Dr Mark Cain

The question of innateness, or nativism, is one of the most heated problems in philosophy, reaching as far back as Plato but generating fierce debates in contemporary philosophy and cognitive science. Which aspects of the human mind are innate and which are the products of experience? Do we have any innate concepts or knowledge or are all the contents of the mind acquired by means of learning? Innateness and Cognition is a much-needed overview of this important problem. Through addressing the following topics M.J. Cain argues for a nativist perspective which, nevertheless, finds an important role for culture and social learning in cognitive development:

• the nature of innateness
• the coherence and explanatory value of the concept of innateness
• the acquisition of concepts and the role of learning in conceptual development
• domain specific knowledge, including the 'massive modularity' thesis and the theory of core knowledge domains
• cognitive development relating the theory of mind and mathematics
• the relationship between biological and cultural evolution and their respective roles in cognitive development
• language and innateness, particularly Chomsky's linguistic nativism and challenges to this
• morality, moral judgment and innateness.

Innateness and Cognition is an excellent resource for those researching and studying in philosophy of psychology and philosophy of mind, as well as those interested in foundational issues in cognitive science, psychology, linguistic and anthropology.

The function of morality is a matter of what morality is ‘for’, what its purpose is or what goal it is designed to achieve. This chapter shows that the appeal to the distinction between why-questions and how-questions defeats any challenge to the point and legitimacy of asking the question as to the function of morality. One of the most interesting, well-developed and important versions of the view that morality has a cooperative function has been developed by Michael Tomasello as part of a broader project concerned with the origins of human cognition. It will be instructive to consider Tomasello’s perspective on morality in some detail. Tomasello’s goal is to provide what he calls a ‘natural history of morality’, an account of how morality developed in the human species. Morality is something that emerged in the species as a result of a process of intellectual reflection and subsequent insight into our situation when we attempt to cooperate.

This chapter focuses on the question of how children acquire mastery of their first language, with particular emphasis on the development of syntactic and semantic knowledge. With respect to the development of syntactic knowledge there has been much heated debate surrounding the respective roles of learning and innate language-specific knowledge. I survey this debate before turning to the issue of how children come to know which words belong to their language and what those words mean. I argue that although learning plays an important role in vocabulary development, such learning is possible only because we have a battery of abstract concepts and an associated metaphysical perspective on the world that is part of our innate endowment.