On the Need to Seriously Challenge the Empiricist Side of the Nativist–Empiricist Debate

Abstract

The nativist-empiricist debate, and all “middle ground” efforts designed to resolve it, are fundamentally marred by a “transmission” mentality—a belief that development entails information transmission from one source to another. Critics of this transmission mentality seek to transcend the nativist-empiricist debate altogether by reorienting the study of development to the actual processes and activities of development itself. Their message—that both nativism and empiricism share a view of development that is decidedly nondevelopmental—has been around for decades. So why do efforts to seek a middle ground between nativism and empiricism still flourish? I argue that critics of the nativist-empiricist debate spend more time attacking the nativist side of the debate than they do attacking the empiricist side. This imbalance, in turn, seriously dilutes the message of the critique, especially when notions of learning remain part of proposals for an alternative, process orientation to development.