment to an innate language of thought. (shrink)

Externalism is the view that the intentional content of a mental state supervenes on its relations to objects in the extramental world. Nativism is the view that some of the innate states of the mind/brain have intentional content. I consider both “causal” and “nomic” versions of externalism, and argue that both are incompatible with nativism. I consider likely candidates for a compatibilist position – a nativism of “narrow” representational states, and a nativism of the contentless formal (...) “vehicles” of representational states. I argue that “narrow nativism” is either too implausible to appeal to the nativist – because it entails that innate representational states are lost as the mind becomes more experienced, or too costly to appeal to the externalist – because a reasonable version of it requires the analytic-synthetic distinction. Finally, I argue that “syntactic nativism” is indistinguishable from classical anti-nativist empiricism, given the latter’s broad tolerance for innate implementation of psychological principles and mechanisms. (shrink)

empiricist approaches to knowledge acquisition. I say " appears" because so often the debaters seem to be talking past each other, arguing about different things or misunderstanding each other in such basic ways that the debates can seem to an observer as incoherent. For these reasons there has been a powerful need for a systematic treatment of the different senses of nativism and empiricism that considers both their historical contexts and their current manifestations. Cowie's book offers such a (...) treatment, one that goes far beyond prior attempts. It is a remarkably clear and insightful exposition and critique of nativist views from earliest writings to the most current debates. It helps all of us understand better what others are talking about when they don't subscribe to our brand of nativism or empiricism. It also reveals just how much theoretical and empirical work needs to be done before we can get a clear handle what is really the truth about the innateness of language, mathematics, folks psychology, and many other potential domains. Yet, despite these powerful virtues, the book also falls short on some key issues that seem necessary to laying an agenda for future empirical or theoretical work on nativism. I will tend to focus in this essay on those missing links, while also repeatedly stating that this book represents a major leap forward in making sense of what it means to say that some aspect of the mind is innate. Mystery and Modularity. (shrink)

Notice that I’m not saying that observations we in fact have made are not relevant to our beliefs about what exists. But the mere fact that something is observable does not give us any reason to think that it ever has or will in fact be observed. The issue between us is whether mere observability—as distinct from actual observation—is relevant to our beliefs about what exists. I submit that it is not.

Notice that I’m not saying that observations we in fact have made are not relevant to our beliefs about what exists. But the mere fact that something is observable does not give us any reason to think that it ever has or will in fact be observed. The issue between us is whether mere observability—as distinct from actual observation—is relevant to our beliefs about what exists. I submit that it is not.

This chapter is concerned only with some of the conceptual (or philosophical) issues relevant to the innateness hypothesis: the supposed analogy with Rationalists’ concern with mathematics; the false contrast between innate and learned; and the character of general statistical (GenStat) approaches. It is not so easy, however, to deal with a Leibnizian problem of the modal status of grammatical rules, nor with a little‐noticed problem, ironically enough raised by the modern empiricist Quine, what the author call superficialism regarding the data (...) available to the child. The chapter shows that a consideration of these problems will invite a specific form of nativism, what might be called a “quasi‐brute process” nativism, that is actually not as closely related to traditional Rationalism as Chomsky originally proposed, but is what he and others have arguably had in mind since the development of the Principles and Parameters and other “biological” models beginning in the 1970s. (shrink)

Hume invokes the separability of perceptions to derive some of his most contentious pronouncements. To assess the cogency of the arguments, the notion must first be clarified. The clarification reveals that sic different separability claims must be distinguished. Of these, I consider the three that are rarely discussed. They turn out to be unacceptable. Locke espouses none of them.This Article does not have an abstract.

