Nativism vs. empiricism

What is Nativism?

Nativism is the view that certain skills or abilities are "native" or hard-wired into the brain at birth. For example, one might argue that some moral intuitions are innate or that color preferences are innate.

According to Kant, Chomsky and Pinker, Nativism is much of humans’ cognitive ability is inborn.

Empiricism

Empiricism is a theory of knowledge which emphasizes those aspects of scientific knowledge that are closely related to experience, especially as formed through deliberate experimental arrangements.

According to J.M. Willhite 2013, Empiricism is a philosophical theory which argues that human knowledge is derived entirely from sensory experience.

Nativism vs. empiricism

In the study of perceptual development, Nativism proposes that people are genetically equipped with all their perceptual abilities. Empiricism claims that cognitive functions, including perceptual ones, develop as adaptations to the environment, through experience and learning. It is a sophisticated version of the old-as-the-hills nature-or-nurture debate.

The empiricism – nativism controversy is also connected to the concept of human mind as either general problem solver, or a system with specialized modules. Those who support a modular concept of mind tend to be of a more nativist orientation.

The sensation aroused at the various receptor points also possessed some spatial indication or sign of their whereabouts.

Both sides agreed that the mind had innate capacities that transcended the senses. One of these a priori categories, as Kant had called them was space. The mind apprehends all experience through its categories of space ant time.

The nativist doctrine was that the local sings were intrinsically special character. The points of sensory stimulation were directly labeled, in phenomenological experience as to their loci. Hering 1964, held that spatial signs were attached to the visual experiences arising from every retinal point. The spatial aspect was immediately given.

Lotze 1852, originated the notion of local signs.  He maintained that the signs that were connected with sensations or were properties of them, were not originally endowed with a special character but had to acquire. The process of acquisition involved muscular sensations and the associative combination or fusion of sensory components. Lotze believed that the distinctive local characteristic of points was qualitative. Other investigators brought in associated ideas and visual imagery of the part stimulated.

Stratton and Ewart’s experiment clearly demonstrated that retinal local signs could be acquired through practice.

The Nativism-empiricism controversy in the realm of special and other dimensions is far from dead.