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What Is Innateness?

The Monist 85 (1):70-85 (2002)

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  1. Concept‐metacognition.Nicholas Shea - 2019 - Mind and Language 35 (5):565-582.
    Concepts are our tools for thinking. They enable us to engage in explicit reasoning about things in the world. Like physical tools, they can be more or less good, given the ways we use them – more or less dependable for categorisation, learning, induction, action-planning, and so on. Do concept users appreciate, explicitly or implicitly, that concepts vary in dependability? Do they feel that some concepts are in some way defective? If so, we metacognize our concepts. One example that has (...)
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  • The conceptual critique of innateness.Stefan Linquist - 2018 - Philosophy Compass 13 (5):e12492.
    It is widely recognized that the innate versus acquired distinction is a false dichotomy. Yet many scientists continue to describe certain traits as “innate” and take this to imply that those traits are not acquired, or “unlearned.” This article asks what cognitive role, if any, the concept of innateness should play in the psychological and behavioural sciences. I consider three arguments for eliminating innateness from scientific discourse. First, the classification of a trait as innate is thought to discourage empirical research (...)
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  • A proposed taxonomy of eliminativism.Bernardo Pino - 2017 - Co-herencia 14 (27):181-213.
    In this paper, I propose a general taxonomy of different forms of eliminativism. In order to do so, I begin by exploring eliminativism from a broad perspective, providing a comparative picture of eliminativist projects in different domains. This exploration shows that eliminativism is a label used for a family of related types of eliminativist arguments and claims. The proposed taxonomy is an attempt to systematise those arguments and claims.
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  • Nature, Nurture and Why the Pendulum Still Swings.Brian Garvey - 2005 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 35 (2):309-330.
    In both popular and technical discussion we often find the pairs of opposed terms ‘innate/acquired,’ ‘due to genes/due to environment,’ ‘nature/nurture,’ and so forth. They appear to be used as if they all captured a genuine distinction, and the same distinction at that. A related family of opposed pairs is held to describe the difference between those who attribute a certain trait to ‘nature’ and those who attribute it to ‘nurture’: ‘nativists’ versus ‘constructivists’ is one such pair. Chomsky and his (...)
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  • Three Approaches to Human Cognitive Development: Neo-nativism, Neuroconstructivism, and Dynamic Enskillment.Mirko Farina - 2016 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 67 (2):617-641.
    In Section 1, I introduce three views that explain human cognitive development from different standpoints: Marcus’s neo-nativism, standard neuroconstructivism, and neo-neuroconstructivism. In Section 2, I assess Marcus’s attempt to reconcile nativism with developmental flexibility. In Section 3, I argue that in structurally reconfiguring nativism, Marcus ends up transforming it into an unrecognizable form, and I claim that his view could be accommodated within the more general framework provided by standard neuroconstructivism. In Section 4, I focus on recent empirical findings in (...)
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  • Irretrievably confused? Innateness in explanatory context.Jonathan Birch - 2009 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 40 (4):296-301.
    The hunt for a biologically respectable definition for the folk concept of innateness is still on. I defend Ariew’s Canalization account of innateness against the criticisms of Griffiths and Machery, but highlight the remaining flaws in this proposal. I develop a new analysis based on the notion of environmental induction. A trait is innate, I argue, iff it is not environmentally induced. I augment this definition with a novel analysis of environmental induction that draws on the contrastive nature of causal (...)
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  • Experimental Philosophy of Science.Edouard Machery - 2016 - In Wesley Buckwalter & Justin Sytsma (eds.), Blackwell Companion to Experimental Philosophy. Malden, MA: Blackwell. pp. 473–490.
    This chapter shows that the experimental philosophy has much to offer to philosophy of science by reviewing the existing experimental‐philosophy work in the philosophy of science and by defending it against an important criticism. A natural way of extending experimental philosophy methods to the philosophy of science is to survey scientists’ judgments. The chapter presents two projects in the philosophy of science that can benefit from such surveys: analyzing the scientific concepts found in particular scientific communities and studying scientific cognition. (...)
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  • Dehumanization, Essentialism, and Moral Psychology.David Livingstone Smith - 2014 - Philosophy Compass 9 (11):814-824.
    Despite its importance, the phenomenon of dehumanization has been neglected by philosophers. Since its introduction, the term “dehumanization” has come to be used in a variety of ways. In this paper, I use it to denote the psychological stance of conceiving of other human beings as subhuman creatures. I draw on an historical example – Morgan Godwyn's description of 17th century English colonists' dehumanization of African slaves and use this to identify three explanatory desiderata that any satisfactory theory of dehumanization (...)
