ABSTRACT
There are plenty to choose from, although no one notion seems to be entirely satisfactory. This chapter argues that for a cognitive ability to be innate is for its developmental emergence not to be a direct consequence of data-driven learning. In short, innate = not learned. This way of characterizing innateness fits perfectly with the most compelling arguments for innateness, which take the form of poverty of stimulus arguments. Such arguments aim to show that some aspect of humans’ syntactic abilities, say, is not entirely a consequence of data-driven learning. The domain in which innateness has been most extensively and carefully researched is probably syntax. Abilities to track syntactic properties and exploit them in communicating with words cannot be based merely on past exposure to particular sentences. The fact that 18-month-olds tend to interpret phrases like ‘the red ball’ as having a nested structure is not by itself evidence of innateness.
