Psychological 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. This factor contributes to the ongoing nature versus nurture dispute, one borne from the current difficulty of reverse engineering the subconscious operations of the brain, especially the human brain. 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. This factor contributes to the ongoing nature versus nurture dispute, one borne from the current difficulty of reverse engineering the subconscious operations of the brain, especially the human brain. 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. 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 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. Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) agreed with Kant, but reduced the number of innate categories to one—causality—which presupposes the others. Modern nativism is most associated with the work of Jerry Fodor (1935–2017), Noam Chomsky (b. 1928), and Steven Pinker (b. 1954), who argue that humans from birth have certain cognitive modules (specialised genetically inherited psychological abilities) that allow them to learn and acquire certain skills, such as language. For example, children demonstrate a facility for acquiring spoken language but require intensive training to learn to read and write. This poverty of the stimulus observation became a principal component of Chomsky's argument for a 'language organ'—a genetically inherited neurological module that confers a somewhat universal understanding of syntax that all neurologically healthy humans are born with, which is fine-tuned by an individual's experience with their native language. In The Blank Slate (2002), Pinker similarly cites the linguistic capabilities of children, relative to the amount of direct instruction they receive, 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. Research on the human capacity for language provides strong support for a nativist view. Firstly, language is a species characteristic of humans: No human society has ever been discovered that does not employ a language, and all medically able children acquire at least one language in early childhood. The typical five-year-old can already use most, if not all, of the grammatical structures that are found in the language of the surrounding community. Yet, the knowledge of grammar is tacit: Neither the five-year-old nor the adults in the community can easily articulate the principles of the grammar they are following. Experimental evidence shows that infants come equipped with presuppositions that allow them to acquire the rules of their language. The term universal grammar (or UG) is used for the innate biological properties of the human brain, whatever exactly they turn out to be, that are responsible for children's rapid and overwhelmingly successful acquisition of a native language, without any obvious effort, during the first few years of life. The person most strongly associated with the scientific investigation of UG is Noam Chomsky, although the idea of Universal Grammar has clear historical antecedents at least as far back as the 1600s, in the form of the Port-Royal Grammar. In contemporary generative grammar (from the late 1970s to the present), the principles and parameters framework has been the dominant formulation of UG. In this framework, a principle is a grammatical requirement that applies to all languages, and a parameter is a tightly constrained point of variation across languages. In the early 1980s parameters were often conceptualized as switches in a switchbox (an idea attributed to James Higginbotham). In more recent research on syntax, parameters are often conceptualized as options for the formal features of functional heads.