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This chapter argues that the recent attempts to use Chomsky-style arguments in support of innate moral knowledge are uniformly unconvincing. The chapter proceeds as follows: Section 1 sets out the basic form of the central argument in the Chomskian arsenal — the poverty of the stimulus (POS) argument, as well as the conclusions about domain specificity and innate propositional knowledge that are supposed to follow. Section 2 distinguishes three hypotheses about innateness and morality: rule nativism, moral principle nativism, and moral judgment nativism. Sections 3–5 consider each of these hypotheses. It is argued that while there is some reason to favour rule nativism, the arguments that moral principles and moral judgment derive from innate moral knowledge don't work. The capacity for moral judgment is better explained by appeal to innate affective systems rather than innate moral knowledge. In the final section, it is argued that the role of such affective mechanisms in structuring the mind complicates the standard picture about poverty of the stimulus arguments and nativism. For the affective mechanisms that influence cognitive structures can make contributions that are neither domain general nor domain specific.

This chapter attempts to untangle the debate surrounding innate ideas and innate knowledge. The controversy is as follows: Some philosophers, as well as linguists, psychologists, and others, allege that human beings have innate knowledge or innate ideas. Others deny it. Advocates of the doctrines of innate ideas and innate knowledge commonly take the notion of innateness itself to be unproblematic. They explain it with a few near synonyms, “inborn” or “unlearned,” or with a metaphor or an allegory, and leave it at that. The doctrine's opponents often begin by puzzling over just what the doctrine could possibly mean. They go on to construct a variety of accounts, arguing against each in turn. The advocate's rejoinder, as often as not, is that he has been misunderstood.

Many of the concepts with which psychologists work have their origins in the writings of the early philosophers. This chapter traces the evolution of major themes in the philosophy of the mind before scientific psychology began. Although it concentrates on accounts of the nature of the mind, one can best make sense of those accounts when given at least a sketch of their philosophical background. Therefore, this chapter includes sufficient information about the general philosophical position of each philosopher to make his account of the mind comprehensible.

Having named the storm makers (the twin principles of Dualism and Essentialism) and described their distractive potential, Chapter 8 moves to track the two forces in action in a laboratory setting. The first set of experiments tests the effects of Dualism, showing that people do, in fact, believe that traits that are considered “ideas” must be immaterial. The second examines whether participants believe that immaterial traits cannot be innate, as would be required by Essentialism. Next, we chase the storm itself. As a proof of our forecasting skills, we demonstrate that it is possible to change the storm’s course (people’s intuitions about nativism) by tweaking its ingredients. The antinativist bias can be heightened in a laboratory setting by increasing the perceived distance between mind and body (as in Dualism), and it can be lessened by suggesting that innate biological traits have a material basis in the human body (as in Essentialism). Together, these experiments demonstrate that antinativism is an inevitable byproduct of the clash between these two principles of core knowledge. Having exposed our blindness to what we know, the second part of the book proceeds to explore the implications of this thesis to who we think we are. We consider a vast number of social and personal matters, including our thoughts and feelings, our reasoning about the brain in health and disease, what happens when we die, and our free will.

Having shown that innate knowledge is a viable scientific hypothesis with considerable evidence in its support, the next three chapters examine laypeople’s intuitions about innate knowledge. We describe a series of experiments that contrasts people’s intuitions about the origins of cognitive traits (those that capture knowledge) and noncognitive traits (either sensory, motor, or emotive capacities). Results show that people believe that cognitive traits are not innate. People maintain these convictions even when they are provided with detailed descriptions of experiments from infant research (those reviewed in previous chapters), complete with an explanation of the rationale and method; while science clearly suggests these principles are present in newborns, people insist that they aren’t. Other results demonstrate that our antinativist intuitions are a bias, as people maintain these intuitions despite explicit evidence to the contrary, and even when they are presented with innate knowledge of nonhuman species. These results show that people are systematically and selectively biased against innate ideas.

This chapter explores the relation between connectionism and Chomsky's arguments for the existence of innate knowledge. Along the way, it proposes to defend a pair of interrelated conclusions. The first is that there are actually three versions of Chomsky's poverty of the stimulus argument, which make increasingly strong claims about the nature of the cognitive endowments required for learning language. The second conclusion is that the relation between connectionism and nativism is considerably more complex than many have assumed. The chapter is organized as follows. Section 2 sets out the three versions of Chomsky's poverty of the stimulus argument. Section 3 offers an introductory overview of recent connectionist research and a survey of ongoing efforts to get connectionist devices to learn aspects of natural language. Section 4 explores the ways in which the success of these efforts would bear upon the three versions of Chomsky's argument.

This chapter takes up the question of human nature from both a biological/behavioural perspective and the perspective or a shared innate knowledge which informs the human experience. It maintains that a biological/behavioural description of human nature is possible while rejecting the possibility that human nature could be described from the second perspective. The author also examines the ways that Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and finally Buddhism conceive of human nature, and how these religious conceptions relate to idea of psychic unity or innate knowledge. Buddhism, the author argues, puts forward an account of human nature which seems plausible. In this account, the core of human nature is the collection of thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and interpretations which the human has experienced or formulated.

Often, mental development is viewed as resulting either from domain-general learning mechanisms or from highly specialized modules containing substantial innate knowledge. However, an evolutionary developmental perspective suggests that learning and specialization are not necessarily in opposition. Instead, natural selection can favor learning mechanisms that rely on information from the environment to construct adaptive phenotypes, exploiting recurrent properties of fitness-relevant domains. Here we consider the possibility that early action understanding is centered on domain-specific action schemas that guide attention towards domain-relevant events and motivate learning about those domains. We examine chasing as a case study. We report studies (1) exploring the mechanisms that guide infants’ attention to chasing events and (2) examining the inferences and judgments that children and adults make. We argue that these findings are consistent with the possibility that natural selection has built “islands of competence” in early action understanding that serve as kernels for future learning and development.