NATIVIST THREADS

The issue of nativism was used in Chapter 1 to illustrate two points. First, adopting a shared framework for understanding various individualistic theses across the cognitive, biological, and social sciences can be mutually informative. Second, these individualistic perspectives have ramifications for central debates across the fragile sciences. To make these points I introduced a two-dimensional analysis of a range of nativist debates: about the mind, biology, and culture. Here I develop and defend that analysis in more detail with a particular focus on nativism about cognition and the mind.

I begin in section 2 by tracing the most influential nativist lineage in the cognitive sciences. This lineage begins with the Chomskyan revolution in linguistics, a revolution that is generalized to other aspects of cognition by philosophers and developmental and cognitive psychologists and then further extended and given a Darwinian twist by evolutionary psychologists. I then turn in section 3 to the chief alternative to such nativist views, often characterized as “empiricist,” and briefly explain why behaviorist and connectionist views of cognition are paradigms of such alternatives. In sections 4–6, the heart of the chapter, I reintroduce, develop, and defend the two-dimensional account of the debate over nativism about the mind. There has been a recent revival of attempts to analyze nativism about cognition in fewer and in more dimensions than two, and part of my defense of the two-dimensional analysis will involve showing its superiority to its contemporary competitors.