## 1. Prehistory: Empedocles vs. Anaxagoras




Even before the competing positions on innateness were delineated,
reflective thinkers were drawn to one or the other pole of the
controversy. We can already see a precursor of the debate in the
opposing theories of knowledge of the pre-Socratic philosophers
Empedocles and Anaxagoras.




The poetic Empedocles, who speculated that reality is the product of
ever-recurring cycles of Love and Strife, held that sensation,
perception, and even wisdom, is a matter of knowing "like by
 like".[1]
His rival
Anaxagoras held that "perception is by
 opposites".[2]
 One way to read these obscure fragments is to see them as emblematic
of two different ways of thinking about the mind. For Empedocles, the
mind is made for the world. Mind grasps reality because it is
pre-tuned to the world and resonates with it. For Anaxagoras, the
world has to impress itself upon us; to shape our unformed minds into
*its* form. This image of the world 'informing' the
knower becomes the *tabula rasa* of 17th century
Empiricism. But there is another connection. Empedocles, with his
cycles of Love and Strife, is unabashedly speculative. Anaxagoras, on
the other hand, comes down to us as "dry, clear-headed,
...[having a] common sense attitude". This difference in
intellectual personality is reflected in the subsequent debate.
Empedocles would be very much at home with the Nativistic Rationalist
philosophers and their "rather dreamlike vision of the
universe", as Bernard Williams has put it. The British
Empiricists are more likely to share Anaxagoras' commonsensical
impatience with such flights of fancy.




One last parallel worth noting while we have these early figures in
view is the very radical nature of Empedocles' Nativism. The
fragment can be read as saying that *all* our modes of
understanding are somehow mirrored in our makeup. Despite their
very different philosophical commitments and interests, ancient,
modern, and contemporary Nativists are all drawn to this
*totalistic* version of the doctrine. It is not so much
that they all defend this radical position, but they are all at least
attracted to it. The prevailing thought is that something about
the nature of concepts (ideas, knowledge etc.) per se pushes us to the
Nativist position.


## 2. Plato (and the Aristotelian Tradition)




As with most philosophical matters, Plato is the first in the
Western tradition to address the innateness question directly and to
work out some of its broader implications. The issue first comes
up in the Meno, where he puts forth the doctrine of *anamnesis*,
which holds that all learning is *recollection,* that everything
we will ever learn is already in us before we are
 taught.[3]
According to
this view, perception and inquiry *remind* us of what is innate
in us. In the dialogue, Socrates supports this view by showing
that by simply asking an uneducated slave the right questions, the
slave can 'discover for himself' a version of the
Pythagorean theorem. Socrates does not elaborate the
*anamnesis* claim as much as we would like. Among other
things, it is not clear what counts as knowledge in this context, what
exactly is innate, or how the innate interacts with perception and/or
inquiry to give rise to knowledge. Still, Nativists have treated
the slave-episode in the Meno as a touchstone for their view
('Platonism' has at different times referred to the
innateness doctrine). Apart from the interpretive problems
just noted, the Meno has never been treated as a significant defense of
Nativism, because it is too easy to doubt Socrates' claim that
the slave has not been told the solution. Skeptics see
Socrates' 'questioning' as really implicitly feeding
the slave the right answers. The upshot is that the demonstration
has remained famous as a pedagogical *tour de force*, but not as
a compelling defense for the doctrine of recollection.




In the later dialogue Phaedo, Socrates argues that the notion of
equality involved in perceiving a pair of sticks as equal could not
have its source in experience and therefore must be
 innate.[4]
Here the
focus is not on knowledge *per se*, but on concept-application,
and Plato introduces the theory of forms as part of his explanation: we
have an innate grasp of the form Equality, and this (grasp of the) form
is somehow involved in our perceiving sticks as equal. Here again
the case is less than compelling for at least two reasons: first, it is
hard to pin down exactly how the equality argument is supposed to go,
and second, we are still not sure about the content of Plato's
theory of forms.




Despite the weaknesses in the arguments, Plato's discussions
begin to put key Nativist pieces into play. One could argue,
following Whitehead's famous remark, that all the key elements in
subsequent Nativist theorizing are anticipated in Plato.
Especially important is (i) the *form* of argument (now termed
the *poverty of the stimulus argument*): some x must be innate
because of the *inadequacy* of sensory experience, and (ii) the
focus on mathematical knowledge and concepts.




