Psychological nativism

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For nativism as a political force, see Nativism.

In the field of psychology, nativism is the view that certain skills or abilities are 'native' or hard wired into the brain at birth. This is in contrast to empiricism, the 'blank slate' or tabula rasa view, which states that the brain has inborn capabilities for learning from the environment but does not contain content such as innate beliefs.

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.

In Philosophy

Nativism has a history in philosophy, particularly as a reaction to the straightforwardly empiricist views of John Locke and David Hume. Hume had given persuasive logical arguments that people cannot infer causality from perceptual input. The most one could hope to infer is that two events happen in succession or simultaneously. One response to this argument was to posit that concepts that are not supplied by experience, such as causality, must exist prior to any experience and hence must be innate.

Philosopher Immanuel Kant reasoned in his Critique of Pure Reason that the human mind knows objects in innate, a priori ways. Kant claimed that humans, from birth, must experience all objects as being successive (time) and juxtaposed (space). His list of inborn Categories describes predicates that the mind can attribute to any object in general. Schopenhauer agreed with Kant, but reduced the number of innate Categories to one, namely, causality, which presupposes the others.

Modularity

Nativism is most associated with the work of Jerry Fodor, Noam Chomsky, and Steven Pinker, who argue that we are born with certain cognitive modules (specialised genetically inherited psychological abilities) that allow us to learn and acquire certain skills (such as language). For example, children demonstrate a facility for acquiring spoken language but require intense training to learn to read and write. In The Blank Slate, Pinker cites this as evidence that humans have an inborn facility for speech acquisition (but not for literacy acquisition).

A number of other theorists have disagreed with these claims. Instead, they have outlined alternative theories of how modularization might emerge over the course of development, as a result of a system gradually refining and fine-tuning its responses to environmental stimuli. ^[1]

Criticism

Nativism is sometimes perceived as being too vague to be falsifiable, as there is no fixed definition of when an ability is supposed to be judged "innate." (As Jeffrey Elman and colleagues pointed out in Rethinking Innateness, it is unclear exactly how the supposedly innate information might actually be coded for in the genes)^[2] Further, modern nativist theory makes little in the way of specific testable (and falsifiable) predictions, and has been compared by some empiricists to a pseudoscience or nefarious brand of "psychological creationism." As influential psychologist Henry L. Roediger III remarked, "Chomsky was and is a rationalist; he had no uses for experimental analyses or data of any sort that pertained to language, and even experimental psycholinguistics was and is of little interest to him."^[3]

Some researchers argue that the premises of linguistic nativism were motivated by outdated considerations and need reconsidering. For example, nativism was at least partially motivated by the perception that statistical inferences made from experience were insufficient to account for the complex minds humans have. In part, this was a reaction to the failure of behaviorism and behaviorist models of the era to easily account for how something as complex and sophisticated as a full-blown language could ever be learned. Indeed, several nativist arguments were inspired by Chomsky's assertion that children could not learn complicated grammar based on the linguistic input they typically receive, and must therefore have an innate language-learning module, or language acquisition device. However, it is now known that many of the claims in Chomsky's famous poverty of the stimulus argument are empirically false and that children can employ generalization and statistical learning to learn a wide array of both word forms and word distributions.

Over the last several decades, with the advent of more complex and sophisticated brands of mathematics such as complexity theory and game theory, it has become increasingly apparent that extremely complicated systems can evolve from agents with few pre-programmed rules. Many empiricists are now also trying to apply modern learning models and techniques to the question of language acquisition, with some success.^[4]

See also

• Domain specificity
• Evolutionary psychology
• Nature versus nurture
• Universal grammar
• Neuroconstructivism

References