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  1. In defense of nativism.Eric Margolis & Stephen Laurence - 2013 - Philosophical Studies 165 (2):693-718.
    This paper takes a fresh look at the nativism–empiricism debate, presenting and defending a nativist perspective on the mind. Empiricism is often taken to be the default view both in philosophy and in cognitive science. This paper argues, on the contrary, that there should be no presumption in favor of empiricism (or nativism), but that the existing evidence suggests that nativism is the most promising framework for the scientific study of the mind. Our case on behalf of nativism has four (...)
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  • Innateness.Steven Gross & Georges Rey - 2012 - In Eric Margolis, Richard Samuels & Stephen P. Stich (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Cognitive Science. Oxford University Press.
    A survey of innateness in cognitive science, focusing on (1) what innateness might be, and (2) whether concepts might be innate.
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  • Sources of Racialism.Ron Mallon - 2010 - Journal of Social Philosophy 41 (3):272-292.
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  • (1 other version)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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  • Living with innateness (and environmental dependence too).Jonathan M. Weinberg & Ron Mallon - 2008 - Philosophical Psychology 21 (3):415 – 424.
    Griffiths and Machery contend that the concept of innateness should be dispensed with in the sciences. We contend that, once that concept is properly understood as what we have called 'closed process invariance', it is still of significant use in the sciences, especially cognitive science.
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  • A field guide to social construction.Ron Mallon - 2006 - Philosophy Compass 2 (1):93–108.
    forthcoming in Philosophy Compass [penultimate draft .pdf file] A survey of the contemporary social constructionist landscape.
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  • Culture and Cognitive Science.Andreas De Block & Daniel Kelly - 2022 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Human behavior and thought often exhibit a familiar pattern of within group similarity and between group difference. Many of these patterns are attributed to cultural differences. For much of the history of its investigation into behavior and thought, however, cognitive science has been disproportionately focused on uncovering and explaining the more universal features of human minds—or the universal features of minds in general. -/- This entry charts out the ways in which this has changed over recent decades. It sketches the (...)
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  • What’s wrong with the minimal conception of innateness in cognitive science?J. Brendan Ritchie - 2020 - Synthese 199 (Suppl 1):159-176.
    One of the classic debates in cognitive science is between nativism and empiricism about the development of psychological capacities. In principle, the debate is empirical. However, in practice nativist hypotheses have also been challenged for relying on an ill-defined, or even unscientific, notion of innateness as that which is “not learned”. Here this minimal conception of innateness is defended on four fronts. First, it is argued that the minimal conception is crucial to understanding the nativism-empiricism debate, when properly construed; Second, (...)
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  • Cognitive/Evolutionary Psychology and the History of Racism.John P. Jackson - 2017 - Philosophy of Science 84 (2):296-314.
    Philosophical defenses of cognitive/evolutionary psychological accounts of racialism claim that classification based on phenotypical features of humans was common historically and is evidence for a species-typical, cognitive mechanism for essentializing. They conclude that social constructionist accounts of racialism must be supplemented by cognitive/evolutionary psychology. This article argues that phenotypical classifications were uncommon historically until such classifications were socially constructed. Moreover, some philosophers equivocate between two different meanings of “racial thinking.” The article concludes that social constructionist accounts are far more robust (...)
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  • Was Race thinking invented in the modern West?Ron Mallon - 2013 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 44 (1):77-88.
    The idea that genuinely racial thinking is a modern invention is widespread in the humanities and social sciences. However, it is not always clear exactly what the content of such a conceptual break is supposed to be. One suggestion is that with the scientific revolution emerged a conception of human groups that possessed essences that were thought to explain group-typical features of individuals as well the accumulated products of cultures or civilizations. However, recent work by cognitive and evolutionary psychologists suggests (...)
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  • Innateness as a natural cognitive kind.Muhammad Ali Khalidi - 2016 - Philosophical Psychology 29 (3):319-333.
    Innate cognitive capacities are widely posited in cognitive science, yet both philosophers and scientists have criticized the concept of innateness as being hopelessly confused. Despite a number of recent attempts to define or characterize innateness, critics have charged that it is associated with a diverse set of properties and encourages unwarranted inferences among properties that are frequently unrelated. This criticism can be countered by showing that the properties associated with innateness cluster together in reliable ways, at least in the context (...)
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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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  • The Content and Implications of Nativist Claims. A Philosophical Analysis.Riin Kõiv - 2021 - Dissertation, University of Tartu
    We often hear how scientists have discovered that a certain human trait – or a trait of another type of organism – is innate, genetic, heritable, inherited, naturally selected etc. All these claims have something in common: they all declare a trait to have significant organism internal (for instance genetic) causes that are present in the organism at its birth. I call claims like these “nativist claims”. Nativist claims are important. They shape our overall understanding of what we are, what (...)
