Innateness as a natural cognitive kind

Abstract

Innate cognitive capacities are widely posited in cognitive science, yet both philosophers and scientists have criticized the concept of innateness as being hopelessly confused. Despite a number of recent attempts to define or characterize innateness, critics have charged that it is associated with a diverse set of properties and encourages unwarranted inferences among properties that are frequently unrelated. This criticism can be countered by showing that the properties associated with innateness cluster together in reliable ways, at least in the context of the study of cognition (though perhaps not in other scientific domains). Even though the causal connections between these cognitive properties are not always strict, they are robust enough to warrant considering innateness to be a natural kind as used in contemporary cognitive science.

Keywords:

• Cognitive science
• innateness
• nativism
• natural kind

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Jacob Beck, Joshua Mugg, and two anonymous referees for this journal for comments on earlier versions of this paper, which resulted in numerous improvements.

Notes

¹ The OED defines innate, as applied to “qualities, principles, etc. (esp. mental),” simply as “opposed to acquired.” The earliest usage cited is from Thomas Hoccleve, The Regiment of Princes (c. 1420), who speaks of “innat[e] sapience [i.e., intelligence].”

² A full-blown defense of this naturalist attitude towards natural kinds is beyond the scope of this paper, but see Craver (2009) and Khalidi (2013) for two recent accounts of natural kinds that consider them to be grounded in causality.

³ I will not try to respond here to the first criticism, which has been made in a number of papers (Griffiths, Machery & Linquist, 2009; see also Griffiths & Machery, 2008; Griffiths & Stotz, 2008; Linquist, Machery, Griffiths, & Stotz, 2011). But it is worth pointing out that even if the vernacular concept of innateness has some of the associations that these critics have identified, that may not render it unfit for scientific theorizing. Many scientific concepts originate as folk concepts before being refined and revised in order to make them suitable for scientific theorizing. In a recent empirical study of the innateness concept among laypersons and scientists, Knobe and Samuels (2013) argue that members of both groups can engage in a process of “filtering” tainted concepts, dissociating them from unwanted pre-scientific associations. Hence, even when vernacular concepts have been implicated in pre-scientific or discredited scientific theories, scientists (and the folk) are capable of jettisoning their problematic features, especially when thinking explicitly and making considered judgments (as opposed to making snap decisions under time constraints).

⁴ A similar proposal has been made by Samuels (2007), but the features he associates with innateness are somewhat different from those I posit. He continues to consider psychological primitiveness to be the primary feature associated with innateness, as I will go on to argue.

⁵ The terms ‘informational encapsulation’ and ‘cognitive impenetrability’ are sometimes used interchangeably, but I am using them here in different senses, based on the way that they appear to be used in the empirical research that I am relying on. It could be said that the sense of informational encapsulation at play here is a rough counterpart, in the cognitive domain, of the notion of ‘entrenchment’ used by Wimsatt (1999) mentioned in section 1.

⁶ A distinction is sometimes made between a critical period and a sensitive period, the difference being that the former entails a sharp cutoff in the ability to acquire a cognitive capacity while the latter involves a more gradual decline in that ability. However, as numerous researchers have pointed out, there are few if any sharp cutoffs of this sort in cognitive development, so all such periods are more properly thought as sensitive periods. But since it is the more common terminology, I will use ‘critical period’, with the caveat that this does not imply a sharp developmental divide.

⁷ I am grateful to a referee for this journal for urging me to clarify this point.

⁸ I have put forward other criticisms of the primitiveness account elsewhere, see Khalidi (2007).

⁹ Shea (2013) has developed a notion of inherited representation that attempts to escape this problem of genetic and epigenetic heterogeneity. Without trying to rehearse this notion in any detail, it may serve to encompass a variety of different genetic and epigenetic mechanisms for encoding cognitive capacities so that they can be passed from one generation to the next. Thus, I would not rule out the possibility of a viable characterization of the mechanism that holds the features listed in homeostasis.

¹⁰ “Either the presence of some of the properties in [a family of properties] F tends (under appropriate conditions) to favor the presence of the others, or there are underlying mechanisms or processes which tend to maintain the presence of the properties in F, or both” (Boyd, 1989, p. 16).

¹¹ Mameli’s claim concerning the concept MASS is controversial and seems to endorse a view according to which the concept did not survive the theory change from classical to relativistic physics, a view that has been widely disputed. Many scientists and philosophers of science have argued instead that rest mass should be identified with the classical concept mass and that the latter concept has not been eliminated at all (see Earman, 1977; Earman & Friedman, 1973). Note also that it may be misguided to insist to an engineer that one should not talk about mass, but must always distinguish rest mass from relativistic mass.

¹² Recent detailed investigations of the interactions between lay concepts and scientific concepts indicate that the relationship is more complex than some philosophers have hitherto believed, and may not always involve deference by laypersons to scientists. For instance, Radick (2012) relates that the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century geneticist William Bateson resisted the concept heredity but eventually succumbed to widespread usage, indicating that scientists sometimes defer to the lay public.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Muhammad Ali Khalidi

Department of Philosophy, York University