Psychological nativism
Encyclopedia
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
.
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 involves positing that concepts not supplied by experience, such as causality, must exist prior to any experience and hence must be innate.
The philosopher Immanuel Kant
(1724-1804) argued 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
(1788-1860) agreed with Kant, but reduced the number of innate categories to one - causality
- which presupposes the others.
, 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.
and colleagues pointed out in Rethinking Innateness
, it is unclear exactly how the supposedly innate information might actually be coded for in the genes) 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."
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 languages humans develop. 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
.
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 (if any) pre-programmed rules. Many empiricists are now also trying to apply modern learning models and techniques to the question of language acquisition, with marked success. Similarity-based generalization marks another avenue of recent research, which suggests that children may be able to rapidly learn how to use new words by generalizing about the usage of similar words that they already know (see also the distributional hypothesis
).
Psychology
Psychology is the study of the mind and behavior. Its immediate goal is to understand individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases. For many, the ultimate goal of psychology is to benefit society...
, nativism is the view that certain skills or abilities are 'native' or hard wired into the brain
Brain
The brain is the center of the nervous system in all vertebrate and most invertebrate animals—only a few primitive invertebrates such as sponges, jellyfish, sea squirts and starfishes do not have one. It is located in the head, usually close to primary sensory apparatus such as vision, hearing,...
at birth
Childbirth
Childbirth is the culmination of a human pregnancy or gestation period with the birth of one or more newborn infants from a woman's uterus...
. This is in contrast to empiricism
Empiricism
Empiricism is a theory of knowledge that asserts that knowledge comes only or primarily via sensory experience. One of several views of epistemology, the study of human knowledge, along with rationalism, idealism and historicism, empiricism emphasizes the role of experience and evidence,...
, the 'blank slate' or tabula rasa
Tabula rasa
Tabula rasa is the epistemological theory that individuals are born without built-in mental content and that their knowledge comes from experience and perception. Generally proponents of the tabula rasa thesis favour the "nurture" side of the nature versus nurture debate, when it comes to aspects...
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
Color preferences
In the psychology of color, color preferences are the tendency for an individual or a group to prefer some colors over others, including a favorite color.-Introduction:...
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
Behaviorism
Behaviorism , also called the learning perspective , is a philosophy of psychology based on the proposition that all things that organisms do—including acting, thinking, and feeling—can and should be regarded as behaviors, and that psychological disorders are best treated by altering behavior...
.
In philosophy
Nativism has a history in philosophy, particularly as a reaction to the straightforwardly empiricist views of John LockeJohn Locke
John Locke FRS , widely known as the Father of Liberalism, was an English philosopher and physician regarded as one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers. Considered one of the first of the British empiricists, following the tradition of Francis Bacon, he is equally important to social...
and David Hume
David Hume
David Hume was a Scottish philosopher, historian, economist, and essayist, known especially for his philosophical empiricism and skepticism. He was one of the most important figures in the history of Western philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment...
. 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 involves positing that concepts not supplied by experience, such as causality, must exist prior to any experience and hence must be innate.
The philosopher Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher from Königsberg , researching, lecturing and writing on philosophy and anthropology at the end of the 18th Century Enlightenment....
(1724-1804) argued in his Critique of Pure Reason
Critique of Pure Reason
The Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant, first published in 1781, second edition 1787, is considered one of the most influential works in the history of philosophy. Also referred to as Kant's "first critique," it was followed by the Critique of Practical Reason and the Critique of Judgement...
that the human mind
Mind
The concept of mind is understood in many different ways by many different traditions, ranging from panpsychism and animism to traditional and organized religious views, as well as secular and materialist philosophies. Most agree that minds are constituted by conscious experience and intelligent...
knows objects in innate, a priori
A priori and a posteriori (philosophy)
The terms a priori and a posteriori are used in philosophy to distinguish two types of knowledge, justifications or arguments...
ways. Kant claimed that humans, from birth, must experience all objects as being successive (time
Time
Time is a part of the measuring system used to sequence events, to compare the durations of events and the intervals between them, and to quantify rates of change such as the motions of objects....
) and juxtaposed (space
Space
Space is the boundless, three-dimensional extent in which objects and events occur and have relative position and direction. Physical space is often conceived in three linear dimensions, although modern physicists usually consider it, with time, to be part of a boundless four-dimensional continuum...
). His list of inborn categories
Category (Kant)
In Kant's philosophy, a category is a pure concept of the understanding. A Kantian category is a characteristic of the appearance of any object in general, before it has been experienced...
describes predicates
Predicate (grammar)
There are two competing notions of the predicate in theories of grammar. Traditional grammar tends to view a predicate as one of two main parts of a sentence, the other being the subject, which the predicate modifies. The other understanding of predicates is inspired from work in predicate calculus...
that the mind can attribute to any object in general. Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer was a German philosopher known for his pessimism and philosophical clarity. At age 25, he published his doctoral dissertation, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, which examined the four separate manifestations of reason in the phenomenal...
(1788-1860) agreed with Kant, but reduced the number of innate categories to one - causality
Causality
Causality is the relationship between an event and a second event , where the second event is understood as a consequence of the first....
- which presupposes the others.
Modularity
Nativism is most associated with the work of Jerry FodorJerry Fodor
Jerry Alan Fodor is an American philosopher and cognitive scientist. He holds the position of State of New Jersey Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University and is the author of many works in the fields of philosophy of mind and cognitive science, in which he has laid the groundwork for the...
, Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years. Chomsky has been described as the "father of modern linguistics" and...