Nativism as a theory that interprets certain abilities and ideas as innate [The contexts we will consider prefer to speak precisely of innateness in the sense of New European philosophical discussions and avoid the notion of “a priori”/“a posteriori”, respectively, and we will stick to this terminological pair.], is considered by some contemporary philosophers as an echo of outdated philosophical approaches. Critics for the most part reproach it for being unscientific and metaphysical. In one of its most extreme forms, (...) nativism is accused of mysticism and lack of evidence. At the same time, a number of very authoritative thinkers openly call themselves nativists and defend this trend in philosophy, cognitive sciences, linguistics and other fields of knowledge (Chomsky, McGinn, Lawrence and Margolis). The main aim of this paper is to analyse the contemporary polemic between empiricists and nativists. It will be shown that the main polemical knot around which the debate unfolds can be easily untied through a transcendentalist interpretation of nativism. In particular, an appeal to phenomenology can help to notice the importance of the idea of the non-essentiality of the source of experience to experience. Phenomenology, which preserves the idea of this non-essentiality, has in mind a radical break with the ontology of natural objects, and will not, in particular, deduce innate knowledge from evolutionary mechanisms, nor will it place it within the biological structure of organisms (e.g., the brain or the neural processes in it). It remains to be shown that most of the positions and refutations of modern nativism are based on a misunderstanding of the classical “overcoming” of the dispute between empiricism and rationalism by transcendentalism and transcendental phenomenology, as well as the requirement of transcendentalism and transcendental phenomenology not to place the source of experience in the same world in which we locate experience itself. The study is to consider what the modern nativist view must look like in its transcendentalist interpretation in order to be a worthy opponent to modern empiricism. (shrink)

This powerfully iconoclastic book reconsiders the influential nativist position toward the mind. Nativists assert that some concepts, beliefs, or capacities are innate or inborn: "native" to the mind rather than acquired. Fiona Cowie argues that this view is mistaken, demonstrating that nativism is an unstable amalgam of two quite different--and probably inconsistent--theses about the mind. Unlike empiricists, who postulate domain-neutral learning strategies, nativists insist that some learning tasks require special kinds of skills, and that these skills are hard-wired into (...) our brains at birth. This "faculties hypothesis" finds its modern expression in the views of Noam Chomsky. Cowie, marshaling recent empirical evidence from developmental psychology, psycholinguistics, computer science, and linguistics, provides a crisp and timely critique of Chomsky's nativism and defends in its place a moderately nativist approach to language acquisition. Also in contrast to empiricists, who view the mind as simply another natural phenomenon susceptible of scientific explanation, nativists suspect that the mental is inelectably mysterious. Cowie addresses this second strand in nativist thought, taking on the view articulated by Jerry Fodor and other nativists that learning, particularly concept acquisition, is a fundamentally inexplicable process. Cowie challenges this explanatory pessimism, and argues convincingly that concept acquisition is psychologically explicable. What's Within? is a clear and provocative achievement in the study of the human mind. (shrink)

It is widely believed that the principal difference between Einstein's special relativity and its contemporary rival Lorentz-type theories was that while the Lorentz-type theories were also capable of “explaining away” the null result of the Michelson-Morley experiment and other experimental findings by means of the distortions of moving measuring-rods and moving clocks, special relativity revealed more fundamental new facts about the geometry of space-time behind these phenomena. I shall argue that special relativity tells us nothing new about the geometry of (...) space-time, in comparison with the pre-relativistic Galileo-invariant conceptions; it simply calls something else "space-time", and this something else has different properties. All statements of special relativity about those features of reality that correspond to the original meaning of the terms "space" and "time" are identical with the corresponding traditional pre-relativistic statements. It will be also argued that special relativity and Lorentz theory are completely identical in both senses, as theories about space-time and as theories about the behavior of moving physical objects. (shrink)

(This paper has since been republished in _Kant's Critique of Pure Reason: Critical Essays_, edited by Patricia Kitcher [Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998], 21-44.) Kant's claim that space and time are "forms of intuition" is contrasted with the nativist claim that space is an innate idea or construct of the mind and with the empiricist claim that space is given in or learned from experience. It is argued that the nativism/empiricism debate masks a more fundamental disagreement between sensationism (...) and constructivism. Kant's account of space- and time-cognition is shown to be neither sensationist nor constructivist and as a consequence to be "nativistic" in a sense which commentators from Vaihinger and Kemp Smith to Patricia Kitcher have failed to capture. (shrink)

