Some nativists believe that specific beliefs or preferences are "hard-wired". For example, one might argue that some moral intuitions are innate or that color preferences are innate. A less established argument is that nature supplies the human mind with specialized learning devices. This latter view differs from empiricism only to the extent that the algorithms that translate experience into information may be more complex and specialized in nativist theories than in empiricist theories. However, empiricists largely remain open to the nature of learning algorithms and are by no means restricted to the historical associationist mechanisms of behaviorism.
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👉 Psychological nativism in the context of Jesse Prinz
Jesse J. Prinz is an American philosopher who is Distinguished Professor of philosophy and Director of the Committee for Interdisciplinary Science Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center.
Prinz works primarily in the philosophy of psychology and ethics and has authored several books and over 100 articles, addressing such topics as concepts, emotions, moral psychology, attention, consciousness and aesthetics. Much of his work in these areas has been a defense of empiricism against psychological nativism, and he situates his work as in the naturalistic tradition of philosophy associated with David Hume. Prinz is also an advocate of experimental philosophy.
In this Dossier
Psychological nativism in the context of Language acquisition device
The Language Acquisition Device (LAD) is a claim from language acquisition research proposed by Noam Chomsky in the 1960s. The LAD concept is a purported instinctive mental capacity which enables an infant to acquire and produce language. It is a component of the nativist theory of language. This theory asserts that humans are born with the instinct or "innate facility" for acquiring language. The main argument given in favor of the LAD was the argument from the poverty of the stimulus, which argues that unless children have significant innate knowledge of grammar, they would not be able to learn language as quickly as they do, given that they never have access to negative evidence and rarely receive direct instruction in their first language.
Critics say there is insufficient evidence from neuroscience and language acquisition research to support the claim that people have a language acquisition device.
Psychological nativism in the context of Domain-specific
Domain specificity is a theoretical position in cognitive science (especially modern cognitive development) that argues that many aspects of cognition are supported by specialized, presumably evolutionarily specified, learning devices. The position is a close relative of modularity of mind, but is considered more general in that it does not necessarily entail all the assumptions of Fodorian modularity (e.g., informational encapsulation). Instead, it is properly described as a variant of psychological nativism. Other cognitive scientists also hold the mind to be modular, without the modules necessarily possessing the characteristics of Fodorian modularity.
Domain specificity emerged in the aftermath of the cognitive revolution as a theoretical alternative to empiricist theories that believed all learning can be driven by the operation of a few such general learning devices. Prominent examples of such domain-general views include Jean Piaget's theory of cognitive development, and the views of many modern connectionists. Proponents of domain specificity argue that domain-general learning mechanisms are unable to overcome the epistemological problems facing learners in many domains, especially language. In addition, domain-specific accounts draw support from the surprising competencies of infants, who are able to reason about things like numerosity, goal-directed behavior, and the physical properties of objects all in the first months of life. Domain-specific theorists argue that these competencies are too sophisticated to have been learned via a domain-general process like associative learning, especially over such a short time and in the face of the infant's perceptual, attentional, and motor deficits. Current proponents of domain specificity argue that evolution equipped humans (and indeed most other species) with specific adaptations designed to overcome persistent problems in the environment. For humans, popular candidates include reasoning about objects, other intentional agents, language, and number. Researchers in this field seek evidence for domain specificity in a variety of ways. Some look for unique cognitive signatures thought to characterize a domain (e.g. differences in ways infants reason about inanimate versus animate entities). Others try to show selective impairment or competence within but not across domains (e.g. the increased ease of solving the Wason Selection Task when the content is social in nature). Still, others use learnability arguments to argue that a cognitive process or specific cognitive content could not be learned, as in Noam Chomsky's poverty of the stimulus argument for language.