Nativism

Nativism is the view that some knowledge, concepts, or cognitive structures are innate rather than acquired entirely through experience. It appears in debates about mind, language, and development.

Empiricism: The philosophical view that knowledge originates in sensory experience. Empiricism gives experience the explanatory role that nativism assigns partly to innate structure.
Universal grammar: A proposed set of innate structural principles shared by human languages. It is a prominent claim that language learning depends on inborn structure.
Plato: An ancient Greek philosopher whose dialogues explore knowledge, reality, and virtue. His theory of recollection is an early influential account of knowledge not derived from ordinary experience.
Meno's paradox: A puzzle in Plato's Meno about how inquiry can discover what one does not know. Plato uses the puzzle to introduce recollection as an account of learning.
Nature versus nurture: The debate over how inherited factors and environmental experience shape traits and abilities. Nativism is one position within this broader dispute about cognitive development.
Blank Slate: The view that the mind begins without built-in ideas or knowledge. The blank-slate model is the strongest foil to claims of innate mental content.
Language acquisition device: A hypothesized innate mental capacity that enables children to acquire language. This proposal describes a mechanism intended to explain rapid language learning.
René Descartes: A seventeenth-century French philosopher and mathematician who argued for innate ideas. Descartes made innate ideas central to his account of human knowledge.
Descartes' innate ideas: The claim that certain ideas, including ideas of God and mathematical truths, are present in the mind innately. This is a canonical philosophical version of nativism about ideas.
Neuroconstructivism: An approach that explains cognitive development through interactions among brain, body, and environment. It challenges fixed, pre-specified mental modules by emphasizing developmental construction.

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