Innateness and Contemporary Theories of Cognition

Nativism is experiencing a resurgence. Up until some sixty years ago, there were no active research programs that were looking for the innate factors in knowledge and cognition that had been hypothesized and argued for by Nativist thinkers since Plato. It was widely agreed that the centuries-old battles between Empiricists and Nativists were over, and that the Empiricists had decisively won. The Nativist situation was actually worse than that: innateness claims were seen as not only wrong, but as ultimately unscientific approaches to mind and perhaps incoherent as well. The prevailing research agenda for scientists and philosophers interested in how the mind works was to show how our knowledge and abilities could be fully accounted for on the basis of our sensory experiences and the general learning mechanisms that operate on them.

I expect that as humans advance or evolve, as their cognitive abilities expand and increase, the opportunity to see previous philosophical views in a more critical manner becomes easier for a wider scope of the population. I wonder if this expansion is fast enough...

A number of developments led to a change in this situation, but most significant was Chomsky's revolutionary work in linguistics in the 1950's and 1960's. Today the cognitive sciences are teeming with multi-disciplinary approaches to mind that are very much open to the idea that the character of our mental lives owes a great deal more to our innate endowments than Empiricists have supposed. It is also teeming with work that is more in line with Empiricist commitments, so it is hard to determine whether, all things considered, the tide has turned in favor of Nativism. But there is no question that the Nativist approach is once again a live and very lively option.

More: Innateness and Contemporary Theories of Cognition (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

I've been following various schools of thought regarding liberty and economics for a while, most of which apply a heavy dose of philosophy to the science of various fields. I suppose I need an outlet to focus on the ideas rather than their application. I am not sure that mental capacity is entirely innate, only that I see an overall increase in the knowledge that can be acquired by individuals in a society.

Welcome to my mind.