Though the innateness doctrine is, strictly speaking, an hypothesis
about cognitive development, it is attractive to Plato because of its
deeper metaphysical and methodological consequences. In the Meno,
innateness solves what is sometimes termed the paradox of
inquiry. The paradox: inquiry into the nature of *x* only makes
sense if we don't *know* the nature of *x*, and we have a
way to determine if a candidate account of *x*'s nature is
*correct*. But if we don't know the nature of *x*, how
are we supposed to determine whether a solution is correct?
Plato's *anamnesis* solution sees inquiry as a kind of
deep memory recall. The right answer to our question is already
within us. Inquiry, when successful, reminds us of that answer,
in the same way that we are reminded of the name that goes with a
face. Once the name is consciously brought to mind, we (somehow)
*know* we have it. In this way, innateness provides a
rationale for Socrates' philosophical practice. We once
grasped the transcendent Ideas that represent the real nature of
things. The trace of that earlier understanding remains in our
souls, waiting to be awakened by inquiry. So it makes sense to
embark on a philosophical search for the nature of Truth, Justice,
Piety, Courage, and so on.




Given innateness, Socrates ultimately arrives at a doctrine of
pre-existence - that there is a stage of our existence, before this
life, in which we came by our knowledge - and he goes on to use
pre-existence in an argument for the immortality of the soul.
This connection between innateness and immortality prompts
Socrates' deathbed discussion of innateness in the Phaedo, where
the topic of discussion is the immateriality and immortality of the
soul. Plato seems to be aware that the connection between
Nativism and immortality is tenuous, but the purported tie will haunt
(or edify, depending on one's perspective) Nativism as it evolves
in the modern period.




Plato is the ur-Nativist, so one might have expected Aristotle to be
the ur-Empiricist. They do disagree on innateness, but assigning
Aristotle a place in the innateness controversy is complicated.
Aristotelian thinking rejects Platonic Nativism, in large part because
it rejects Plato's poverty of the stimulus argument.
The key here is the Aristotelian rejection of the theory of
transcendent forms. For Aristotelians, the form of a thing is
*not* a transcendent reality that the thing strives for and
fails to reach, but is rather part and parcel of the thing
itself. Material things are forms embodied in matter. For
Aristotle, our grasp of the nature or form of things is based in
perception, which he understands as a process in which the form of
things - the sensible as well as the intelligible form - is
conveyed to the mind (and the matter left
 behind).[5]
So there is no poverty of
the stimulus to motivate the Nativist account. Variations on this
anti-Nativist approach dominated European thought for two millennia,
and Aristotle's more down-to-earth and less-speculative approach
to philosophy is reflected in 17th and 18th
century Empiricism. But it would obscure too many
differences - especially in their views of perception and
reason - to put Aristotle at the head of the Empiricist line.


## 3. The Rationalist Deployment of Nativism: Descartes & Leibniz




Intelligibility is at the heart of the revival of the innateness
doctrine in the modern period. From the very start of the Western
tradition, it has been widely accepted that we not only sense the
world, but that we also *make sense* of it; that it is not only
*sensible* but also *intelligible*. Platonism
explains intelligibility in terms of the innate forms that we are
reminded of by sense-experience. Aristotelianism explains
intelligibility in terms of a richer theory of perception - viz.,
it holds that we *receive* the intelligible nature of things
from the things themselves. The scientific revolution of the
17th century, with its stress on the distinction between
primary and secondary qualities and its materialist conception of the
physical world, undercut the Aristotelian view of perception
completely. The problem can be illustrated with the new account
of vision. What happens when we see, according to the new
scientific picture, is that light bouncing off an object carries a
pattern of motion to the eye. These motions cause motions in the
brain, and (somehow) conscious visual experience results. How can
we explain the richness of our conception of the world given that only
motions reach the sense organs? There seems to be no natural way
to incorporate the transmission of Aristotelian intelligible forms into
this account, so the problem of intelligibility returns. In the
Second Meditation, Descartes exposes this gap between what the senses
receive and what the mind knows and understands. Considering a
piece of wax, which presents itself to us as a contingent set of actual
and possible sensory images, he asks how we come to understand it in
the way scientists must - as an inherently colorless, odorless,
persistent object with an underlying nature that is subject to
mathematical laws? The answer, for Descartes, is that we all have
an *abstract, non-sensory* idea of a physical object.
Sense-perception makes it possible for us to 'fill out'
this abstract idea with the contingent details of our actual
situation. But *intelligibility,* our most general
*understanding* of the world - of physical objects, of
space, of causality, of God, and so on - is grounded in these
abstract ideas. But where do these general abstract ideas come
from, given the 'poverty' of sense? Nativism now
seems an attractive answer. We must come into the world
pre-loaded with the categories (concepts, principles, general ideas,
etc) that will enable us to make sense of what we actually see, hear,
etc. Reason can mine this innate endowment to arrive at an
*apriori* understanding of things.




