- For nativism as a political force, see Nativism
Nativism may refer to:* Nativism or political nativism a term used by scholars to refer to ethnocentric beliefs relating to immigration and nationalism...
.
In the field of
psychologyPsychology is an academic and applied discipline involving the systematic, and sometimes scientific, study of human or animal mental functions and behavior...
,
nativism is the view that certain skills or abilities are 'native' or hard wired into the
brainThe brain is the center of the nervous system in all vertebrate, and most invertebrate, animals. Some primitive animals such as jellyfish and starfish have a decentralized nervous system without a brain, while sponges lack any nervous system at all...
at
birthChildbirth is the culmination of a human pregnancy or gestation period with birth of one or more newborn infants from a woman's uterus...
. This is in contrast to
empiricismIn philosophy, empiricism is a theory of knowledge which asserts that knowledge arises from sense experience. Empiricism is one of several competing views about how we know "things," part of the branch of philosophy called epistemology, or "the Theory of Knowledge"...
, the 'blank slate' or
tabula rasaTabula rasa refers to the epistemological thesis that individuals are born without built-in mental content and that their knowledge comes from experience and perception....
view, which states that the brain has inborn capabilities for learning from the environment but does not contain content such as innate beliefs.
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.
- For nativism as a political force, see Nativism
Nativism may refer to:* Nativism or political nativism a term used by scholars to refer to ethnocentric beliefs relating to immigration and nationalism...
.
In the field of
psychologyPsychology is an academic and applied discipline involving the systematic, and sometimes scientific, study of human or animal mental functions and behavior...
,
nativism is the view that certain skills or abilities are 'native' or hard wired into the
brainThe brain is the center of the nervous system in all vertebrate, and most invertebrate, animals. Some primitive animals such as jellyfish and starfish have a decentralized nervous system without a brain, while sponges lack any nervous system at all...
at
birthChildbirth is the culmination of a human pregnancy or gestation period with birth of one or more newborn infants from a woman's uterus...
. This is in contrast to
empiricismIn philosophy, empiricism is a theory of knowledge which asserts that knowledge arises from sense experience. Empiricism is one of several competing views about how we know "things," part of the branch of philosophy called epistemology, or "the Theory of Knowledge"...
, the 'blank slate' or
tabula rasaTabula rasa refers to the epistemological thesis that individuals are born without built-in mental content and that their knowledge comes from experience and perception....
view, which states that the brain has inborn capabilities for learning from the environment but does not contain content such as innate beliefs.
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
behaviorismBehaviorism , also called the learning perspective , is a philosophy of psychology based on the proposition that all things which organisms do — including acting, thinking and feeling — can and should be regarded as behaviors...
.
In Philosophy
Nativism has a history in philosophy, particularly as a reaction to the straightforwardly empiricist views of
John LockeJohn Locke was an English physician and philosopher regarded as one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers. Considered the first of the British empiricists, he is equally important to social contract theory. His work had a great impact upon the development of epistemology and political...
and
David HumeDavid Hume was a Scottish philosopher, economist, historian and a key figure in the history of Western philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment...
. 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 was to posit that concepts that are not supplied by experience, such as causality, must exist prior to any experience and hence must be innate.
Philosopher
Immanuel KantImmanuel Kant was an 18th-century German philosopher from the Prussian city of Königsberg...
reasoned in his
Critique of Pure ReasonThe Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant, first published in 1781, second edition 1787, is one of the most influential works in the history of philosophy...
that the human
mindMind is the aspect of intellect and consciousness experienced as combinations of thought, perception, memory, emotion, will and imagination, including all unconscious cognitive processes. The term is often used to refer, by implication, to the thought processes of reason. Mind manifests itself...
knows objects in innate,
a prioriThe terms "a priori" and "a posteriori" are used in philosophy to distinguish two types of knowledge, justifications or arguments...
ways. Kant claimed that humans, from birth, must experience all objects as being successive (
timeTime is a component of the measuring system used to sequence events, to compare the durations of events and the intervals between them, and to quantify the motions of objects...
) and juxtaposed (
spaceSpace is the boundless, three-dimensional extent in which objects and events occur and have relative position and direction. Physical space is often conceived in three linear dimensions, although modern physicists usually consider it, with time, to be part of the boundless four-dimensional...
). His list of inborn
CategoriesIn 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. Kant wrote that he wanted to provide "…a word of explanation in regard to the categories...
describes
predicatesIn traditional grammar, a predicate is one of the two main parts of a sentence . For the simple sentence "John [is yellow]," John acts as the subject, and is yellow acts as the predicate, a subsequent description of the subject headed with a verb.In current linguistic semantics, a predicate is an...
that the mind can attribute to any object in general.
SchopenhauerArthur Schopenhauer was a German philosopher known for his atheistic pessimism and philosophical clarity...
agreed with Kant, but reduced the number of innate Categories to one, namely,
causalityCausality is the relationship between an event and a second event , where the second event is a direct consequence of the first....
, which presupposes the others.
Modularity
Nativism is most associated with the work of
Jerry FodorJerry Alan Fodor is an American philosopher and cognitive scientist. He is the State of New Jersey Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University and is also the author of many works in the fields of philosophy of mind and cognitive science, in which he has laid the groundwork for the modularity of...
,
Noam ChomskyAvram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, political activist, author, and lecturer. He is an Institute Professor and professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Chomsky is well known in the academic and scientific community as...
