Should we eliminate the innate? Reply to Griffiths and Machery

Abstract

Griffiths and Machery (2008) have argued that innateness is a folk notion that obstructs inquiry and has no place in contemporary science. They support their view by criticizing the canalization account of innateness (Ariew, 1999, 2006). In response, I argue that the criticisms they raise for the canalization account can be avoided by another recent account of innateness, the triggering account, which provides an analysis of the concept as it applies to cognitive capacities (Khalidi, 2002, 2007; Stich, 1975). I also claim that they have not demonstrated that the folk notion of innateness is unsuitable for rehabilitation in a science of cognition. I conclude that they have not made the case that the notion of innateness ought to be eliminated from a scientific account of the mind.

Keywords:

• Cognitive Capacities
• Eliminativism
• Folk Psychology
• Innateness

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Mike Stuart for helpful exchanges on the topic of this paper, and to two anonymous referees for comments that led to significant improvements to this paper.

Notes

Muhammad Ali Khalidi is associate professor of philosophy at York University.

Notes

[1] Since a more general defense of the triggering model of innateness can be found elsewhere (see the references mentioned in the text), I will confine myself here mainly to defending it against the considerations brought forth by G&M.

[2] There are also other ways in which the degree of innateness can be assessed. For instance, if birds from species A acquire imperfect song in the absence of exposure to normal adult song, while those from species B acquire perfect command of adult song in that condition, then we can say that birdsong is more innate in B than in A, even though environmental conditions are more or less the same. For further details, see Khalidi (2007).

[3] Carnap characterizes “explication” as follows: “the transformation of an inexact, prescientific concept… into a new exact concept” (1950, p. 3). However, I do not think that this process always results in a “new” concept, since depending on one's account of conceptual identity and individuation, the resulting concept may indeed be the same. (For more on this point, see section 2.) This type of theoretical explication seems different than either of the two alternatives that G&M consider with respect to Ariew's account: “conceptual analysis” or “identification” that “provides the basis for a promising scientific research strategy” (Griffiths & Machery, 2008, pp. 399–400).

[4] Ariew (2006) states that an adequate account of the human linguistic capacity should capture relevant developmental differences between traits that are independent of linguistic cues and those that require some linguistic cue or other, whereby the cue is too impoverished to explain the output. Here, Ariew incorporates triggers into the account of innateness, but I would argue that if the canalization account is modified to focus on the “cues” that “initiate” canalized pathways, then it will have moved in the direction of the triggering account.

[5] Another significant difference between the triggering account and the invariance account is that the latter leans heavily on the notion of “normal” environments to explain why some innate traits do not emerge in a wide range of environments that happen not to feature the specific conditions needed to lead to the emergence of those innate traits. Since some such environments would otherwise be considered quite normal, it can be argued that the unexplicated notion of normalcy is doing too much work in this account. The problems with this reliance on normalcy have been elaborated in Khalidi (2002, 2005). By contrast, the triggering model can make do with an innocuous notion of normal conditions (inserted in the form of a ceteris paribus clause), which can be interpreted as: conditions necessary for acquiring any cognitive capacity at all (cf. Stich, 1975).

[6] For a particularly clear explication of the argument from the poverty of the stimulus when it comes to the acquisition of human language, see Pullum and Scholz (2002). The authors explicitly identify the data that would be needed for learning as the “lacuna” and hold that if it is to succeed, the argument needs to show both that such data are indispensable to learning and that the data are inaccessible to the subject.

[7] I am grateful to an anonymous referee for raising this point.

[8] Later in this section I will entertain a more subjective construal of “non-obvious,” in considering whether the concept of innateness is methodologically problematic in that it discourages researchers from looking for triggers beyond the ones that they would usually expect.

[9] I owe this point to an anonymous referee.

[10] This is certainly not to suggest that all those who have theorized about the mind since Plato have been nativists. However, even arch empiricists have been concerned to counter claims of innateness.

[11] A search of the PSYCINFO database between 1995 and 2007 reveals that the number of articles published annually that contain ‘innate’ as a keyword rose by 75% during this period. Even allowing for a substantial increase in the number of articles published annually over this period, this is still a very significant increase.

[12] In a sense, this is an optimistic scenario. In Khalidi (2005), I have argued that many psychological properties may crosscut lower-level ones rather than be multiply realizable by them. The same may go for innateness.

[13] For more on functional reduction, see Lewis (1972).

[14] Although it is usually cited as the textbook case of reduction, the extent to which there has been a genuine reduction is in dispute among philosophers of physics.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Muhammad Ali Khalidi

Muhammad Ali Khalidi is associate professor of philosophy at York University.