One can see the concept of innateness at work behind the scenes in
Descartes' wax argument, but that passage is designed more to
rid us of the idea that our deepest understanding of things comes from
the senses than to defend innateness. It is in working out the
implications of the wax discussion that we arrive at an innate
abstract concept of spatial extension. Innateness is also at work, but
again behind the scenes, in the central argument of the Meditations
that takes us from the fact that we have an idea of God to the
existence of God outside the mind. This (innate) idea of an infinite
being (God's 'signature' in us his creatures, as
Descartes has it) is what makes it possible for us to know that there
is a world beyond our thoughts and that our thoughts are not
systematically mistaken. But in the discussion in Meditation III,
Descartes again does not feature the concept of innateness - when
and how we've come by our idea of God is less to the point than
that we have it and could not have constructed it from our thoughts
about our own mind. What's more, that argument takes as a given
a causal principle to the effect that the cause of an idea must have
at least as great a 'degree of formal reality' (read: reality)
as the 'objective reality' (read: the degree of reality of the
object/content) of the idea. The principle is arcane, and it's hard
to imagine how Descartes could have explained its availability to the
Meditator except by claiming that it rests on a clear and distinct
insight into the nature of causality, which would presumably have to
be given innately. In both these arguments, as in most of his main
works, Descartes does not address the concept of innateness head-on
(the outburst in his Notes Directed Against a Certain Program, which
includes a defense of the radical view that
*all* our ideas are innate, is the most notable
exception). Part of the problem might be that it is not easy to
integrate the claim that there are innate ideas or principles with
Descartes' identification of mind and consciousness. What
is innate is in the mind prior to experience. He suggests at one
point that ideas may be in the mind innately in the way that gout may
run in a family. To the extent that this is read as a propensity
theory, it will come in for heavy criticism in the Empiricist attack on
innateness.




Leibniz, the other important Rationalist defender of innateness,
elaborates the theory in a number of important ways in his New Essays
on Human Understanding. He famously challenges Locke's
analogy of the mind as blank slate with a competing image of the mind
as a block of marble whose veins already mark out the shape of Hercules
(52). A more significant point is his sharpening of the poverty
of the stimulus claim. He argues that our experience of the world
is always of contingent particulars, but our knowledge can be general,
and sometimes necessary (50). Going back to the Meno example, the
slave can see that the squares Socrates has scratched out in the dirt
stand in a certain relation, but he ends up knowing that such a
connection *must* hold of any possible set of squares that meets
Socrates' initial description; that it holds - to use a phrase
Leibniz introduced - *in all possible worlds*. Leibniz
argues that rationality must involve more than induction from
contingent experience. It must ultimately rely on innate ideas
and principles that allow us to grasp not just how things
*happen* to be, but also *why* they *must* be that
way.




Leibniz also addresses the question of how the innateness doctrine
needs to be integrated into a broader epistemology and theory of
mind. Among his most important contributions in this area: (i)
the defense of unconscious mental states (53), (ii) the suggestion that
not all of our innate endowment needs to be realized as (unconscious)
ideas and thoughts, but might instead be
'procedural' - inborn ways of thinking and reasoning
(84), (iii) a clear distinction between something's being innate
in us and its being *known* innately, and (iv) the provocative
idea, also hinted at in Descartes, that our innate endowment is not
simply a grab-bag of elements that God thought it would be good for us
to start out with, but is in some way a systematic reflection of our
nature - for example, the fact that we are substances and can
reflect on our natures somehow provides us with the innate idea of
substance (as Leibniz has it: we are "innate to
ourselves" (51-2)). Leibniz, like Plato, saw the innateness
issue as being *the* most important point of disagreement
between himself and Locke, and perhaps as the central issue in
philosophy. He suspected that Locke's anti-Nativism was an
indirect attack on the immaterial soul and therefore a challenge to the
idea of the afterlife and immortality, and therefore a challenge to
religion, to ethics, and to public order.




