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The distinction between innate and acquired characteristics

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2010)

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  1. Philosophy as Mathematics or as Anthropology.Daniel Dennett - 1986 - Mind and Language 1 (1):18-19.
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  • Innateness as genetic adaptation: Lorenz redivivus (and revised).Nathan Cofnas - 2017 - Biology and Philosophy 32 (4):559-580.
    In 1965, Konrad Lorenz grounded the innate–acquired distinction in what he believed were the only two possible sources of information that can underlie adaptedness: phylogenetic and individual experience. Phylogenetic experience accumulates in the genome by the process of natural selection. Individual experience is acquired ontogenetically through interacting with the environment during the organism’s lifetime. According to Lorenz, the adaptive information underlying innate traits is stored in the genome. Lorenz erred in arguing that genetic adaptation is the only means of accumulating (...)
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  • The role of attraction in cultural evolution.Nicolas Claidière & Dan Sperber - 2007 - Journal of Cognition and Culture 7 (1-2):89-111.
    Henrich and Boyd (2002) were the first to propose a formal model of the role of attraction in cultural evolution. They came to the surprising conclusion that, when both attraction and selection are at work, final outcomes are determined by selection alone. This result is based on a deterministic view of cultural attraction, different from the probabilistic view introduced in Sperber (1996). We defend this probabilistic view, show how to model it, and argue that, when both attraction and selection are (...)
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  • Syntactic Structures.Noam Chomsky - 1957 - Mouton.
    Noam Chomsky's book on syntactic structures is a serious attempts on the part of a linguist to construct within the tradition of scientific theory-construction ...
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  • Science and Core Knowledge.Susan Carey & Elizabeth Spelke - 1996 - Philosophy of Science 63 (4):515 - 533.
    While endorsing Gopnik's proposal that studies of the emergence and modification of scientific theories and studies of cognitive development in children are mutually illuminating, we offer a different picture of the beginning points of cognitive development from Gopnik's picture of "theories all the way down." Human infants are endowed with several distinct core systems of knowledge which are theory-like in some, but not all, important ways. The existence of these core systems of knowledge has implications for the joint research program (...)
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  • The Instinct Concept of the Early Konrad Lorenz.Ingo Brigandt - 2005 - Journal of the History of Biology 38 (3):571-608.
    Peculiar to Konrad Lorenz’s view of instinctive behavior is his strong innate-learned dichotomy. He claimed that there are neither ontogenetic nor phylogenetic transitions between instinctive and experience-based behavior components, thus contradicting all former accounts of instinct. The present study discusses how Lorenz came to hold this controversial position by examining the history of Lorenz’s early theoretical development in the crucial period from 1931 to 1937, taking relevant influences into account. Lorenz’s intellectual development is viewed as being guided by four theoretical (...)
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  • What Realism Implies and What it Does Not.Richard Boyd - 1989 - Dialectica 43 (1‐2):5-29.
    SummaryThis paper addresses the question of what scientific realism implies and what it does not when it is articulated so as to provide the best defense against plausible philosophical alternatives. A summary is presented of “abductive” arguments for scientific realism, and of the epistemological and semantic conceptions upon which they depend. Taking these arguments to be the best current defense of realism, it is inquired what, in the sense just mentioned, realism implies and what it does not. It is concluded (...)
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  • The Misuse of Instinct in the Social Sciences.L. L. Bernard - 1921 - Psychological Review 28 (2):96-119.
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  • Innateness is canalization: In defense of a developmental account of innateness.Andre Ariew - 1999 - In Philosophy of Science. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. pp. S19-S27.
    Lorenz proposed in his (1935) articulation of a theory of behavioral instincts that the objective of ethology is to distinguish behaviors that are “innate” from behaviors that are “learned” (or “acquired”). Lorenz’s motive was to open the investigation of certain “adaptive” behaviors to evolutionary theorizing. Accordingly, since innate behaviors are “genetic”, they are open to such investigation. By Lorenz’s light an innate/acquired or learned dichotomy rested on a familiar Darwinian distinction between genes and environments. Ever since Lorenz, ascriptions of innateness (...)
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  • Unity and Fragmentation in Psychology: The Philosophical and Methodological Roots of the Discipline.Nicolò Gaj - 2016 - New York, NY: Routledge.