, and
Steven PinkerSteven Arthur Pinker is a Canadian-American experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, and author of popular science...
, who argue that we are born with certain
cognitiveThe 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...
modulesModularity is a general systems concept, typically defined as a continuum describing the degree to which a system’s components may be separated and recombined. It refers to both the tightness of coupling between components, and the degree to which the “rules” of the system architecture enable the...
(specialised genetically inherited psychological abilities) that allow us to learn and acquire certain skills (such as
languageA language is a system for encoding and decoding information. In its most common use, the term refers to so-called "natural languages" — the forms of communication considered peculiar to humankind. In linguistics the term is extended to refer to the human cognitive facility of creating and using...
). For example, children demonstrate a facility for acquiring spoken language but require intense training to learn to read and write. In
The Blank SlateThe 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 behavior is substantially shaped by evolutionary psychological adaptations...
, Pinker cites this as evidence that humans have an inborn facility for
speech acquisitionLanguage acquisition is the study of the processes through which humans acquire language. By itself, language acquisition refers to first language acquisition, which studies infants' acquisition of their native language, whereas second language acquisition deals with acquisition of additional...
(but not for
literacyLiteracy is a concept claimed and defined by a range of different theoretical fields. In everyday terms, "literacy" is typically described as the ability to read and write...
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 (see
Beyond Modularity by
Annette Karmiloff-SmithAnnette Karmiloff-Smith is a professorial research fellow at the Developmental Neurocognition Lab at Birkbeck, University of London. She is an expert in developmental disorders, with a particular interest in Williams syndrome....
and
Interactive SpecializationInteractive Specialization is a theory of brain development proposed by the British cognitive neuroscientist Mark Johnson, who is head of the Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development at Birkbeck, University of London, London....
).
Criticism
Nativism is sometimes perceived as being too vague to be falsifiable, as there is no fixed definition of when an ability is called innate. Furthermore, it is unclear exactly
how the supposedly innate information might actually be coded for in the genes (a point that
Jeffrey ElmanJeffrey L. Elman is Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of California, San Diego. He is a well-known psycholinguist and pioneer in the field of neural networks....
and colleagues make in
Rethinking InnatenessPublished in 1996 by Jeffrey Elman, Annette Karmiloff-Smith, Elizabeth Bates, Mark Johnson, Domenico Parisi, and Kim Plunkett, Rethinking Innateness has had a significant influence on our understanding of gene/environment interaction...
).
Some researchers argue that the premises of nativism were motivated by outdated considerations and need reconsidering. Nativism was partially motivated by the perception that statistical inferences made from experience were insufficient to account for the complex minds humans have. In part, it was a reaction to the failure of
behaviorismBehaviorism , also called the learning perspective , is a philosophy of psychology based on the proposition that all things which organisms do — including acting, thinking and feeling — can and should be regarded as behaviors...
to account for why some associations were easier to learn than others. With the advent of more complicated mathematics such as
complexity theoryComplexity theory may refer to:*The study of complex systems.*Computational complexity theory, a field in theoretical computer science and mathematics dealing with the resources required during computation to solve a given problem....
or
game theoryGame theory is a branch of applied mathematics that is used in the social sciences, most notably in economics, as well as in biology, engineering, political science, international relations, computer science, and philosophy...
, however, scientists are now able to see that extremely complicated systems can evolve from agents with few pre-programmed rules.
For example, several nativist arguments were inspired by the success of Chomsky in advocating the existence of an innate language-learning module called a
language acquisition deviceThe Language Acquisition Device is a postulated "organ" of the brain that is supposed to function as a congenital device for learning symbolic language . First proposed by Noam Chomsky, the LAD concept is a component of the nativist theory of language...
. Chomsky's arguments were based partially on the assertion that children could not learn complicated grammar based on the input they typically receive. It is now known that many of the claims in Chomsky's
poverty of the stimulusThe poverty of the stimulus argument is a variant of the epistemological problem of the indeterminacy of data to theory that claims that grammar is unlearnable given the linguistic data available to children. As such, the argument strikes against empiricist accounts of language acquisition...
argument are empirically false and that complicated grammars can indeed be developed. Similar arguments extend to other modules.
See also
- Domain specificity
Domain specificity is a theoretical position in cognitive science that argues that many aspects of cognition are supported by specialized, presumably evolutionarily specified, learning devices...
- Evolutionary psychology
Evolutionary psychology attempts to explain psychological traits—such as memory, perception, or language—as adaptations, that is, as the functional products of natural selection or sexual selection. Adaptationist thinking about physiological mechanisms, such as the heart, lungs, and immune system,...
- Nature versus nurture
The nature versus nurture debates concern the relative importance of an individual's innate qualities versus personal experiences The nature versus nurture debates concern the relative importance of an individual's innate qualities ("nature", i.e. nativism, or innatism) versus personal experiences...
- Universal grammar
Universal grammar is a theory of linguistics postulating principles of grammar shared by all languages, thought to be innate to humans . It attempts to explain language acquisition in general, not describe specific languages...
- Neuroconstructivism
In this psychological approach, gene/gene interaction, gene/environment interaction and, crucially, the process of ontogeny are all considered to play a vital role in how the brain progressively sculpts itself and how it gradually becomes specialised over developmental time.Neuroplasticity is...