Publications and Research
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
6-2002
Abstract
This paper advocates a dispositional account of innate cognitive capacities, which has an illustrious history from Plato to Chomsky. The ‘triggering model’ of innateness, first made explicit by Stich ([1975]), explicates the notion in terms of the relative informational content of the stimulus (input) and the competence (output). The advantage of this model of innateness is that it does not make a problematic reference to normal conditions and avoids relativizing innate traits to specific populations, as biological models of innateness are forced to do. Relativization can be avoided in the case of cognitive capacities precisely because informational content is involved. Even though one cannot measure output relative to input in a precise way, there are indirect and approximate ways of assessing the degree of innateness of a specific cognitive capacity.
Comments
This article was originally published in The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, available at https://doi.org/10.1093/bjps/53.2.251
This work is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0).