How is knowledge of geometry developed and acquired? This central question in the philosophy of mathematics has received very different answers. Spelke and colleagues argue for a “core cognitivist”, nativist, view according to which geometric cognition is in an important way shaped by genetically determined abilities for shape recognition and orientation. Against the nativist position, Ferreirós and García-Pérez have argued for a “culturalist” account that takes geometric cognition to be fundamentally a culturally developed phenomenon. In this paper, I argue that (...) when understood as moderate versions supported by the state-of-the-art research, the nativist and culturalist views are in fact possible to reconcile. While Ferreirós and García-Pérez present the work of Spelke and colleagues as implying that geometric cognition is genetically determined, I argue that they fail to appreciate the role that Spelke and colleagues see for cultural factors. On this basis, I provide theoretical and terminological clarifications and show that moderate versions of the nativist and culturalist view are in fact consistent with each other. I then propose a unifying theoretical framework for future study that can integrate the two accounts in ontogeny by moving beyond the crude nature (nativism) vs. nurture (culturalism) dichotomy. (shrink)

Scheibe is one of the most important philosophers of science in Germany. He has written extensively on all the problems that confront the philosophy of physics: rationalism vs. empiricism; reductionism; the foundations of quantum mechanics; space-time, and much more. Since little of his work has been translated into English, he is not yet well known internationally. However, this collection of some 40 of his papers will remedy this unfortunate situation.

The rise of Bayesianism in cognitive science promises to shape the debate between nativists and empiricists into more productive forms—or so have claimed several philosophers and cognitive scientists. The present paper explicates this claim, distinguishing different ways of understanding it. After clarifying what is at stake in the controversy between nativists and empiricists, and what is involved in current Bayesian cognitive science, the paper argues that Bayesianism offers not a vindication of either nativism or empiricism, but one way (...) to talk precisely and transparently about the kinds of mechanisms and representations underlying the acquisition of psychological traits without a commitment to an innate language of thought. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Born to Be Good? Are There Moral Universals? Is There a Morality Acquisition Device? Morality Without Innateness Appendix: Moral Anti‐nativism and Moral Relativism References.

Introduction: The empiricists and their context -- Empiricism and the empiricists -- The intellectual background to the early modern empiricists -- Martin Luther and the Reformation -- Aristotelian cosmology and the scientific revolution -- Aristotelian/scholastic hylomorphism and the rise of mechanism -- The Royal Society of London -- Francis Bacon (1561-1626) -- The natural realm : the idols of the mind -- Idols of the tribe -- Idols of the cave -- Idols of the marketplace -- Idols of the (...) theatre -- Knowledge and experience : induction introduced -- Aristotelian/scholastic syllogisms : deductions dismissed -- Baconian empiricism : induction introduced -- Conclusion: Bacon the empiricist -- Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) -- The natural realm : Hobbes's materialistic mechanism -- The importance of motion -- Sensation and the mind -- Knowledge and experience : definitions and the euclidean method -- Two kinds of knowledge and proper ratiocination -- The method of analysis and the method of synthesis -- Conclusion: Hobbes, the empiricist -- Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655) -- The natural realm : Gassendi's atomism -- The basic principles of Gassendi's atomism -- Atomistic sensation -- Knowledge and experience : the middle way to knowledge -- The sceptics are partly correct -- Knowledge regained? -- Conclusion: Gassendi. the empiricist -- Robert Boyle (1627-1691) -- The natural realm : Boyle's mechanism (corpuscularianism) -- The basic principles of Boyle's mechanism (or corpscularianism) -- Sensation and the mind -- Knowledge and experience : mechanism and the cautious experimenter -- The excellency of mechanism -- Experimentation and the status of mechanism -- Conclusion: Boyle, the empiricist -- John Locke (1632-1704) -- The natural realm : Locke's mechanism -- Against innatism -- Ideas and the tabula rasa -- Primary and secondary qualities, and our confused idea of substance -- Locke on power -- Knowledge and experience : Locke's epistemology -- Indirect realism, or the representational theory of perception -- The certainty of knowledge -- The origin of knowledge -- The extent of knowledge -- Conclusion: Locke, the empiricist -- Isaac Newton (1642-1727) -- The natural realm : Newton's principia -- A world of forces : universal gravitation -- What kind of quality is gravity? -- Mechanism and action at a distance -- Knowledge and experience : rules for the study of natural philosophy -- The four rules -- Whither natural philosophy -- Conclusion: Newton, the empiricist -- George Berkeley (1685-1753) -- The natural realm : Berkeley's idealism -- The world contains only souls and ideas -- Esse est percipi : two arguments for idealism/immaterialism -- Against the primary/secondary quality distinction -- Knowledge and experience : Berkeley's common sense epistemology -- Against the representational theory of perception -- Defeating the skeptic, and returning to common sense -- Mechanism, newtonianism, and instrumentalism : Berkeley on the new science -- Responses to popular objections -- Conclusion: Berkeley, the empiricist -- David Hume (1711-1776) -- The natural realm : Hume's psychological approach -- Ideas and impressions -- The principles of association -- Knowledge and experience : Hume's semi-scepticism -- Relations of ideas vs. matters of fact -- From matters of fact to cause and effect : Hume's first question -- Knowledge of cause and effect : Hume's second question -- The problem of induction : Hume's third question -- Hume's positive account of causation : induction regained -- Conclusion: Hume, the empiricist -- Empiricism and the empiricists : summary and conclusion. (shrink)