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  • Philosophy of mind and cognitive science since 1980.Elizabeth Schier & John Sutton - 2014 - In Graham Oppy & Nick Trakakis (eds.), History of Philosophy in Australia and New Zealand. Dordrecht: Springer.
    If Australasian philosophers constitute the kind of group to which a collective identity or broadly shared self-image can plausibly be ascribed, the celebrated history of Australian materialism rightly lies close to its heart. Jack Smart’s chapter in this volume, along with an outstanding series of briefer essays in A Companion to Philosophy in Australia and New Zealand (Forrest 2010; Gold 2010; Koksvik 2010; Lycan 2010; Matthews 2010; Nagasawa 2010; Opie 2010; Stoljar 2010a), effectively describe the naturalistic realism of Australian philosophy (...)
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  • Philosophy and the Biology of Male Homosexuality.Olivier Lemeire & Andreas De Block - 2015 - Philosophy Compass 10 (7):479-488.
    This paper is a review of how biological as well as other scientific theories, concepts and findings have been used to answer philosophical questions regarding the nature of male homosexuality. We argue that while these sciences are certainly relevant for present philosophical debates, few of the different philosophical issues surrounding male homosexuality can be settled by science alone. In the first section, we introduce a number of various essentialist and constructivist views on (male) homosexuality. The second section focuses on the (...)
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  • Thinking like a scientist: Innateness as a case study.Joshua Knobe & Richard Samuels - 2013 - Cognition 126 (1):72-86.
    The concept of innateness appears in systematic research within cognitive science, but it also appears in less systematic modes of thought that long predate the scientific study of the mind. The present studies therefore explore the relationship between the properly scientific uses of this concept and its role in ordinary folk understanding. Studies 1-4 examined the judgments of people with no specific training in cognitive science. Results showed (a) that judgments about whether a trait was innate were not affected by (...)
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  • Musicality: Instinct or Acquired Skill?Gary F. Marcus - 2012 - Topics in Cognitive Science 4 (4):498-512.
    Is the human tendency toward musicality better thought of as the product of a specific, evolved instinct or an acquired skill? Developmental and evolutionary arguments are considered, along with issues of domain‐specificity. The article also considers the question of why humans might be consistently and intensely drawn to music if musicality is not in fact the product of a specifically evolved instinct.
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  • Evolutionary Psychology, Ethology, and Essentialism (Because What They Don't Know Can Hurt Us).Letitia Meynell - 2012 - Hypatia 27 (1):3-27.
    In 2002, Evolution and Human Behavior published a study purporting to show that the differences in toy preferences commonly attributed to girls and boys can also be found in male and female vervet monkeys, tracing the origin of these differing preferences back to a common ancestor. Despite some flaws in its design and the prima facie implausibility of some of its central claims, this research received considerable attention in both scientific circles and the popular media. In what follows, I survey (...)
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  • Genetic Representation Explains the Cluster of Innateness‐Related Properties.Nicholas Shea - 2012 - Mind and Language 27 (4):466-493.
    The concept of innateness is used to make inferences between various better-understood properties, like developmental canalization, evolutionary adaptation, heritability, species-typicality, and so on (‘innateness-related properties’). This article uses a recently-developed account of the representational content carried by inheritance systems like the genome to explain why innateness-related properties cluster together, especially in non-human organisms. Although inferences between innateness-related properties are deductively invalid, and lead to false conclusions in many actual cases, where some aspect of a phenotypic trait develops in reliance on (...)
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  • The distinction between innate and acquired characteristics.Paul Griffiths - 2010 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    The idea that some characteristics of an organism are explained by the organism's intrinsic nature, whilst others reflect the influence of the environment is an ancient one. It has even been argued that this distinction is itself part of the evolved psychology of the human species. The distinction played an important role in the history of philosophy as the locus of the dispute between Rationalism and Empiricism discussed in another entry in this encyclopedia. This entry, however, focuses on twentieth-century accounts (...)
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  • The vernacular concept of innateness.Paul Griffiths, Edouard Machery & Stefan Linquist - 2009 - Mind and Language 24 (5):605-630.
    The proposal that the concept of innateness expresses a 'folk biological' theory of the 'inner natures' of organisms was tested by examining the response of biologically naive participants to a series of realistic scenarios concerning the development of birdsong. Our results explain the intuitive appeal of existing philosophical analyses of the innateness concept. They simultaneously explain why these analyses are subject to compelling counterexamples. We argue that this explanation undermines the appeal of these analyses, whether understood as analyses of the (...)
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  • Innate cognitive capacities.Muhammad ali KhAlidi - 2007 - Mind and Language 22 (1):92-115.
