The Innate Mind: Structure and Contents Peter Carruthers Stephen Laurence Stephen Stich, Editors OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS The Innate Mind This page intentionally left blank The Innate Mind Structure and Contents Edited by Peter Carruthers Stephen Laurence Stephen Stich 1 2005 3 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Copyright # 2005 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. 246897531 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The innate mind : structure and contents / edited by Peter Carruthers, Stephen Laurence, Stephen Stich. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13 978-0-19-517967-5; 978-0-19-517999-6 (pbk.) ISBN 0-19-517967-6; ISBN 0-19-517999-4 (pbk.) 1. Cognitive science. 2. Philosophy of mind. 3. Nativism (Psychology) I. Carruthers, Peter, 1952– II. Laurence, Stephen. III. Stich, Stephen P. BD418.3.156 2005 153—dc22 2004056813 Preface T his is the first book of a projected three volumes to be born out of the three-year interdisciplinary Innateness and the Structure of the Mind project. The project is primarily funded by a grant from the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Board, awarded to Stephen Laurence. The overall aim of the project is to undertake a comprehensive assessment of where nativist theorizing stands now and determine what directions future research should take. Accordingly we have tried to bring together many of the top researchers across the cognitive sciences working within a broadly nativist perspective. We hope that these volumes will illustrate the scope and power of contemporary nativism, and help point the way for future research in cognitive science. This volume discusses the likely overall architecture and some of the probable features of the innate human mind. Subsequent volumes will examine the interactions between innate minds and culture, and will consider a range of foundational issues concerning innateness. They will also attempt to sketch some future directions for nativist inspired research in cognitive science. (For further information, see the project’s website at: http://www.shef.ac.uk/~phil/ AHRB-Project). The topic of nativism lends itself well to cross-disclipinary research—indeed, many of the significant questions in this area can only be adequately addressed through interdisciplin ary research. Accordingly, the project has bro ught together a distinguished international team of more than 75 researchers from across the cognitive sciences to examine a range of themes and issues from a broadly nativist perspective. Participants were brought together in a series of small workshops over the course of a year to exchange ideas and try out new lines of thought, before presenting their draft volume papers at a concluding public conference. In the 2001–2 academic year four workshops were held, one in New Jersey, one in Maryland, and two in Sheffield, with the concluding conference being held in Sheffield in July 2002. The editors have selected the best, most focused papers from the concluding conference, as well as commissioning some other chapters from those scientists and scholars whose relevant research became known to us in the course of the project. These chapters were displayed in draft on a closed website for the other participants to read and take account of, and were rewritten in the light of feed- back provided by the editors and the referees. The result, we believe, is an inte- grated volume of cutting-edge essays, pushing forward the boundaries of nativist inspired research in cognitive science. Many people have helped to make this a better volume. We would like to thank everyone who attended the workshops and conference for their contributions through comments and discussions. We would especially like to express our grat- itude to all those who presented a talk or a commentary at the conference or one of the workshops, but who for a variety of reasons don’t have a chapter in the present volume (some of this work will be included in later volumes). In this regard we would like to thank: Paul Bloom, Robert Boyd, Stanislas Dehaene, Randy Gallistel, Rochel Gelman, Lila Gleitman, Juan-Carlos Gomez, Marc Hauser, Joe Henrich, Norbert Hornstein, David Lightfoot, Richard Nisbett, David Papineau, Steven Pinker, Denis Walsh, and Fei Xu. Their efforts surely helped to make the project a success. We also acknowledge the generous funding for this project provided by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Board, as well as financial support from the Hang Seng Centre for Cognitive Studies (founded in 1992 through the gen- erosity and far-sightedness of Sir Q. W. Lee), the Evolution and Higher Cognition Research Group at Rutgers, and the Cognitive Studies Group at Maryland. Thanks to Simon Fitzpatrick for constructing the index. Finally, we should like to thank Tom Simpson, the project’s Research Associate, for all his assistance—particularly in helping to ensure that the Sheffield workshops and the end of the year con- ference ran smoothly, and for his work in preparing the volume for press. vi Preface Contents List of Contributors xi 1 Introduction: Nativism Past and Present 3 Tom Simpson, Peter Carruthers, Stephen Laurence, and Stephen Stich PART ONE ARCHITECTURE 2 What Developmental Biology Can Tell Us about Innateness 23 Gary F. Marcus 3 Innateness and (Bayesian) Visual Perception: Reconciling Nativism and Development 34 Brian J. Scholl 4 Modularity and Relevance: How Can a Massively Modular Mind Be Flexible and Context-Sensitive? 53 Dan Sperber 5 Distinctively Human Thinking: Modular Precursors and Components 69 Peter Carruthers 6 Languag e and the Development of Spatial Reasoning 89 Anna Shusterman and Elizabeth Spelke 7 The Complexity of Cognition: Tractability Arguments for Massive Modularity 107 Richard Samuels 8 Toward a Reasonable Nativism 122 Tom Simpson PART TWO LANGUAGE AND CONCEPTS 9 Strong versus Weak Adaptationism in Cognition and Language 141 Scott Atran 10 The Innate Endowment for Language: Underspecified or Overspecified? 