Fiona Cowie's book What's Within: Nativism Reconsidered offers an important critical assessment of nativist views of the mind. She provides an account of what nativism consists in, and discusses prominent nativist views of concept acquisition and language acquisition. In the latter case, she also offers an empiricist alternative to Chomskyan nativist accounts, and claims that the main arguments for an innate language faculty—one that embodies Universal Grammar—don't work. We provide an overview of her position, focusing mostly on her (...) views about natural language, and argue that she has underestimated the power the poverty of the stimulus argument and consequently has underestimated the advantages of nativist models of language acquisition. (shrink)

A new direction in philosophy Between 1920 and 1940 logical empiricism reset the direction of philosophy of science and much of the rest of Anglo-American philosophy. It began as a relatively organized movement centered on the Vienna Circle, and like-minded philosophers elsewhere, especially in Berlin. As Europe drifted into the Nazi era, several important figures, especially Carnap and Neurath, also found common ground in their liberal politics and radical social agenda. Together, the logical empiricists set out to reform traditional (...) philosophy with a new set of doctrines more firmly grounded in logic and science. Criticism and decline Because of Nazi persecution, most of the European adherents of logical empiricism moved to the United States in the late 1930s. During the 1940s, many of their most cherished tenets became targets of criticism from outsiders as well as from within their own ranks. Philosophers of science in the late 1950s and 1960s rejected logical empiricism and, starting in the 1970s, presented such alternative programs such as scientific realism with evolutionary epistemology. A resurgence of interest During the early 1980s, philosophers and historians of philosophy began to study logical empiricism as an important movement. Unlike their predecessors in the 1960s-for whom the debate over logical empiricism now seems to have been largely motivated by professional politics-these philosopher no longer have to take positions for or against logical empiricism. The result has been a more balanced view of that movement, its achievements, its failures, and its influence. Hard-to-find core writings now available This collection makes available a selection of the most influential and representative writings of the logical empiricists, important contemporary criticisms of their doctrines, their responses, as well as the recent reappraisals. Introductions to each volume examine the articles in historical context and provide importantbackground information that is vital to a full understanding of the issues discussed. They outline prevalent trends, identifying leading figures and summarize their positions and reasoning, as well as those of opposing thinkers. (shrink)

Kant criticizes the so-called ‘preformation’ hypothesis – a nativist account of the origin of the categories – at the end of the B-Deduction on the ground that it entails scepticism. I examine the historical context of Kant's criticism, and identify the targets as both Crusius and Leibniz. There are two claims argued for in this paper: first, that attending to the context of the opposition to certain forms of nativism affords a way of understanding Kant's commitment to the so-called (...) ‘discursivity thesis’, by contrasting the possession conditions for the categories with those for innate ideas; secondly, it provides an insight with regard to Kant's understanding of the dialectic with scepticism. Kant's claim is that a certain explanatory lacuna that attaches to Humean empiricism can be seen to apply equally to any nativist theory. The lacuna concerns the explanation of the modal purport of a priori necessity, i.e. how it is that our consciousness can even distinguish contents that are represented as necessary features of objects.Send article to KindleTo send this article to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Note you can select to send to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be sent to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply. Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.Kant on Nativism, Scepticism and NecessityVolume 18, Issue 1John Callanan DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S136941541200026XYour Kindle email address Please provide your Kindle [email protected]@kindle.com Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Dropbox To send this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Dropbox. Kant on Nativism, Scepticism and NecessityVolume 18, Issue 1John Callanan DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S136941541200026XAvailable formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Google Drive To send this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Google Drive. Kant on Nativism, Scepticism and NecessityVolume 18, Issue 1John Callanan DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S136941541200026XAvailable formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Export citation. (shrink)