    This paper attempts to articulate a dispositional account of innateness that applies to cognitive capacities. After criticizing an alternative account of innateness proposed by Cowie (1999) and Samuels (2002), the dispositional account of innateness is explicated and defended against a number of objections. The dispositional account states that an innate cognitive capacity (output) is one that has a tendency to be triggered as a result of impoverished environmental conditions (input). Hence, the challenge is to demonstrate how the input can be (...)
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  • Basic Equality.Paul Sagar - 2024 - Princeton: Princeton University Press.
    Although thinkers of the past might have started from presumptions of fundamental difference and inequality between (say) the genders, or people of different races, this is no longer the case. At least in mainstream political philosophy, we are all now presumed to be, in some fundamental sense, basic equals. Of course, what follows from this putative fact of basic equality remains enormously controversial: liberals, libertarians, conservatives, Marxists, republicans, and so on, continue to disagree vigorously with each other, despite all presupposing (...)
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  • Why do numbers exist? A psychologist constructivist account.Markus Pantsar - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    In this paper, I study the kind of questions we can ask about the existence of numbers. In addition to asking whether numbers exist, and how, I argue that there is also a third relevant question: why numbers exist. In platonist and nominalist accounts this question may not make sense, but in the psychologist account I develop, it is as well-placed as the other two questions. In fact, there are two such why-questions: the causal why-question asks what causes numbers to (...)
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  • From Maximal Intersubjectivity to Objectivity: An Argument from the Development of Arithmetical Cognition.Markus Pantsar - 2022 - Topoi 42 (1):271-281.
    One main challenge of non-platonist philosophy of mathematics is to account for the apparent objectivity of mathematical knowledge. Cole and Feferman have proposed accounts that aim to explain objectivity through the intersubjectivity of mathematical knowledge. In this paper, focusing on arithmetic, I will argue that these accounts as such cannot explain the apparent objectivity of mathematical knowledge. However, with support from recent progress in the empirical study of the development of arithmetical cognition, a stronger argument can be provided. I will (...)
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  • Development and microbiology.Aja Watkins - 2021 - Biology and Philosophy 36 (4):1-30.
    On the basis of findings from developmental biology, some researchers have argued that evolutionary theory needs to be significantly updated. Advocates of such a “developmental update” have, among other things, suggested that we need to re-conceptualize units of selection, that we should expand our view of inheritance to include environmental as well as genetic and epigenetic factors, that we should think of organisms and their environment as involved in reciprocal causation, and that we should reevaluate the rates of evolutionary change. (...)
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  • The Cyclical Return of the IQ Controversy: Revisiting the Lessons of the Resolution on Genetics, Race and Intelligence.Davide Serpico - 2021 - Journal of the History of Biology 54 (2):199-228.
    In 1976, the Genetics Society of America published a document entitled “Resolution of Genetics, Race, and Intelligence.” This document laid out the Society’s position in the IQ controversy, particularly that on scientific and ethical questions involving the genetics of intellectual differences between human populations. Since the GSA was the largest scientific society of geneticists in the world, many expected the document to be of central importance in settling the controversy. Unfortunately, the Resolution had surprisingly little influence on the discussion. In (...)
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  • Causal clarity and deeper dimensions in microbiota-gut-brain research.Katarzyna B. Hooks, Jan Pieter Konsman & Maureen A. O'Malley - 2019 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 42.
    Our analysis of microbiota-gut-brain research took MGB to task for some of its methods, concepts, and interpretations. Commentators then raised numerous issues about the neuroscientific and microbiome aspects of MGB and how it can be understood as a field. We respond by addressing the dimensionality and causal focus of MGB.
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  • (1 other version)A Developmental Systems Account of Human Nature.Karola Stotz & Paul Griffiths - 2018 - In Elizabeth Hannon & Tim Lewens (eds.), Why We Disagree About Human Nature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 00-00.
    It is now widely accepted that a scientifically credible conception of human nature must reject the folkbiological idea of a fixed, inner essence that makes us human. We argue here that to understand human nature is to understand the plastic process of human development and the diversity it produces. Drawing on the framework of developmental systems theory and the idea of developmental niche construction we argue that human nature is not embodied in only one input to development, such as the (...)
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  • Adaptation, Exaptation, By-Products, and Spandrels in Evolutionary Explanations of Morality.Benjamin James Fraser - 2010 - Biological Theory 5 (3):223-227.
