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7What Nativism IsIn What’s Within? Nativism Reconsidered, Oxford University Press Usa. 1998.The internalist construal of nativism appears to explain how nativism may be related to rationalism in epistemology, since nativism may be able to explain the link between an a priori belief and what such a belief may justify. According to Plato, a priori beliefs are justified by a benevolent God, since such beliefs are pre-set in our minds. Also, this interpretation, in a way, clarifies ideas regarding certain nonepistemological aspects of the debate regarding empiricist-rationalist ideals. As …Read more
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8What Nativism Is The Mystery HypothesisIn What’s Within? Nativism Reconsidered, Oxford University Press Usa. 1998.While we realize that the empiricist interpretation of nativism may in fact be able to explain some of the central cases of both belief and concept acquisition, arguments from the poverty of the stimulus still assert how some acquisitions may not be obtained through merely making use of the general-purpose learning mechanisms brought on by empiricist thinking, and that we have to realize that the mind should contain other task-specific faculties for learning. This chapter looks into another form…Read more
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8Will the Evidence for Linguistic Nativism Please Stand Up?In What’s Within? Nativism Reconsidered, Oxford University Press Usa. 1998.Regardless of whether Chomsky's grammar constraints may be learned from experience of not, the author argues that there is no “back door” to nativism. In relation to finding out whether there exists a special faculty for language learning, the author presents how she, on a more personal note and in terms of language acquisition, is more inclined to going with a weak nativist position since she believes that learning a language would probably entail one or more faculties of mind as a basis. Altho…Read more
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4The Poverty of the StimulusIn What’s Within? Nativism Reconsidered, Oxford University Press Usa. 1998.Chomsky had been able to look into how various theses—representationalism, biological boundedness, domain specificity, innateness and universal grammar—may be used in explaining the acquisition and mastery of language. Chomsky was able to not only establish the inaccuracy of behaviorism through defending representationalism, but also initiate the development of a more mentalistic conception of both the learning of language and linguistic competence. Because other aspects of Chomsky's nativism ar…Read more
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7The Role of Universal Grammar in Language-LearningIn What’s Within? Nativism Reconsidered, Oxford University Press Usa. 1998.In contrast to what others may commonly believe, reflecting on the poverty of the stimulus does not sustain or reinforce the notion of learning a language within nativism. Also, although initially opposed, there are a lot more explanatory resources to empiricism than it is given credit for, particularly on issues regarding the domain-neutral mechanism for learning. While the enlightened empiricist would believe that the mechanism for language learning is general in purpose and that the theory ch…Read more
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5What Nativism Is NotIn What’s Within? Nativism Reconsidered, Oxford University Press Usa. 1998.It can be observed that the doctrine of innate ideas may be as old as philosophy itself, as it may be one of the most basic conceptions. The notion that the character of our mental faculties is determined internally or innately is evident in works as early as that of Plato, which was revived between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by significant rationalist philosophers, and which underwent further examination in the twentieth century by mentalists such as Jerry Fodor and Noam Chomsky. …Read more
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6Prospects for a Psychology of Concept AcquisitionIn What’s Within? Nativism Reconsidered, Oxford University Press Usa. 1998.Fodor gained a certain amount of embarrassment in 1981 after realizing that the intentional integrity of the link between the concept and the cause may be questioned. While the older Fodor, the one in 1998, is able to acknowledge that his earlier conceptions had to be modified, Fodor emphasizes that acquiring a concept is not to be recognized as a psychological process. In this chapter, however, we look into how psychological processing plays, in fact, no small part in the acquisition of concept…Read more
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4The Case Against EmpiricismIn What’s Within? Nativism Reconsidered, Oxford University Press Usa. 1998.Examining impossibility arguments has allowed us to observe certain flaws in the empiricist construal of nativism, since such arguments point out that the empiricist views may entail some degree of self-contradiction and confusion. As the author makes use of Fodor's works such as The Language of Thought as reference, this chapter looks into Fodor's explanation regarding the empiricist view and how this relates to acquiring a concept of hypothesis-testing or learning and to its content or meaning…Read more
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7ConclusionIn What’s Within? Nativism Reconsidered, Oxford University Press Usa. 1998.This book has been able to provide a thorough examination of certain aspects of nativism about the mind, such as its development throughout history and the modern advances in psychology and other fields that can be attributed to such. Part I was able to investigate historical debates regarding innateness, misconceptions and clarifications about this, and how we have been able to develop a novel explanation as to what nativism is. It explores the several nativist claims that involve psychological…Read more
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7The Constitution HypothesisIn What’s Within? Nativism Reconsidered, Oxford University Press Usa. 1998.As the empiricist view relies much on the notion that concept acquisition involves coming up with and testing hypotheses about a concept's meaning or content, Fodor asserts that such is not possible and is self-defeating, since concepts do not possess the kinds of meanings that would allow the derivation of hypotheses. Looking into Fodor's writings, we see how he was able to conclude without having to deny the significance of experience in acquiring a concept, that most concepts must be innate a…Read more
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4Language–Learning From Behaviorism to NativismIn What’s Within? Nativism Reconsidered, Oxford University Press Usa. 1998.In contrast to the empiricist view, which states how all learning involves general strategies that can be applied in various fields and learning from experience, the nativist view explains how the acquisition of some knowledge cannot be associated with the domain-neutral empiricist model. In 1960, Noam Chomsky made his claims regarding how human beings are innately bestowed of knowledge of natural languages. This chapter attempts to provide an overview of Chomsky's explanation of language acquis…Read more
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8The Logical Problem of Language AcquisitionIn What’s Within? Nativism Reconsidered, Oxford University Press Usa. 1998.The author is able to point out the weak points of the a posteriori argument from the poverty of the stimulus through drawing attention to how such is not able to supply empirical support for their claims regarding types of available linguistic evidence and how the credibility of the APS is undermined by how nativists rely on unsupported intuitions about children's knowledge. Also, the author gives focus to how the APS provided an evaluation regarding the possible empiricist explanation of how c…Read more
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17Why Isn't Stich an ElimiNativist?In Dominic Murphy & Michael Bishop (eds.), Stich, Wiley‐blackwell. 2009-03-20.This chapter contains sections titled: What is Innateness? The Case for ElimiNativism Good Uses for Bad Concepts Against Premature Elimination References.