    Psychology has always defined itself as a science and yet it has lacked the theoretical and methodological unity regarded as characteristic of the natural sciences. Nicolò Gaj explores the topical question of unification in psychology, setting out a conceptual framework for considerations of unity and disunity, and exploring the evidence of its fragmentation. He takes a critical look at the history of the most prominent attempts at unification, and at the desirability and feasibility of the whole project. The book represents (...)
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  • The Strategy of the Genes: A Discussion of Some Aspects of Theoretical Biology.C. H. Waddington - 2014 - Routledge.
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  • The descent of man, and selection in relation to sex.Charles Darwin - 1898 - New York: Plume. Edited by Carl Zimmer.
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  • Is innateness a confused notion?Richard Samuels - 2005 - In Peter Carruthers, Stephen Laurence & Stephen P. Stich (eds.), The Innate Mind: Structure and Contents. New York, US: Oxford University Press on Demand.
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  • The Innate Mind: Structure and Contents.Peter Carruthers, Stephen Laurence & Stephen P. Stich (eds.) - 2005 - New York, US: Oxford University Press on Demand.
    This is the first of three volumes on the subject of innateness. The extent to which the mind is innate is one of the central questions in the human sciences, with important implications for many surrounding debates. This book along with the following two volumes provide assess of nativist thought and a definitive reference point for future nativist inquiry. This book is concerned with the fundamental architecture of the mind, addressing such question as: what capacities, processes, representations, biases, and connections (...)
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  • A new factor in evolution.J. M. Baldwin - 2014 - In Francisco José Ayala & John C. Avise (eds.), Essential readings in evolutionary biology. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
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  • Concepts, Kinds and Cognitive Development.Frank C. Keil - 1989 - MIT Press.
    In Concepts, Kinds, and Cognitive Development, Frank C. Keil provides a coherent account of how concepts and word meanings develop in children, adding to our understanding of the representational nature of concepts and word meanings at all ages. Keil argues that it is impossible to adequately understand the nature of conceptual representation without also considering the issue of learning. Weaving together issues in cognitive development, philosophy, and cognitive psychology, he reconciles numerous theories, backed by empirical evidence from nominal kinds studies, (...)
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  • The Language of Thought.Jerry A. Fodor - 1975 - Harvard University Press.
    INTRODUCTION: TWO KINDS OF RLDUCTIONISM The man who laughs is the one who has not yet heard the terrible news. BERTHOLD BRECHT I propose, in this book, ...
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  • Philosophy Within its Proper Bounds.Edouard Machery - 2017 - Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.
    In Philosophy Within Its Proper Bounds, Edouard Machery argues that resolving many traditional and contemporary philosophical issues is beyond our epistemic reach and that philosophy should re-orient itself toward more humble, but ultimately more important intellectual endeavors, such as the analysis of concepts.
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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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  • The extended replicator.Kim Sterelny, Kelly C. Smith & Michael Dickison - 1996 - Biology and Philosophy 11 (3):377-403.
    This paper evaluates and criticises the developmental systems conception of evolution and develops instead an extension of the gene's eye conception of evolution. We argue (i) Dawkin's attempt to segregate developmental and evolutionary issues about genes is unsatisfactory. On plausible views of development it is arbitrary to single out genes as the units of selection. (ii) The genotype does not carry information about the phenotype in any way that distinguishes the role of the genes in development from that other factors. (...)
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  • Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach.Dan Sperber - 1996 - Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
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  • Evolution, population thinking, and essentialism.Elliott Sober - 1980 - Philosophy of Science 47 (3):350-383.
    Ernst Mayr has argued that Darwinian theory discredited essentialist modes of thought and replaced them with what he has called "population thinking". In this paper, I characterize essentialism as embodying a certain conception of how variation in nature is to be explained, and show how this conception was undermined by evolutionary theory. The Darwinian doctrine of evolutionary gradualism makes it impossible to say exactly where one species ends and another begins; such line-drawing problems are often taken to be the decisive (...)
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  • Apportioning Causal Responsibility.Elliott Sober - 1988 - Journal of Philosophy 85 (6):303.
    (Journal of Philosophy, 1988, 85:303-318).
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  • Representation in the genome and in other inheritance systems.Nicholas Shea - 2007 - Biology and Philosophy 22 (3):313-331.
    There is ongoing controversy as to whether the genome is a representing system. Although it is widely recognised that DNA carries information, both correlating with and coding for various outcomes, neither of these implies that the genome has semantic properties like correctness or satisfaction conditions, In the Scope of Logic, Methodology, and the Philosophy of Sciences, Vol. II. Kluwer, Dordrecht, pp. 387–400). Here a modified version of teleosemantics is applied to the genome to show that it does indeed have semantic (...)