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  • Philosophical analyses of scientific concepts: A critical appraisal.Daniel Mark Kraemer - 2018 - Philosophy Compass 13 (9):e12513.
    Philosophical analyses of scientific concepts are legion. However, this literature is replete with methodological errors that have largely gone unnoticed. Five distinct projects are conflated which has led to faulty inferences, ambiguities, and mischaracterizations. There has also been some recent enthusiasm for approaches that attempt to rectify problematic scientific concepts but the motivations for these approaches are questionable. I am hopeful that by bringing these various issues to light that it will lead practitioners to be more explicit about their aims (...)
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  • Beyond the search for the subject: An anti-essentialist ontology for liberal democracy.Samuel Bagg - 2021 - European Journal of Political Theory 20 (2):208-231.
    Reading Foucault’s work on power and subjectivity alongside “developmentalist” approaches to evolutionary biology, this article endorses poststructuralist critiques of political ideals grounded in the value of subjective agency. Many political theorists embrace such critiques, of course, but those who do are often skeptical of liberal democracy, and even of normative theory itself. By contrast, those who are left to theorize liberal democracy tend to reject or ignore poststructuralist insights, and have continued to employ dubious ontological assumptions regarding human agents. Against (...)
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  • The ontogeny and evolution of human collaboration.Brian McLoone & Rory Smead - 2014 - Biology and Philosophy 29 (4):559-576.
    How is the human tendency and ability to collaborate acquired and how did it evolve? This paper explores the ontogeny and evolution of human collaboration using a combination of theoretical and empirical resources. We present a game theoretic model of the evolution of learning in the Stag Hunt game, which predicts the evolution of a built-in cooperative bias. We then survey recent empirical results on the ontogeny of collaboration in humans, which suggest the ability to collaborate is developmentally stable across (...)
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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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  • Relativizing innateness: innateness as the insensitivity of the appearance of a trait with respect to specified environmental variation.Elizabeth O’Neill - 2015 - Biology and Philosophy 30 (2):211-225.
    I object to eliminativism about innateness and André Ariew’s identification of innateness with canalization, and I propose a new treatment of innateness. I first argue that the concept of innateness is serving a valuable function in a diverse set of research contexts, and in these contexts, claims about innateness are best understood as claims about the insensitivity of the appearance of a trait to certain variations in the environment. I then argue that innateness claims, like claims about canalization, should be (...)
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  • Evolutionary Debunking Arguments in Ethics.Andreas Lech Mogensen - 2014 - Dissertation, University of Oxford
    I consider whether evolutionary explanations can debunk our moral beliefs. Most contemporary discussion in this area is centred on the question of whether debunking implications follow from our ability to explain elements of human morality in terms of natural selection, given that there has been no selection for true moral beliefs. By considering the most prominent arguments in the literature today, I offer reasons to think that debunking arguments of this kind fail. However, I argue that a successful evolutionary debunking (...)
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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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  • Culture and cognitive science.Jesse Prinz - forthcoming - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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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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  • (1 other version)Bayesian cognitive science, predictive brains, and the nativism debate.Matteo Colombo - 2017 - Synthese:1-22.
    The rise of Bayesianism in cognitive science promises to shape the debate between nativists and empiricists into more productive forms—or so have claimed several philosophers and cognitive scientists. The present paper explicates this claim, distinguishing different ways of understanding it. After clarifying what is at stake in the controversy between nativists and empiricists, and what is involved in current Bayesian cognitive science, the paper argues that Bayesianism offers not a vindication of either nativism or empiricism, but one way to talk (...)
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  • (1 other version)Bayesian cognitive science, predictive brains, and the nativism debate.Matteo Colombo - 2018 - Synthese 195 (11):4817-4838.
    The rise of Bayesianism in cognitive science promises to shape the debate between nativists and empiricists into more productive forms—or so have claimed several philosophers and cognitive scientists. The present paper explicates this claim, distinguishing different ways of understanding it. After clarifying what is at stake in the controversy between nativists and empiricists, and what is involved in current Bayesian cognitive science, the paper argues that Bayesianism offers not a vindication of either nativism or empiricism, but one way to talk (...)
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  • (1 other version)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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  • Innatismo y control genético.Sergio Daniel Barberis - 2013 - Manuscrito 36 (2):263-310.
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  • Conceived this way: innateness defended.Northcott Robert - forthcoming - Philosophers' Imprint.
    We propose a novel account of the distinction between innate and acquired biological traits: biological traits are innate to the degree that they are caused by factors intrinsic to the organism at the time of its origin; they are acquired to the degree that they are caused by factors extrinsic to the organism. This account borrows from recent work on causation in order to make rigorous the notion of quantitative contributions to traits by different factors in development. We avoid the (...)
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