Finally, we note that there are really two distinct but related
Leibnizian philosophies. The foregoing represents Leibniz's
attempt to 'mainstream' his thought and contribute to the
broader 17th century controversy over science, epistemology,
and innateness. But there is another Leibniz that we find in his
more speculative, more Empedoclean, metaphysical writings, particularly
the Monadology. Leibniz' goal there is presciently like the
work of contemporary string theorists - i.e., to look
*behind* the scientific picture and lay out the still-deeper
ontological and metaphysical nature of reality. The relevant
point for us is that the ultimate simple elements in this
system - the individual 'monads' - contain
representations of the world beyond themselves, but these
representations are not caused by the world. For Leibniz,
world-to-mind causality is only an appearance. The reality is
that each monad contains, as part of its essential nature, a preloaded
set of representations of the world. The sequential
'unfolding' or 'playing out' of these
representations can be thought of, in the case of minds, as a stream of
consciousness. But the monads do not interact; instead, the
streams are coordinated by a pre-established divine harmony
(Leibniz's analogy is a pair of synchronized clocks). The
upshot of all this is that we arrive (again) at the radical conclusion
that *all* thought and experience is innate. There can be
*no* external origin for a mental element in Leibniz's
monadology, and the same can be said for the metaphysics of Spinoza,
the third of the great Rationalists.




The three Nativist thinkers we have so-far discussed also happen to
be Rationalists; that is, they all hold that Reason allows us to go
beyond experience and to arrive at a more profound grasp of the
world. There is a natural affinity between Nativism and
Rationalism, but it needs to be stressed that despite the tendency to
identify the two, they are different. Nativism is about the
initial conditions of our mental life. Rationalism is about the
character of what we can know. Nativism is a supporting element
in these larger Rationalist philosophies. But this raises a
question that perceptive critics of 17th century Rationalism
asked - viz., even if it were granted that there *are*
innate concepts and principles, how can they support Rationalism unless
we know independently that they are correct? Otherwise, we have
no warrant to hold that these innate materials reveal the ultimate
nature of the world (let alone all possible worlds). It is
tempting to think that the 17th century response would be to
add the premise that such innate ideas and principles are God-given,
and God would not deceive us. But this reply is inadequate.
First, it is hard to avoid the charge of circularity, but second, it is
also dogmatic about God's plans. How do we know, as one
critic put it, that the (purported) innate materials we start with are
not meant to be burnt away by experience, in the manner of the natural
wild growth of soil before it is cultivated?




As it happens, the Rationalist can resist the temptation to invoke
God, and avoid the dead-end to which it leads. For Descartes, the
presence in us of innate materials is of course a contingent fact, but
the *warrant* for the deeper truths we derive from what is
innate does not involve any premises about their origin. It is
because we have innate ideas that we can think of mind and extension in
the abstract way we do. But the principle *that matter
(extension) cannot think* is an a priori truth (according to
Descartes) because we see *clearly and distinctly* that it is
holds. Clarity-and-distinctness as a criterion of truth raises
its own difficulties, but the difficulties are not the obvious and
devastating ones raised above. Once we disentangle Nativism from
Rationalism, we can look back and identify the non-Nativist Rationalist
elements in Aristotle, and see Rationalist elements in the Empiricist
and arch anti-Nativist Locke. Both present us with forms of
Rationalism without Nativism. By the same light, contemporary
nativists inspired by Chomsky's Linguistic Nativism are
emphatically 
anti-Rationalist.[6]


