Innateness and the Situated Mind

Many advocates of situated approaches to the study of cognition (e. Thelen and Smith, 1994) explicitly take exception to cognitive science's pronounced nativist turn. 1 Other proponents of situated models seek to mitigate strong nativist claims, by, for example, finding ways to acknowledge innate contributions to cognitive processing while at the same time downplaying those contributions (Wilson, 2004, Chapter 3). Still others leave implicit their apparent opposition to nativism: they emphasize the environment's contribution to cognition so strongly as to suggest antinativist views but do not take up the issue explicitly 2 Thus, situated theorists have reached something approximating an antinativist consensus. In this chapter, I argue that they should not embrace the antinativist view so readily. To this end, I divide the situated approach into two species, extended and embedded views of cognition, arguing that each version of the situated view admits of a plausible nativist interpretation with respect to at least some important cognitive phenomena. In contrast, I also argue for the nonnativist interpretation of certain cognitive phenomena; nevertheless, these antinativist recommendations come heavily hedged-in some cases, at the expense of a robust reading of the situated program or one of its subdivisions. 2 I. Extended Cognition and Nativism Consider first the view that cognitive processes extend beyond the boundary of the organism. The intimacy of the human organism's interaction with its environment during cognitive processing suggests that those cognitive processes literally comprises elements of the environment beyond the boundary of the human organism (Clark and Chalmers, 1998). I shall refer to this view as the 'hypothesis of extended cognition', or 'HEC'. As I understand it, HEC entails that the human mind is extended. Accordingly, the subject matter of HEC-i.e., the kind of cognition at issue-had better be the sort that bears on the location of the mind. This seems fair enough. The explananda of cognitive science are various mental capacities broadly to do with belief formation, such as the capacities to reason, perceive, remember, construct theories, and use language. Thus, whatever model of cognition we ultimately adopt will be a model of the mind's activities or capacities; and if the activities of a mind take place at a particular spatio-temporal location, that mind is at least partly at that location. 3 On this view, a given mind has a location in space-time and, according to HEC, this location includes points outside the 'skin-bag', as Andy Clark (2003) …