Quinian bootstrapping is Susan Carey's solution to Fodor’s paradox of concept learning. Carey claims that contrary to Fodor’s view, not all learning amounts to hypothesis testing, and that there are ways in which even primitive concepts can be learned. Recently Georges Rey has argued that Carey’s attempt to refute radical concept nativism is unsuccessful. First it cannot explain how the express...

—Exotics are species that are foreign to an ecological assemblage in the sense that they have not significantly adapted to resident biota or to local abiotic conditions, and resident species have not significantly adapted to them. Although they need not be human introduced nor damaging, when they are, a negative appraisal of such exotic species can be justified. Human introduction of exotics in...

This article makes the simple argument that populism is not poorly defined. Rather, this proverbial claim arises from a misunderstanding of concepts and their use. I argue confusion linked to semantic approach defining concept. The assumes precise definition concept corresponding some objective phenomena. main inherently collider conceptual variable. looks at how it interacts with nationalism n...

The literature on assimilation and ethnic identity formation largely assumes that the durability of ethnic boundaries is a function of the assimilation measures that sociologists commonly employ. But this literature fails to account adequately for the role of immigration patterns in explaining the durability and nature of ethnic boundaries. Using 123 in-depth interviews with later-generation Me...

It is commonly supposed that evolutionary explanations of cognitive phenomena involve the assumption that the capacities to be explained are both innate and modular. This is understandable: independent selection of a trait requires that it be both heritable and largely decoupled from other `nearby' traits. Cognitive capacities realized as innate modules would certainly satisfy these contraints....

A zemiology of politics is required in the face disastrous historic, contemporary and future social harms. Focusing on state-led politics, article charts some politically generated or mediated harms: military; ecological economic. These can generate justificatory narratives zemiogenic deceit ignorance. In a political moment authoritarian populism, nativism racism, each feature as part wider pro...

During the second half of 19th century, in field physiological optics, there was a strong controversy between Hermann von Helmholtz and Ewald Hering. This has been usually characterized as “empiricism” vs. “nativism”. In physiology visual perception, several subjects demanded attention, among them, color vision. Hering suggested different theories for correlate sensation spaces to give an accou...

After all the criticism Pullum and Scholz (2002a) have received, the best way of contributing something new to the debate of the Poverty of Stimulus (POS) argument and linguistic nativism was to discuss some empirical evidence of the kind these authors claim to be missing in the generative literature. In this paper, I explore the idea that, as suggested by other authors (Rosselló, Llinàs and Be...

A pattern of widespread connection optimization in the nervous system has become evident: deployment of some neural interconnections attains optimality, sometimes without detectable limits. New results for optimization of layout of connected areas of rat olfactory cortex and of rat amygdala are reported here. One larger question concerns mechanisms-how such minimization is attained. A next ques...