, and Steven Pinker
Steven Pinker
Steven Arthur Pinker is a Canadian-American experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, linguist and popular science author...
, who argue that we are born with certain cognitive
Cognitivism (psychology)
In psychology, cognitivism is a theoretical framework for understanding the mind that came into usage in the 1950s. The movement was a response to behaviorism, which cognitivists said neglected to explain cognition...
modules
Modularity
Modularity is a general systems concept, typically defined as a continuum describing the degree to which a system’s components may be separated and recombined. It refers to both the tightness of coupling between components, and the degree to which the “rules” of the system architecture enable the...
(specialised genetically inherited psychological abilities) that allow us to learn and acquire certain skills (such as language
Language
Language may refer either to the specifically human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, or to a specific instance of such a system of complex communication...
). For example, children demonstrate a facility for acquiring spoken language but require intense training to learn to read and write. In The Blank Slate
The Blank Slate
The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature is a best-selling 2002 book by Steven Pinker arguing against tabula rasa models of the social sciences. Pinker argues that human behavior is substantially shaped by evolutionary psychological adaptations...
, Pinker cites this as evidence that humans have an inborn facility for speech acquisition
Language acquisition
Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive, produce and use words to understand and communicate. This capacity involves the picking up of diverse capacities including syntax, phonetics, and an extensive vocabulary. This language might be vocal as with...
(but not for literacy
Literacy
Literacy has traditionally been described as the ability to read for knowledge, write coherently and think critically about printed material.Literacy represents the lifelong, intellectual process of gaining meaning from print...
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.
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 ElmanJeffrey Elman
Jeffrey L. Elman is Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of California, San Diego. He is a well-known psycholinguist and pioneer in the field of neural networks.-Biography:...
and colleagues pointed out in Rethinking Innateness
Rethinking Innateness
Published in 1996 by Jeffrey Elman, Annette Karmiloff-Smith, Elizabeth Bates, Mark Johnson, Domenico Parisi, and Kim Plunkett, Rethinking Innateness: A connectionist perspective on development is a book regarding gene/environment interaction...
, it is unclear exactly how the supposedly innate information might actually be coded for in the genes) 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
Henry L. Roediger III
Henry L. "Roddy" Roediger III , is James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Psychology at Washington University in St. Louis. He is a pioneer and an internationally-renowned expert in the study of human memory processes...
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."
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 languages humans develop. In part, this was a reaction to the failure of behaviorism
Behaviorism
Behaviorism , also called the learning perspective , is a philosophy of psychology based on the proposition that all things that organisms do—including acting, thinking, and feeling—can and should be regarded as behaviors, and that psychological disorders are best treated by altering behavior...
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
Language acquisition device
The Language Acquisition Device is a postulated "organ" of the brain that is supposed to function as a congenital device for learning symbolic language . First proposed by Noam Chomsky, the LAD concept is an instinctive mental capacity which enables an infant to acquire and produce language. It is...
.
Over the last several decades, with the advent of more complex and sophisticated brands of mathematics such as complexity theory
Complex systems
Complex systems present problems in mathematical modelling.The equations from which complex system models are developed generally derive from statistical physics, information theory and non-linear dynamics, and represent organized but unpredictable behaviors of systems of nature that are considered...
and game theory
Game theory
Game theory is a mathematical method for analyzing calculated circumstances, such as in games, where a person’s success is based upon the choices of others...
, it has become increasingly apparent that extremely complicated systems can evolve from agents with few (if any) pre-programmed rules. Many empiricists are now also trying to apply modern learning models and techniques to the question of language acquisition, with marked success. Similarity-based generalization marks another avenue of recent research, which suggests that children may be able to rapidly learn how to use new words by generalizing about the usage of similar words that they already know (see also the distributional hypothesis
Distributional hypothesis
The Distributional Hypothesis in linguistics is the theory that words that occur in the same contexts tend to have similar meanings. The underlying idea that "a word is characterized by the company it keeps" was popularized by Firth. The Distributional Hypothesis is the basis for Statistical...
).
See also
- Domain specificityDomain specificityDomain specificity is a theoretical position in cognitive science that argues that many aspects of cognition are supported by specialized, presumably evolutionarily specified, learning devices...
- Evolutionary psychologyEvolutionary psychologyEvolutionary psychology is an approach in the social and natural sciences that examines psychological traits such as memory, perception, and language from a modern evolutionary perspective. It seeks to identify which human psychological traits are evolved adaptations, that is, the functional...
- Nature versus nurtureNature versus nurtureThe nature versus nurture debate concerns the relative importance of an individual's innate qualities versus personal experiences The nature versus nurture debate concerns the relative importance of an individual's innate qualities ("nature," i.e. nativism, or innatism) versus personal experiences...
- Universal grammarUniversal grammarUniversal grammar is a theory in linguistics that suggests that there are properties that all possible natural human languages have.Usually credited to Noam Chomsky, the theory suggests that some rules of grammar are hard-wired into the brain, and manifest themselves without being taught...
- NeuroconstructivismNeuroconstructivismIn this psychological approach, gene/gene interaction, gene/environment interaction and, crucially, the process of ontogeny are all considered to play a vital role in how the brain progressively sculpts itself and how it gradually becomes specialised over developmental time.Neuroplasticity is...
- Poverty of the stimulusPoverty of the stimulusIn linguistics, the poverty of the stimulus is the assertion that natural language grammar is unlearnable given the relatively limited data available to children learning a language, and therefore that this knowledge is supplemented with some sort of innate linguistic capacity...