Psychological nativism

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For nativism as a political force, see Nativism.

In the field of psychology, nativism is the view that certain skills or abilities are 'native' or hard wired into the brain at birth. This is in contrast to Empiricism, the 'blank slate' or tabula rasa view which states that the brain has little innate ability and almost everything is learned through interaction with the environment.

When understood as an interdisciplinary field in their own right, nativist approaches are referred to collectively as nativist theorizing.

Philosopher Immanuel Kant reasoned in his Critique of Pure Reason that the human mind knows objects in innate, a priori ways. Kant claimed that humans, from birth, must experience all objects as being successive (time) and juxtaposed (space). His list of inborn Categories are predicates that the mind can attribute to any object in general. Schopenhauer agreed with Kant, but reduced the number of innate Categories to one, namely, causality, which presupposes the others.

Nativism is most associated with the work of Jerry Fodor, Noam Chomsky, and Steven Pinker, who argue that we are born with certain cognitive modules (specialised genetically inherited psychological abilities) that allow us to learn and acquire certain skills (such as language). They argue that many such abilities would otherwise be greatly impaired without this genetic contribution. For example, children demonstrate a facility with acquiring spoken language but require intense training to learn to read and write. In The Blank Slate, Pinker cites this as evidence that humans have an inborn facility with speech acquisition (but not with literacy acquisition).

Psychologist Annette Karmiloff-Smith has put forward a theory known as the representational redescription or RR model of development which argues against such strict nativism and which proposes that the brain may become modular through experience within certain domains (such as social interaction or visual perception) rather than modules being genetically pre-specified.

In the United Kingdom, Stephen Laurence of the University of Sheffield initiated an interdisciplinary nativist theorizing project, entitled Innateness and the Structure of the Mind, which ran from 2001 to 2004 and was funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Board (AHRB). [1]