ABSTRACT
Nativism has a long intellectual heritage going back at least as far as Plato and the claim that we possess innate knowledge. More recently, it has played a pivotal role in the development of cognitive science, where largely under Chomky’s inuence, innateness hypotheses have been invoked to explain a broad array of psychological phenomena, including concept acquisition, theory of mind, arithmetic and language. Though there are many interesting issues about the history of nativist thought and its connections to more recent concerns (Scott 1995; Stich 1975; Cowie 1999), in what follows I focus primarily on recent incarnations of nativism and the debates in which they gure.