In his recent book, Concepts: Where Cognitive Science Went Wrong, Jerry Fodor retracts the radical concept-nativism he once defended. Yet that postion stood, virtually unchallenged, for more than twenty years. This neglect is puzzling, as Fodor's arguments against concepts being learnable from experience remain unanswered, and nativism has historically been taken very seriously as a response to empiricism's perceived shortcomings. In this paper, I urge that Fodorean nativism should indeed be rejected. I argue, however, that its (...) deficiencies are not so obvious that they can simply be taken for granted. Fodor can counter extant objections by stressing two distinctions: between historicist and counterfactual semantic theories and between explaining reference and explaining concept-acquisition. But, I argue, this victory is pyrrhic. Reformulated as objections to his account qua theory of concept-acquisition, and not qua theory of reference, analogous difficulties are fatal to the Fodorean position. (shrink)

This paper traces the empiricist program from early debates between nativism and behaviorism within philosophy, through debates about early connectionist approaches within the cognitive sciences, and up to their recent iterations within the domain of deep learning. We demonstrate how current debates on the nature of cognition via deep network architecture echo some of the core issues from the Chomsky/Quine debate and investigate the strength of support offered by these various lines of research to the empiricist standpoint. Referencing literature (...) from both computer science and philosophy, we conclude that the current state of deep learning does not offer strong encouragement to the empiricist side despite some arguments to the contrary. (shrink)

This paper was originally published in _Journal of the History of Ideas_ 51 (1990): 573-597. Kant's claim that space and time are "forms of intuition" is contrasted with the nativist claim that space is an innate idea or construct of the mind and with the empiricist claim that space is given in or learned from experience. It is argued that the nativism/empiricism debate masks a more fundamental disagreement between sensationism and constructivism. Kant's account of space- and time-cognition is (...) shown to be neither sensationist nor constructivist and as a consequence to be "nativistic" in a sense which commentators from Vaihinger and Kemp Smith to Patricia Kitcher have failed to capture. (shrink)

The innate knowledge problem is a classical problem in philosophy, which has been known since the classical antiquity. Plato in his dialogues Meno and Phaedo formulated the doctrine of innate ideas and proposed an early version of the poverty of the stimulus argument, which is the most frequently used argument in innate knowledge debates. In the history of philosophy there was also an opposite view. This approach is often associated with J. Locke’s philosophy. Locke thought that all our knowledge about (...) the world is a product of the universal learning mechanisms whose functioning is based on perception. The question about the presence of innate ideas in the human mind still remains relevant. New findings in cognitive science and neurosciences and also some recent arguments from philosophers contribute to the contemporary discussion between the spokesmen of the rival approaches to this problem. The paper presents the investigation of one of the approaches to solving the problem of innate concepts, which is called a “concept nativism.” It highlights the outstanding characteristics of the concept nativism: (a) domain specificity position, (b) belief that domain-specific mechanisms of learning are innate and (c) belief that at least some concepts are innate. The article also proposes an analysis of notions “innateness” and “idea” which is important for understanding nativists’ approach to innate ideas theory. And finally, it describes the most popular nativists’ arguments: (a) references to empirical studies using the preferential looking technique, (b) the poverty of the stimulus argument and (c) the argument from animals. (shrink)

Prinz (Perceptual the Mind: Concepts and Their Perceptual Basis, MIT Press, 2002) presents a new species of concept empiricism, under which concepts are off-line long-term memory networks of representations that are ‘copies’ of perceptual representations – proxytypes. An apparent obstacle to any such empiricism is the prevailing nativism of generative linguistics. The paper critically assesses Prinz’s attempt to overcome this obstacle. The paper argues that, prima facie, proxytypes are as incapable of accounting for the structure of the (...) linguistic mind as are the more traditional species of empiricism. This position is then confirmed by looking in detail at two suggestions (one derived from recent connectionist research) from Prinz of how certain aspects of syntactic structure might be accommodated by the proxytype theory. It is shown that the suggestions fail to come to terms with both the data and theory of contemporary linguistics. (shrink)