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26Why isn't Stich an eliminativist?In Dominic Murphy & Michael Bishop (eds.), Stich and His Critics, Wiley-blackwell. pp. 14--74. 2009.
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33By the Waters of Babel: Jean-Louis Dessalles' Why We TalkBiology and Philosophy 25 (5): 880-888. 2010.Why We Talk is a complex, ambitious, original, thought-provoking, and sometimes frustrating book. In it, Jean-Louis Dessalles argues that the critical spur to the development of human language—language’s true biological function—was political. It wasn’t political in any of the senses hitherto floated in the literature, though: language didn’t evolve because it fostered group cohesion or cooperation, or facilitated mind-reading or manipulation. Instead, language originally served more or less the…Read more
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109What’s Within? Nativism ReconsideredOxford University Press USA. 1998.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 …Read more
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1Innate Ideas.Dissertation, Princeton University. 1994.Recent years have seen a renewal of the perennial debate concerning innate ideas: Noam Chomsky has argued that much of our knowledge of natural languages is innate; Jerry Fodor has defended the innateness of most concepts. ;Part One concerns the historical controversy over nativism. On the interpretation there developed, nativists have defended two distinct theses. One, based on arguments from the poverty of the stimulus, is a psychological theory postulating special-purpose learning mechanisms.…Read more
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254The logical problem of language acquisitionSynthese 111 (1): 17-51. 1997.Arguments from the Logical Problem of Language Acquisition suggest that since linguistic experience provides few negative data that would falsify overgeneral grammatical hypotheses, innate knowledge of the principles of Universal Grammar must constrain learners hypothesis formulation. Although this argument indicates a need for domain-specific constraints, it does not support their innateness. Learning from mostly positive data proceeds unproblematically in virtually all domains. Since not every…Read more
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36Human Knowledge and Human Nature: A New Introduction to an Ancient DebatePhilosophical Review 105 (4): 530. 1996.Based on lectures developed for an audience ignorant of analytic thought, Carruthers’s clearly and elegantly written book introduces many central issues in modern philosophy, including knowledge, justification, truth, the a priori, Platonism, learning, the evolution of mind, explanation. Its organizing principle being the rationalist-empiricist controversy from the 1700s onwards, it also offers an intriguing reinterpretation of that debate and mounts a lively defense of a hybrid position that es…Read more
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130Symposium on J.-L. Dessalles’s Why we Talk : Precis by J.-L. Dessalles, commentaries by E. Machery, F. Cowie, and J. Alexander, Replies by J.-L. Dessalles (review)Biology and Philosophy 25 (5): 851-901. 2010.This symposium discusses J.-L. Dessalles's account of the evolution of language, which was presented in Why we Talk (OUP 2007)
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26Innateness, Philosophical Issues aboutIn L. Nadel (ed.), Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science, Nature Publishing Group. 2003.
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108Us, them and it: Modules, genes, environments and evolutionMind and Language 23 (3). 2008.The Architecture of Mind is an ambitious and informative work, surveying an impressive range of empirical literature and arguing that the mind is massively modular. However, it suffers from two major theoretical flaws. First, Carruthers’ concept of a module is weak, so much so that it robs his thesis of massive modularity of any real substance. Second, his conception of how the mind’s modules evolved ignores the role of niche construction and cultural evolution to its detriment.
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52Hurford's partial vindication of classical empiricismBehavioral and Brain Sciences 26 (3): 289-290. 2003.Hurford's discussion also vindicates the classical empiricist program in semantics. The idea that PREDICATE(x) is the logical form of the sensory representations encoded via the dorsal and ventral streams validates empiricists' insistence on the psychological primacy of sense data, which have the same form. In addition to knowing the logical form of our primitive representations, however, we need accounts of (1) their contents and (2) how more complex thoughts are derived from them. Ideally, our…Read more
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196The mind is not (just) a system of modules shaped (just) by natural selectionIn Christopher Hitchcock (ed.), Contemporary debates in philosophy of science, Blackwell. pp. 312-34. 2004.
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310Mad dog nativismBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 49 (2): 227-252. 1998.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 rej…Read more
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Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Biology |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |