Seeing the world through a third eye: Developmental systems theory looks beyond the nativist-empiricist debate.

Short arms and talking eggs: Why we should no longer abide the nativist-empiricist debate.

The nativist-empiricist debate and the nativist commitment to the idea of core knowledge and endowments that exist without relevant postnatal experience continue to distract attention from the reality of developmental systems. The developmental systems approach embraces the concept of epigenesis, that is, the view that development emerges via cascades of interactions across multiple levels of c...

The babies, the representations, and the nativist–empiricist bathwater. Commentary on “Stepping Off the pendulum: Why only an action-based approach can transcend the nativist–empiricist debate” by J. Allen & M. Bickhard

Various versions of the ‘nativist–empiricist debate’ have been with us at least since John Locke formulated some of the basic principles of empiricist philosophy in the 17th century (Locke, 1690). As Allen and Bickhard suggest in their target article (this issue), empiricist and nativist perspectives have dominated the scientific landscape in pendulum-like alternation across the centuries. Most...

Innateness, Learning, and Rationality.

J. P. Spencer et al. (2009) ask readers to reject the nativist–empiricist dialogue and adopt a new theoretical perspective on cognition, focusing on ‘‘developmental process.’’ This commentary argues that the dialogue between nativism and empiricism is a rich source of insight into the nature and development of human knowledge. Indeed, the dialogue is entering a new and exciting phase, in which ...

Machine Learning of Natural Language: An Empiricist Alternative to Nativist Theory

Four Problems Solved by the Probabilistic Language of Thought

We argue for the advantages of the probabilistic language of thought (pLOT), a recently emerging approach to modeling human cognition. Work using this framework demonstrates how the pLOT (a) refines the debate between symbols and statistics in cognitive modeling, (b) permits theories that draw on insights from both nativist and empiricist approaches, (c) explains the origins of novel and comple...