Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

At the heart of cognitive science lie two problems: the nature of our knowledge and how it emerges. For many centuries, these issues were the province of philosophers only. Nativists such as René Descartes argued that much of our knowledge was innate, driven by the character of the human mind and only indirectly by the nature of the particular events we might experience. By contrast, empiricists such as John Locke argued that very little of our knowledge was innate; rather, he argued that knowledge was acquired through a lengthy process of learning in which the putative primitive elements of thought – the sensations – came to be associated with each other, yielding higher-level concepts. While no longer the sole province of philosophy, the nativist and empiricist frameworks have come to organize some of the most important issues in cognitive science today: How can we characterize human knowledge? How does it emerge? What are the relative contributions of innate structure and learning through experience? From the nativist perspective, the general answer to these questions is that the human mind is predisposed to interpret the world in terms of certain categories: for example, language, space, and number. Carrying out the nativist program requires a full understanding of the specific structure of these categories and the way they emerge in early development. Cognitive science provides ... log in or subscribe to read full text