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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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  • On the generality of the laws of learning.Martin E. Seligman - 1970 - Psychological Review 77 (5):406-418.
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  • Thinking about biology. Modular constraints on categorization and reasoning in the everyday life of Americans, Maya, and scientists.Scott Atran, Douglas I. Medin & Norbert Ross - 2002 - Mind and Society 3 (2):31-63.
    This essay explores the universal cognitive bases of biological taxonomy and taxonomic inference using cross-cultural experimental work with urbanized Americans and forest-dwelling Maya Indians. A universal, essentialist appreciation of generic species appears as the causal foundation for the taxonomic arrangement of biodiversity, and for inference about the distribution of causally-related properties that underlie biodiversity. Universal folkbiological taxonomy is domain-specific: its structure does not spontaneously or invariably arise in other cognitive domains, like substances, artifacts or persons. It is plausibly an innately-determined (...)
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  • Genes, behavior, and developmental emergentism: One process, indivisible?Kenneth F. Schaffner - 1998 - Philosophy of Science 65 (2):209-252.
    The question of the influence of genes on behavior raises difficult philosophical and social issues. In this paper I delineate what I call the Developmentalist Challenge (DC) to assertions of genetic influence on behavior, and then examine the DC through an indepth analysis of the behavioral genetics of the nematode, C. elegans, with some briefer references to work on Drosophila. I argue that eight "rules" relating genes and behavior through environmentally-influenced and tangled neural nets capture the results of developmental and (...)
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  • From the reaktionsNorm to the adaptive Norm: The Norm of reaction, 1909–1960. [REVIEW]Sahotra Sarkar - 1999 - Biology and Philosophy 14 (2):235-252.
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  • Nativism in cognitive science.Richard Samuels - 2002 - Mind and Language 17 (3):233-65.
    Though nativist hypotheses have played a pivotal role in the development of cognitive science, it remains exceedingly obscure how they—and the debates in which they figure—ought to be understood. The central aim of this paper is to provide an account which addresses this concern and in so doing: a) makes sense of the roles that nativist theorizing plays in cognitive science and, moreover, b), explains why it really matters to the contemporary study of cognition. I conclude by outlining a range (...)
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  • Innateness in cognitive science.Richard Samuels - 2004 - Trends in Cognitive Sciences 8 (3):136-141.
    has a more specific role to play in the development of Of course, the conclusion to draw is not that innateness innate cognitive structure. In particular, a common claim claims are trivially false or that they cannot be character-.
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  • Innateness as Closed Process Invariance.Ron Mallon & Jonathan M. Weinberg - 2006 - Philosophy of Science 73 (3):323-344.
    Controversies over the innateness of cognitive processes, mechanisms, and structures play a persistent role in driving research in philosophy as well as the cognitive sciences, but the appropriate way to understand the category of the innate remains subject to dispute. One venerable approach in philosophy and cognitive science merely contrasts innate features with those that are learned. In fact, Jerry Fodor has recently suggested that this remains our best handle on innateness.
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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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  • Degree of explanation.Robert Northcott - 2012 - Synthese 190 (15):3087-3105.
    Partial explanations are everywhere. That is, explanations citing causes that explain some but not all of an effect are ubiquitous across science, and these in turn rely on the notion of degree of explanation. I argue that current accounts are seriously deficient. In particular, they do not incorporate adequately the way in which a cause’s explanatory importance varies with choice of explanandum. Using influential recent contrastive theories, I develop quantitative definitions that remedy this lacuna, and relate it to existing measures (...)
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  • Contemporary instinct theory and the fixed action pattern.Howard Moltz - 1965 - Psychological Review 72 (1):27-47.
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  • The Native Mind: Biological Categorization and Reasoning in Development and Across Cultures.Douglas L. Medin & Scott Atran - 2004 - Psychological Review 111 (4):960-983.
    . This paper describes a cross-cultural and developmental research project on naïve or folk biology, that is, the study of how people conceptualize nature. The combination of domain specificity and cross-cultural comparison brings a new perspective to theories of categorization and reasoning and undermines the tendency to focus on “standard populations.” From the standpoint of mainstream cognitive psychology, we find that results gathered from standard populations in industrialized societies often fail to generalize to humanity at large. For example, similarity-driven typicality (...)
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  • On innateness: The clutter hypothesis.Matteo Mameli - 2008 - Journal of Philosophy 105 (12):719-736.
