Psychological nativism

Information about Psychological nativism

For nativism as a political force, see 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 the 'blank slate' or tabula rasa view which states that the brain has little innate ability and almost everything is learned through interaction with the environment.

When understood as an interdisciplinary field in their own right, nativist approaches are referred to collectively as nativist theorizing.

Philosopher Immanuel Kant reasoned 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 are predicates that the mind can attribute to any object in general. Schopenhauer agreed with Kant, but reduced the number of innate Categories to one, namely, causality, which presupposes the others.

Nativism is most associated with the work of Jerry Fodor, 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). They argue that many such abilities would otherwise be greatly impaired without this genetic contribution. For example, children demonstrate a facility with 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 with speech acquisition (but not with literacy acquisition).

Psychologist Annette Karmiloff-Smith has put forward a theory known as the representational redescription or RR model of development which argues against such strict nativism and which proposes that the brain may become modular through experience within certain domains (such as social interaction or visual perception) rather than modules being genetically pre-specified.

In the United Kingdom, Stephen Laurence of the University of Sheffield initiated an interdisciplinary nativist theorizing project, entitled Innateness and the Structure of the Mind, which ran from 2001 to 2004 and was funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Board (AHRB). [1]

Case studies

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Psychology (from Greek: Literally "talk about the soul" (from logos)) is both an academic and applied discipline involving the scientific study of mental processes and behavior.
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In animals, the brain or encephalon (Greek for "in the skull"), is the control center of the central nervous system, responsible for behavior. The brain is located in the head, protected by the skull and close to the primary sensory apparatus of vision, hearing,
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Childbirth (also called labour, birth, partus or parturition) is the culmination of a human pregnancy or gestation period with the delivery of one or more newborn infants from a woman's uterus.
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Tabula rasa (Latin: scraped tablet or clean slate) refers to the epistemological thesis that individual human beings are born with no innate or built-in mental content, in a word, "blank", and that their entire resource of knowledge is built up gradually
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Interdisciplinarity is the act of drawing from and integrating two or more academic disciplines, professions, technologies, departments, their methods and insights, in the pursuit of a common goal.
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Immanuel Kant (22 April, 1724 – 12 February, 1804) was a philosopher from Königsberg in the Kingdom of Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia). He is regarded as one of the most influential thinkers of modern Europe and the closing period of the Enlightenment.
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MIND High School

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4563 St. Urbain
Montreal, Quebec, H2T 2V9, Canada
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a priori" and "a posteriori" are used in philosophy to distinguish between deductive and inductive reasoning, respectively. Attempts to define clearly or explain a priori and a posteriori
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time.

One view is that time is part of the fundamental structure of the universe, a dimension in which events occur in sequence, and time itself is something that can be measured.
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The term SPACE (capitalized) can refer to:
  • , a Canadian science-fiction channel
  • The Society for Promotion of Alternative Computing and Employment
  • DSPACE, a term in computational complexity theory

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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.
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predicate is one of the two main parts of a sentence (the other being the subject, which the predicate modifies). In current linguistic semantics, a predicate is an expression that can be true of something.
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Arthur Schopenhauer (February 22, 1788 – September 21, 1860) was a German philosopher who believed that the will to live is the fundamental reality and that this will, being a constant striving, is insatiable and ultimately yields only suffering.
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Causality or causation denotes the relationship between one event (called cause) and another event (called effect) which is the consequence (result) of the first. [1]
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Jerry Alan Fodor (born 1935) is an American philosopher and cognitive scientist currently teaching at Rutgers University in New Jersey. He is the author of many works in the fields of philosophy of mind and cognitive science in which he laid the groundwork for the modularity of
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Avram Noam Chomsky (Hebrew: אברם נועם חומסקי Yiddish: אברם נועם כאמסקי) (born December 7, 1928) is an American
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Steven Arthur Pinker (born September 18 1954) is a prominent Canadian-American experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, and popular science writer known for his spirited and wide-ranging advocacy of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind.
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The word cognitivism is used in several ways:
  • In ethics, cognitivism is the philosophical view that ethical sentences express propositions, and hence are capable of being true or false. See Cognitivism (ethics).

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Modularity can refer to one of the following things:
  • In biology, modularity (biology) refers to the concept that organisms or metabolic pathways are composed of modules.

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See Language (journal) for the linguistics journal.


A language is a system of symbols and the rules used to manipulate them. Language can also refer to the use of such systems as a general phenomenon.
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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 behaviour is substantially shaped by evolutionary psychological adaptations.
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In psychology, visual perception is the ability to interpret visible light information reaching the eyes which is then made available for planning and action. The resulting perception is also known as eyesight, sight or vision.
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Motto
"Dieu et mon droit" [2]   (French)
"God and my right"
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"God Save the Queen" [3]
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Stephen Laurence is a scientist and philosopher, currently at the University of Sheffield, whose primary areas of research interest are the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of language, and cognitive science.
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University of Sheffield is a research university, located in Sheffield in South Yorkshire, England.

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Sheffield was the Sunday Times University of the Year in 2001 and has consistently appeared as their top 20 institutions.
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The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) is a British Research Council that provides government funding for grants to undertake research in the arts and humanities, mainly to universities in the United Kingdom.
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David Reimer (August 22, 1965 – May 4, 2004) was a Canadian man who was born as a healthy boy, but was sexually reassigned and raised as female after his penis was inadvertently destroyed during circumcision.
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Domain-specificity is a theoretical position in cognitive science (especially modern cognitive development) that argues that many aspects of cognition are supported by specialized, presumably evolutionarily specified, learning devices.
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