## 4. Empiricism and the Attack on Nativism: Locke and Hume




The modern *debate* about innateness really begins with
Locke's polemic against innate principles and innate ideas in the
opening chapters of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, which
happens to also be the founding document of modern Empiricism.
The point of the polemic is to delegitimize innateness as a candidate
explanation of our knowledge and understanding, and to thereby leave
the field to the Empiricist account that is developed in the rest of
the Essay. The thrust of Locke's arguments is
two-fold: first, that the facts Nativists cite in favor of their views
are not facts at all; second, that even if the facts were granted for
the sake of argument, Empiricist accounts are preferable, because they
are simpler. The simplicity resides in the fact that both parties
accept a role for experience in knowledge acquisition.
Empiricists presume there is *only* experience; Nativists think
there is experience plus innate principles and ideas. If we can
account for knowledge without innate ideas, principles, and so on, the
Empiricist wins. Given the logic of the situation as Locke
understands it, the whole polemical *negative* attack on
innateness is almost beside the point. The real epistemological
prize he is after can only be won by providing a satisfactory
*positive* innateness-free account of how knowledge is produced
from experience. But Locke is probably right in thinking that his
Empiricist doctrines will be more convincing if there is no Nativist
alternative to challenge them.




Why, according to Locke, is Nativism not only unnecessary but
illegitimate? One prominent theme is that if there were innate
principles in the mind - his example is *Whatsoever is,
is* - we would be aware of them, and they would therefore be
universally assented to. But, he argues, children and idiots cannot
even make sense of such claims, let alone assent to them. He goes on
to argue that various fallback positions - assent when they
understand, assent when they begin to reason, capacity to assent under
appropriate conditions - all reduce the claim to a sort of
triviality. The upshot is that innateness is either a real alternative
to Empiricism but obviously false, or trivially true but not
incompatible with Empiricism.




Underlying much of Locke's attack is the Cartesian view that
to claim something is 'in the mind', innately or not, is to
give it a place in our conscious awareness. Leibniz's bold
hypothesis of non-conscious mental states would, if successful, sweep
aside most of Locke's arguments against innateness. But we
need to keep in mind that the polemics in the Essay, though they were
historically influential, are almost a sideshow. The real issue
is whether the Empiricist can construct a satisfactory account of human
knowledge without adverting to any innate ideas and principles.
To meet this challenge, Locke (and to an even greater extent Hume)
offered what may be termed *adequacy of the stimulus*
counterarguments. Locke constructs a theory of experience
(perception and reflection) as the source of all our ideas, sketches an
account of the mental faculties that can be brought to bear on these
ideas, and applies these materials to our ideas of infinity, number,
space, substance, our understanding of general principles of causality,
and so on. These were the abstract ideas and principles that
Rationalists had claimed could *not* be derived from perceptual
experience. Locke wants to demonstrate that such ideas and
principles *can* be acquired without the need for any innate
'pre-seeding'. Locke believes that the key to
intelligibility and understanding lies in a proper appreciation of what
our faculty of Reason can accomplish when set to work on the ideas
received in our experience.




In considering Locke's execution of this plan in the Essay we
discover a trend that grows stronger in subsequent Empiricist thinkers
like Hume and his 19th and 20th century
successors. One can be easily misled into thinking that there was
a general agreement on both sides of this controversy about the
*explanandum*: we can call that our understanding, or simply the
intelligibility of the world. The innateness controversy would
then be about which theory can provide the best explanation of this
agreed-upon 'Understanding'. But this positivistic
paradigm of the dynamics of theory-selection does not fit the real
debate. A Kuhnian perspective is closer to the truth.
Empiricists inevitably reconfigured the *explanandum* - some
elements of the original *explanandum* were to be (better)
*explained* by the Empiricist account, but a good deal of it was
to be *explained away* as Rationalist over-reaching. Our
earlier example of Descartes' *a priori* claim that matter
cannot think is a case in point. Locke's system was
criticized for not being able to exclude the possibility of thinking
matter. But for Locke, that possibility was not excludable,
despite Descartes' clear and distinct perception to the
contrary. So Locke does not accept the explanatory burden of
providing an Empiricist account of how it is that the Understanding
grasps the falsity of materialism and the truth of dualism. Our
knowledge of the world does not extend as far as the Rationalist
thinks, and the *true* explanatory burden is therefore lighter
than the Rationalist makes it out to be. This pattern of
*explaining away* reaches its culmination in Hume, who sees more
clearly than Locke that the fact that the mind can make the world
intelligible is itself a philosophical presumption that needs to be
explained away. Hume replaces it with a naturalistic account of
how we track the way the world appears to us, and collate the results
to guide us in the future. Our understanding of the world, in
Hume's philosophy, is thinned out into something the Rationalists
would not count as Understanding at all; his conception of human reason
is, appropriately enough, a pale shadow of their Reason.