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  • Nongenetic selection and nongenetic inheritance.Matteo Mameli - 2004 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 55 (1):35-71.
    According to the received view of evolution, only genes are inherited. From this view it follows that only genetically-caused phenotypic variation is selectable and, thereby, that all selection is at bottom genetic selection. This paper argues that the received view is wrong. In many species, there are intergenerationally-stable phenotypic differences due to environmental differences. Natural selection can act on these nongenetically-caused phenotypic differences in the same way it acts on genetically-caused phenotypic differences. Some selection is at bottom nongenetic selection. The (...)
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  • Innateness and the sciences.Matteo Mameli & Patrick Bateson - 2006 - Biology and Philosophy 21 (2):155-188.
    The concept of innateness is a part of folk wisdom but is also used by biologists and cognitive scientists. This concept has a legitimate role to play in science only if the colloquial usage relates to a coherent body of evidence. We examine many different candidates for the post of scientific successor of the folk concept of innateness. We argue that none of these candidates is entirely satisfactory. Some of the candidates are more interesting and useful than others, but the (...)
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  • Cartesian Linguistics: A Chapter in the History of Rationalist Thought.Noam Chomsky - 1966 - New York and London: Cambridge University Press.
    In this extraordinarily original and profound work, Noam Chomsky discusses themes in the study of language and mind since the end of the sixteenth century in order to explain the motivations and methods that underlie his work in linguistics, the science of mind, and even politics. This edition includes a new and specially written introduction by James McGilvray, contextualising the work for the twenty-first century. It has been made more accessible to a larger audience; all the French and German in (...)
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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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  • Exploring the Folkbiological Conception of Human Nature.Stefan Linquist, Edouard Machery, Paul E. Griffiths & Karola Stotz - 2011 - Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B-Biological Sciences 366 (1563):444.
    Integrating the study of human diversity into the human evolutionary sciences requires substantial revision of traditional conceptions of a shared human nature. This process may be made more difficult by entrenched, 'folkbiological' modes of thought. Earlier work by the authors suggests that biologically naive subjects hold an implicit theory according to which some traits are expressions of an animal's inner nature while others are imposed by its environment. In this paper, we report further studies that extend and refine our account (...)
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  • Species Natures: A Critique of Neo-Aristotelian Ethics.Tim Lewens - 2020 - Philosophical Quarterly 70 (280):480-501.
    This paper examines the neo-Aristotelian account of species natures as ‘life-forms’, which we owe to Philippa Foot, Michael Thompson and their defenders. I begin by developing two problems for their view: a problem of underdetermination and a problem generated by psychological work on ‘folk essentialism’. I move on to consider their important transcendental argument, which suggests that claims about life-forms are presupposed by all efforts to describe the organic world. In response, I sketch a neo-Kantian projectivist position, which agrees that (...)
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  • Progress and Its Problems: Toward a Theory of Scientific Growth.Larry Laudan - 1980 - Erkenntnis 15 (1):91-103.
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  • The net result of the anti-heredity movement in psychology.Z. Y. Kuo - 1929 - Psychological Review 36 (3):181-199.
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  • Giving up instincts in psychology.Zing Yang Kuo - 1921 - Journal of Philosophy 18 (24):645-664.
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  • How are our Instincts Acquired?Z. Y. Kuo - 1922 - Psychological Review 29 (5):344-365.
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  • A psychology without heredity.Z. Y. Kuo - 1924 - Psychological Review 31 (6):427-448.
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  • The Pervasive Impact of Moral Judgment.Dean Pettit & Joshua Knobe - 2009 - Mind and Language 24 (5):586-604.
    Shows that the very same asymmetries that arise for intentionally also arise from deciding, desiring, in favor of, opposed to, and advocating. It seems that the phenomenon is not due to anything about the concept of intentional action in particular. Rather, the effects observed for the concept of intentional action should be regarded as just one manifestation of the pervasive impact of moral judgment.
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  • The good, the bad and the blameworthy: Understanding the role of evaluative reasoning in folk psychology.Joshua Knobe & Gabriel S. Mendlow - 2004 - Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology 24 (2):252-258.
    People ordinarily make sense of their own behavior and that of others by invoking concepts like belief, desire, and intention. Philosophers refer to this network of concepts and related principles as 'folk psychology.' The prevailing view of folk psychology among philosophers of mind and psychologists is that it is a proto-scientific theory whose function is to explain and predict behavior.
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