    Adaptationist accounts of morality attempt to explain the evolution of morality in terms of the selective advantage that judging in moral terms secured for our ancestors (e.g. Ruse 1998; Joyce 2006; Street 2006). So-called by-product explanations of morality have been presented as an alternative to adaptationist accounts (e.g. Prinz 2009; Ayala 2010; cf. Darwin 2004/1871). In assessing the relationship between adaptationist and by-product accounts, care must be taken to distinguish several related but importantly different notions: innateness, adaptation, exaptation, spandrel, and (...)
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  • Experimental philosophy of science.Paul E. Griffiths & Karola Stotz - 2008 - Philosophy Compass 3 (3):507–521.
    Experimental philosophy of science gathers empirical data on how key scientific concepts are understood by particular scientific communities. In this paper we briefly describe two recent studies in experimental philosophy of biology, one investigating the concept of the gene, the other the concept of innateness. The use of experimental methods reveals facts about these concepts that would not be accessible using the traditional method of intuitions about possible cases. It also contributes to the study of conceptual change in science, which (...)
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  • Sensitive and insensitive causation.James Woodward - 2006 - Philosophical Review 115 (1):1-50.
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  • Two dogmas of neo-empiricism.Edouard Machery - 2006 - Philosophy Compass 1 (4):398–412.
    This article critically examines the contemporary resurgence of empiricism (or “neo-empiricism”) in philosophy, psychology, neuropsychology, and artificial intelligence. This resurgence is an important and positive development. It is the first time that this centuries-old empiricist approach to cognition is precisely formulated in the context of cognitive science and neuroscience. Moreover, neo-empiricists have made several findings that challenge amodal theories of concepts and higher cognition. It is argued, however, that the theoretical foundations of and the empirical evidence for neo-empiricism are not (...)
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  • 4.2. Quel che resta dei generi naturali.Andrea Borghini & Elena Casetta - 2012 - Rivista di Estetica 49:247-271.
    If natural kinds were defined on the basis of fixed and immutable essences, then – with the end of essentialism in life sciences – their end, at least for those kinds confined to the living realm, would ensue as well (1-2). If appropriately revised and adapted, however, natural kinds may still play an important theoretical role, not only for the sake of philosophical speculation, but also in accomodating scientific practices and in providing an adequate rendering of human reasoning. The proposal (...)
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  • Can Innateness Ascriptions Avoid Tautology?Valentine Reynaud - 2014 - Philosophia Scientiae 18:177-190.
    Les hypothèses sur l’innéité d’un trait formulées par les sciences cognitives – l’hypothèse d’une faculté innée de langage, par exemple – peuvent-elles échapper à la tautologie? Aucune définition générale de l’innéité ne semble pleinement satisfaisante. En tant que notion dispositionnelle, l’innéité rencontre le « problème de la tautologie » mis en évidence par Locke. Les jugements en matière d’innéité, qu’ils relèvent d’une théorie innéiste ou d’une théorie empiriste (puisque même les empiristes doivent en formuler), dépendent toujours d’une vision particulière du (...)
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  • That was the Philosophy of Biology that was: Mainx, Woodger, Nagel, and Logical Empiricism, 1929–1961.Sahotra Sarkar - 2023 - Biological Theory 18 (3):153-174.
    This article is a systematic critical survey of work done in the philosophy of biology within the logical empiricist tradition, beginning in the 1930s and until the end of the 1950s. It challenges a popular view that the logical empiricists either ignored biology altogether or produced analyses of little value. The earliest work on the philosophy of biology within the logical empiricist corpus was that of Philipp Frank, Ludwig von Bertalanffy, and Felix Mainx. Mainx, in particular, provided a detailed analysis (...)
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  • Is Identity Essentialism a Fundamental Feature of Human Cognition?Edouard Machery, Christopher Y. Olivola, Hyundeuk Cheon, Irma T. Kurniawan, Carlos Mauro, Noel Struchiner & Harry Susianto - 2023 - Cognitive Science 47 (5):e13292.
    The present research examines whether identity essentialism, an important component of psychological essentialism, is a fundamental feature of human cognition. Across three studies (Ntotal = 1723), we report evidence that essentialist intuitions about the identity of kinds are culturally dependent, demographically variable, and easily malleable. The first study considered essentialist intuitions in 10 different countries spread across four continents. Participants were presented with two scenarios meant to elicit essentialist intuitions. Their answers suggest that essentialist intuitions vary dramatically across cultures. Furthermore, (...)
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  • 「生得的な心」の可能性:刺激の貧困論証は生得性についてなにを語るのか(あるいはなにを語らないのか).Naoki Usui - 2015 - Kagaku Tetsugaku 48 (2):2-65.
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  • 文法能力の生得主義.Shun Tsugita - 2017 - Kagaku Tetsugaku 50:107-127.
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