Nativism and Science: A History of Schipwrecks and a Desert Island
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5944/endoxa.46.2020.28495Keywords:
Nativism, Naturalism, Chomsky, Descartes, Leibniz.Abstract
The classic theory of innate ideas experienced a resurge in the last decades through the Chomskyan philosophy of mind and language and in association with a genetic justification. However, the clarification of the role and scope of the genes in development, along with the complexity and plurality of the systems that comprise them has shadowed, perhaps even blown out, the reputation of this stance. Historically, it is argued here that a similar effect happened regarding the Cartesian nativism, when interpreted as a dispositional model of the innate and accommodated to the epigeneticist model of development. The price of the survival of some kind of nativism appears to be to maintain itself isolated from any naturalistic reading and to stress its metaphysical character, the epitome of which is Leibniz’s monadological model.
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