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The Cultural Origins of Cognitive Adaptations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 April 2017

David Papineau
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Extract

According to an influential view in contemporary cognitive science, many human cognitive capacities are innate. The primary support for this view comes from ‘poverty of stimulus’ arguments. In general outline, such arguments contrast the meagre informational input to cognitive development with its rich informational output. Consider the ease with which humans acquire languages, become facile at attributing psychological states (‘folk psychology’), gain knowledge of biological kinds (‘folk biology’), or come to understand basic physical processes (‘folk physics’). In all these cases, the evidence available to a growing child is far too thin and noisy for it to be plausible that the underlying principles involved are derived from general learning mechanisms. This only alternative hypothesis seems to be that the child's grasp of these principles is innate. (Cf. Laurence and Margolis, 2001.)

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Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 56 , December 2005 , pp. 291 - 324
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2005

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