The doctrinally pure(r) Empiricism that we find in Hume also
contains a surprising twist for the innateness doctrine. The
alternative to innateness, at least in Locke's shorthand form, is
that ideas come via the senses from the world outside us. But it
can be argued that Hume's Empiricism has no room for thinking of
a world outside us, and certainly not for ideas as copies of properties
of things or as caused by things in that world (a point also stressed
by the other prominent British Empiricist, Bishop Berkeley).
Hume, perhaps a bit tongue-in-cheek, tells us that the innateness
debate is totally wrong-headed and that as he sees it, *all our
impressions are innate*, in that they are original to the
 mind.[7]
Along these
lines, one can argue that for Hume, innateness is a red herring.
What matters to Empiricism is not the history of ideas in the mind and
the before or after, but the *nature* of those ideas.
Specifically, what's foundationally important for Humean
Empiricism is not anti-Nativism, but what we might call
*experientialism*, the thesis that all our ideas are
*representations of particular sensory states*. We can
summarize this and say they must be 'copies of
experiences', but for Hume, it has no philosophical import if we
one day learn how to tinker with a fetus to produce in its mind an
'innate' representation of the taste of chocolate.
What counts is that the idea produced be experiential in the right
sense. For Hume we will never be able to tinker away to produce
an abstract idea of causal power, because *there is no such
idea* - all ideas are experiential or constructs of such.
(These points, I think, can explain why Hume is so cavalier about the
famous missing shade of blue that seems to not be copied from
experience - i.e., because it is still an experiential
 idea.)[8]


## 5. The Kantian Turn




Kant is usually given short shrift in discussions of the history of
the Nativism-Empiricism controversy. He is certainly not an
Empiricist; he sees his philosophy as a *response* to the
challenge of Humean Empiricism. Nevertheless, he is critical of
Rationalist versions of the Innateness doctrine at every turn. In
my view, Kant is a
 Nativist.[9] 
The reason for the anomalies is that he is
much *more* than a Nativist, and assigns a very different role
to what is innate in us than the role assigned by his Rationalist
predecessors. 




The 'more' here is Kant's distinctive approach
to metaphysics and epistemology; his Transcendental Idealism. 
Hume had argued that since knowledge is based on experience, our
knowledge of the world could not go beyond registering and mining
regularities in that experience. The prospect of what Kant called
*synthetic a priori* knowledge - of an understanding of the
necessary structuring principles of reality - was beyond us. 
Kant takes it as a given that we have such knowledge and sets out to
construct a system that explains how such knowledge is possible. 
His response to Hume's challenge is to argue that the
distinctive structure of experience is a function of our nature. 
We *impose* regularities. If these regularities are
recognized as our contribution, and we understand the structuring
principles that are at work, we can make sense of the actuality of
synthetic apriori knowledge. But the price we pay is that this is
knowledge of the world of *appearances*, not about things as
they are in themselves.




Kant divides these ordering principles into the Forms of Sensible
Intuition and the Categories. *Space* and *Time*
are pre-experiential ordering principles that give us sense experience
of a spatial and temporal world. The Categories play a parallel
role for the understanding. Through the category of
*Causality*, for example, we impose causal structure on the
events that we perceive. This imposed structure allows us to move
from the subjectivity of successive sensations to experience of an
objective world. Consider an analogy: the pixel structure of
every picture that a digital camera takes is the result of an ordering
principle imposed on every photograph by the nature of the
camera. The pixel structure of the representations does
*not* capture a feature of the camera-independent reality. 
Similarly, the spatiotemporality and categorical structure of our
experience is *not* a feature of a mind-independent
reality. 




Kant's main complaint against Rationalist Nativism was that
it accepted that the innate had to correspond to an independent
reality, but it could not explain how we could establish such a
correspondence or use it to account for the full range of our
knowledge. In this, it failed to meet
Hume's
 challenge.[10] 
Kant finds the
position guilty of a number of related fatal errors. 