156 Mark C. Baker 11 Brass Tacks in Linguistic Theory: Innate Grammatical Principles 175 Stephen Crain, Andrea Gualmini, and Paul Pietroski 12 Two Insights about Naming in the Preschool Child 198 Susan A. Gelman 13 Number and Natural Language 216 Stephen Laurence and Eric Margolis PART THREE THEORY OF MIND 14 Parent-Offspring Conflict and the Development of Social Understanding 239 Daniel J. Povinelli, Christopher G. Prince, and Todd M. Preuss 15 Reasoning about Intentionality in Preverbal Infants 254 Susan C. Johnson 16 What Neurodevelopmental Disorders Can Reveal about Cognitive Architecture: The Example of Theory of Mind 272 Helen Tager-Flusberg PART FOUR MOTIVATION 17 The Plausibility of Adaptations for Homicide 291 Joshua D. Duntley and David M. Buss 18 Resolving the Debate on Innate Ideas: Learnability Constraints and the Evolved Interpenetration of Motivational and Conceptual Functions 305 John Tooby, Leda Cosmides, and H. Clark Barrett 19 Cognitive Neuroscience and the Structur e of the Moral Mind 338 Joshua Greene viii Contents 20 Innateness and Moral Psychology 353 Shaun Nichols References 371 Index 417 Contents ix [...]... mind, and on some of its innate contents The essays contained herein investigate such questions as: What capacities, processes, representations, biases, and connections are innate? What role do these innate elements play in the development of our mature cognitive capacities? Which of these elements are shared with other members of the animal kingdom? What, in short, is the structure of the innate mind? ... determining the content of our innate cognitive endowment There is also much healthy disagreement over the exact nature of the innate faculties and mechanisms that have evolved (Carruthers & Chamberlain, 2000; Heyes & Huber, 2000) Suffice it to say that all the authors in this volume, and indeed most other nativists, endorse some degree of evolutionary explanation of the contents and structure of our innate. .. Essay Concerning Human Understanding John Locke argued that there can be ‘‘no innate principles in the mind ’ because, among other things, no useful sense can be given to the notion of innateness itself Locke argued that if innateness literally means ‘‘in the mind at birth,’’ then innate principles must play from birth the same kinds of role that such principles play in our minds later in life But this,... psychology and the other cognitive sciences, and some of the other sources of evidence that provide the backdrop to this volume 3 Psychology and Anthropology Perhaps the most striking aspect of human cognition is also the one that is easiest to miss: namely, its widespread uniformity and predictability In our daily lives we tend to focus on the differences between individuals, and these differences can be the. .. Philosophical consideration of the innate structure of the mind has a long and complex history.1 Plato was one of the earliest and most extreme—nativists In the Phaedo and the Meno Plato argued that, since we have knowledge and abilities for which experience is insufficient, these things must not have been taught to us but rather must have been present in us at birth Plato’s extreme, and highly implausible,... function of our minds comes from the structure of our brains, these findings suggest that the microcircuitry of the brain is innate, largely wired up before birth But where does the structure of our brains come from? If instincts for mental capacities such as language, number, and intuitive physics are (partly) inborn, I thank Athena Vouloumanos for comments and the NIH and HFSP for supporting the research... integrated and detailed picture of where nativist theory currently stands and of what its future holds Taken together, these volumes present a detailed and wide-ranging study of the current state and the possible future development of twenty-first-century nativism In so doing, they also provide unparalleled insight into what we, as humans, are This first volume focuses on the fundamental architecture of the mind, ... general terms, the ways in which nativist views tend to differ from empiricist views Nativists are inclined to see the mind as the product of a relatively large number of innately specified, relatively complex, domain-specific structures and processes Their empiricist counterparts incline toward the view that much less of the content of the mind exists prior to worldly experience, and that the processes... children understand that the meanings of determiners are ‘‘conservative,’’ that the meaning of natural language disjunction is ‘‘inclusive-or,’’ and that the structural notion of ‘‘c-command’’ governs a range of linguistic phenomena They employ this and other work to defend three related versions of the argument from the poverty of the stimulus, each of which strongly supports the existence of an innate language... Where they differ is over the existence, richness, and complexity of the prespecified contents, structures, and processes of the mind What is perhaps most significant and characteristic of the contemporary debate is that empirical data is now being brought to bear on the debate in a systematic way This is strikingly evident in Chomsky’s own work, and is undoubtedly at the heart of the resurgence of nativism . The Innate Mind: Structure and Contents Peter Carruthers Stephen Laurence Stephen Stich, Editors OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS The Innate Mind This page intentionally left blank The Innate Mind Structure. Nativism Philosophical consid eration of the innate structure of the mind has a long and complex history. 1 Plato was one of the earliest and most extreme— nativists. In the Phaedo and the Meno Plato argued that,. the animal kingdom? What, in short, is the structure of the innate mind? A summary of these investigations, and of the answers that they provide, can be found in the final section of this introduction.