ABSTRACT
Nativism has a long intellectual heritage going back at least as far as Plato and the claim that we possess innate knowledge. In contrast to local forms of nativism, global nativism involves a claim about the overall nature and extent of our innate psychological endowment. Empiricists suppose that our minds contain relatively little innate structure; and that what specialized structure they have is largely a product of general learning processes. According to many linguists, the existence of linguistic universals – roughly, properties possessed by all possible natural languages – militates in favor of linguistic nativism, since the existence of such universals is readily explained on the assumption that we possess an innate language faculty or universal grammar. As with the case of language, there are many considerations that have been invoked in support of nativism about folk psychology.