1. *Warrant*. How can we establish that innate principles are
true of the world? In the Prolegomena he criticizes the Innateness
doctrine of his contemporary Crusius because even if a benevolent
non-deceiving God was the source of the innate principles, we have no
way to reliably determine which candidate principles are innate and
which may pass as such (for 
some).[11]
2. *Psychologism*. At times
Kant seems to suggest that the psychologism of Rationalist Nativism is
itself a problem and makes it impossible to explain how we can get
knowledge of objective necessary connections (as opposed to
subjective
 necessities).[12]
3. *Modal concepts*. Callanan
2013 reads Kant as offering a Hume-style argument that Rationalist
Nativism cannot explain how we could come to have a *concept* of
objective necessity, if all we had were innate psychological
principles.




The root problem of Rationalist Nativism, as seen through the lens
of Kant's Transcendental Idealism, is that it needs to say more
than that something - a framework of concepts, ideas, principles,
etc. - is innate in us. It needs to say that it is
*only* in *us*. It must acknowledge that we
*create* the structure that we find in our experience. The
problems of Rationalist Nativism all arise from trying to get from the
mind's structuring to the world's inherent
structure. Once we drop the idea that we are aiming for the
world's inherent, mind-independent structure, the problems
(should) dissolve. 




From Plato until Kant, Nativism was supposed to serve Realism. 
Whatever the vision of reality was - Forms for Plato, matter and
mind for Descartes, etc. - our grasp of that reality was possible
because we were provided with a map to that reality before we set
out. Kant rejects the Realist aspirations of this
tradition. For him, we can *never* understand the
*ultimate* nature of things as they are in themselves. Our
theoretical knowledge can only go as deep as the structure we
impose. The only necessity we can grasp is the one we have
spontaneously made.




We've discussed Kant's main complaint about the
Nativist tradition, at least as a reply to the Empiricist
challenge. But he also argues that we have no innate
*representations* of Space, of Time, of Causality, or of any of
the ordering principles we impose apriori (Zoeller 1989). To
return to our earlier analogy: the initial state of the camera includes
no pictures/representations of the innate abstract pixel structure that
the camera imposes. But unlike the camera, *we* can
*acquire* representations of these ordering
constraints - these Kant terms 'pure apriori ideas' of
Space, of Time, of Causality, of Substance, and so on. These pure
apriori ideas play a crucial role in our *understanding* of how
knowledge of mathematics and metaphysics and natural science is
possible. In this respect Kant agrees with Locke that there are no
innate principles or ideas to be 'found' in us. Both hold
that all our ideas have their origin in experience. But Locke thinks
that we build these ideas by *abstracting* from experience and
recombining abstracted elements. Kant holds that such representations
or ideas *cannot* be abstracted from experience; they must be
the product of careful reflection on the nature of
experience.[13]




The camera analogy can help highlight an important shift.
 Imagine that our camera is damaged and its resolution in part of
the screen is diminished. This newly acquired constraint will be
reflected in every subsequent photo, and this low-resolution element
would be an 'apriori' feature of each photo: it would be a
contribution of the representational structure of the camera, not of
the scene. The point is that the key feature of Kant's
framework elements is the role they play in structuring experience,
*not* whether they are present as part of the initial
condition. In principle, acquired changes could play
this
 role.[14] 
In this respect,
Kant shifted the epistemological focus away from genetic questions of
*origins* to questions about *sources of warrant*. 
It could be argued that this shift moved innateness to the periphery of
philosophical concern until its 20th century
revival.


## 6. The (Temporary) Triumph of Anti-Nativism




In terms of the historical contest, Empiricism emerged triumphant,
and as inevitably happens in such victories, anti-Nativism triumphed
over Nativism. The doctrine of innate ideas came to
be seen as backward and unscientific, as inextricably tied to
discredited metaphysical and theological doctrines, and as therefore
incompatible with a naturalistic approach to human nature.
Empiricism developed very much along Humean lines (and with
Anaxagoras' anti-speculative hard-headedness). The
20th century Logical Positivists and Logical Empiricists
agreed with Hume that we have no *a priori* knowledge about the
intelligible structure of the
 world.[15]
*A priori* knowledge is only
possible in the formal sciences, and this is so only because such
knowledge is ultimately about the structure of our concepts and/or our
language. Others, following Quine, have gone a step further and
followed John Stuart Mill's lead in rejecting *all* claims to
knowledge of *apriori* necessary truths. For Quine, only
our sensory evidence ultimately warrants the claim that
 2+2=4.[16]
On both
views, once we get straight about the true nature and extent of our
knowledge, Nativism turns out to be an unnecessary extravagance.




Even without its 17th century metaphysical and theological
'baggage', the Nativist view, and the entire controversy
surrounding it, came to be seen as born in conceptual confusion about
the proper task of a theory of knowledge. Real philosophical questions
are about the
*nature* of our ideas and about the *structure* and
*justification* of our knowledge. Nativism deflects attention
from these issues, and distracts us with empirical claims about
the *genesis* of ideas and beliefs. Kantianism, the main
19th century alternative to the Empiricist project, presses
many of these ideas. The modern scientific temperament was influenced
by both these approaches, and eventually to be identified with
Empiricism. We learn about the world only from our perceptual
encounter with it; nothing is revealed to us beforehand. So innateness
was triply condemned: it was born of superstitious religious thinking,
it is empirically false, and it is philosophically beside the
point.


## 7. Conclusion: Choosing Sides




Although the battleground for the historical controversy over
innateness was epistemology, if we take one step back we see the
Rationalist defense of the doctrine as part of a broader set of
metaphysical, theological, and ethical commitments. Different
Nativists would highlight different elements, but the underlying
picture of human nature that emerges from the Nativist side of the
historical debate is something like this. We human beings,
distinct from all other created things, are not fully of this material
world. We are guided in our thought and action by a special gift
from our creator, who has seen fit to implant in our souls the deeper
truth of the nature of the world, and special guidance about how we are
to act in it. We must discover this inner truth, and adhere to it
in the face of the often-distracting course of our experience.




Looking at Locke as the voice for the other side of the controversy,
we find a very different set of motivations. Nativism makes
understanding seem too much like inherited wealth. It suggests
that without our innate legacy we would not have the resources to
understand the world we live in. To this extent, Nativism stands
against the ethos of individual initiative. It can also be too
easily abused as a tool of intellectual authoritarianism, because those
who are not up to the task of uncovering these rarified innate truths
must take their lead from those who are. For the Empiricist this
is an invitation to superstition, obscurity, and abuse. The
Empiricist does not see our understanding as in any way given to us as
a gift. It is the product of our individual labor. God has
given all of us the general ability to reason, and this includes the
ability to acquire knowledge from experience; it is our job to exercise
that ability. We fully own our knowledge: we collect the raw
materials and add our mental labor to create it. Locke is more
drawn to the dignity of the worker than to the status of the aristocrat
who has received a special inherited honor.




The factors that drove Locke's rejection of Nativism
ultimately led, in no small part through Hume's philosophy, to
the now-dominant naturalistic picture of human beings. On this
picture we humans are material beings continuous with the rest of the
natural world, we have no divine element in our nature and no divine
guidance to help us along, and no recourse but to build our
understanding of our world on our experience. But I close with
two points about these developments. The first has to do with
Locke, our arch anti-Nativist, and it is that he would have been
horrified at what his Empiricism has wrought. The underlying
Rationalist picture I sketched two paragraphs back is a picture that
Locke would, with some small reservations, have accepted. He was
a dualist and a theist, he believed in an afterlife, and he saw our
god-given faculty of Reason as capable of discovering the most
important truths about our world and our lives - i.e., the
existence of God and the nature of our moral duties. The second
point is that even though our contemporary naturalism was inspired by
anti-Nativist Empiricism, it has seen a revival of Nativist
thinking. The turning point in this revival, Chomsky's work
in linguistics, is an area set apart from the concerns that energized
the historical controversy over
 innateness.[17]
But contemporary
research in cognitive development, genetics, evolutionary psychology,
and other fields has extended Chomsky's Nativist thinking to the
very concepts and principles that were at the heart of the historical
debate (god, morality, personhood/mind, causality, mathematics, basic
ontology, etc.).