Innateness and Cognition

M. J. Cain

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781317288756
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The question of innateness, or nativism, is one of the most heated problems in philosophy, reaching as far back as Plato but generating fierce debates in contemporary philosophy and cognitive science. Which aspects of the human mind are innate and which are the products of experience? Do we have any innate concepts or knowledge or are all the contents of the mind acquired by means of learning?

Innateness and Cognition is a much-needed overview of this important problem. Through addressing the following topics M.J. Cain argues for a nativist perspective which, nevertheless, finds an important role for culture and social learning in cognitive development:

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• the nature of innateness
• the coherence and explanatory value of the concept of innateness
• the acquisition of concepts and the role of learning in conceptual development
• domain specific knowledge, including the 'massive modularity' thesis and the theory of core knowledge domains
• cognitive development relating the theory of mind and mathematics
• the relationship between biological and cultural evolution and their respective roles in cognitive development
• language and innateness, particularly Chomsky's linguistic nativism and challenges to this
• morality, moral judgment, and innateness.

Innateness and Cognition is an excellent resource for those researching and studying philosophy of psychology and philosophy of mind, as well as those interested in foundational issues in cognitive science, psychology, linguistics, and anthropology.

1 The nature of innateness

Introduction

Throughout this book I will examine various claims as to which aspects of cognition are innate but in this chapter and the next my primary concern is with the more basic question as to the nature of innateness: what is it for a characteristic to be innate? This question is going to require some work to answer for two reasons. First, there are a number of competing accounts of the nature of innateness that are prominent in the recent literature and their respective strengths and limitations need to be explored. Second, a number of scholars¹ have questioned the value of the concept of innateness arguing that, in the light of recent developments in biology, it no longer has any legitimate use or that, indeed, it is an incoherent concept.

What is innateness?

To a first approximation a good account of innateness has to satisfy the following conditions:

• It has to cohere with traditional debates that have utilised the term ‘innate’ or have been standardly characterised in the subsequent literature by means of that term. For example, it would tell against an account if it was such as to imply that Plato’s discussion of the slave boy in Meno (1980) or the debate between Locke (1690/1975) and Leibniz (1704/1981) on ‘innate ideas’ was about some topic other than innateness.
• It should cohere with the folk concept of ‘innateness’ that is prominent in the contemporary landscape in debates as to how we acquire a range of characteristics including certain illnesses, personality traits, physical properties and abilities. It would tell against an account of innateness if it implied that the folk, on the one hand, and philosophers and cognitive scientists, on the other hand, were talking at cross-purposes in their respective use of the term ‘innate’ and its cognates.²
• It should cohere with our best scientific accounts of the way in which organisms normally develop so that the concept of innateness comes out both as respectable from a scientific perspective and such that science can shed some light on debates as to precisely what is innate.
• It should be such as to categorise characteristics that are widely seen as being innate as being innate and those that are widely seen as not being innate as not being innate. For example, it would tell against an account of innateness if it implied that having two arms and two legs and a body that is bilaterally symmetrical was not innate for humans or that the belief that Paris is the capital of France was part of the human innate endowment.
• It should make sense of the attractiveness of the various accounts of innateness that are prominent in the contemporary literature. There are currently several popular accounts of innateness that are inconsistent with one another and so cannot all be correct. However, it would tell against an account of innateness if it implied that all those accounts were way off mark and completely without rational motivation. In other words, it must follow the principle of charity by explaining the appeal of popular competing accounts of innateness even when it ultimately serves to undermine those accounts.

By saying that ‘to a first approximation’ a good account of innateness is obliged to satisfy the above conditions I mean to qualify the claim that satisfying them is absolutely sacrosanct. For example, perhaps the folk are confused when they talk about ‘innateness’, or perhaps most of us are mistaken as to which characteristics are innate and which are not, or perhaps the historical philosophical debate was so bound up with anachronistic assumptions that contemporary scholars debating what they call ‘innateness’ are not engaged in the same debate as Plato, Descartes, Locke, or Leibniz. More precisely, what I mean is that the conditions should not be ignored and that any account that doesn’t satisfy one or more of them needs to present us with an explanation as to why a failure to meet those conditions is not problematic. In other words, it should tell us why the condition in question should be jettisoned.

An obvious first stab at an account of innateness is that innate characteristics are those that are inborn or present at birth. There are two familiar problems with this suggestion. First, there are many human characteristics that are often regarded as innate even though they are not present at birth and appear only after several years of development. Examples include teeth, the ability to walk upright and secondary sexual characteristics such as pubic hair and female breasts. Second, there are characteristics that are present at birth which are acquired by means of in utero learning and for that reason don’t count as innate. For example, at birth human infants show a recognition of, and preference for, the language of the community they are born into. The standard explanation for this is that they learn details of the phonetics of that language in utero as a result of hearing others, particularly their mother, speak (Moon, Lagercrantz and Kuhl, 2013).

A second suggestion makes an overt appeal to learning: innate characteristics are those that are not learned. This fits nicely with the case of in utero learning. It also coheres with the untendentious point that being learned and being innate are mutually exclusive categories and the fact that some key participants to the debate about which aspects of human cognition are innate provide a rough characterisation of innateness as being not learned.³ However, there are problems. First, being learned and being innate do not exhaust the possibilities so that a characteristic might not have been learned without it thereby being innate. Jerry Fodor (1981) produced some fanciful examples that illustrate the point well. Suppose that one acquired a knowledge of Latin as a result of taking a pill, receiving a bump to the head, or by means of surgical insertion. Then that knowledge would not have been learned but it would hardly be innate. Second, characterising innateness in terms of learning suggests that it only makes sense to describe a characteristic as innate if it is the kind of characteristic that one could, at least in principle, learn. That works fine for cognitive characteristics such as items of knowledge and concepts. But it doesn’t apply in cases of innate characteristics outside of the cognitive domain which, by their very nature, don’t seem to be the kinds of characteristics that an organism could learn, even in principle. For, example, it sounds very odd to me to talk of an organism having two arms and two legs or a body that is bilaterally symmetrical as a result of learning. Hence, if one claims that these characteristics are innate one can hardly be making the point that they are not learned as such a point would not be very illuminating. Therefore, the central contrast can’t be between being innate and being learned but between being innate and being the product of a more general process than learning of which learning is a particular example.

I now come to third suggestion as to what it is for a characteristic to be innate. Ultimately, I think this can be developed into a solid account of innateness. The core idea is that innate characteristics come from within the organism rather than from outside. Thus, they are present when the organism comes into existence or develop from the organism’s inner resources without any outside involvement. In other words, innate characteristics are part of the initial state of the organism or develop from that initial state without the involvement of outside factors. This account of innateness has more than a flavour of the ancient doctrine of preformationism according to which all the characteristics of an adult human are present in a miniature form in the fertilised egg.⁴ It also gels with a definition of innateness presented in a well-known critique of nativism delivered by Elman et al. (1996: 22). Elman et al. write:

Here the term innate refers to changes that arise as a result of interactions that occur within the organism itself during ontogeny. That is, interactions between the genes and their molecular and cellular environments without recourse to information from outside the organism. We adopt this working definition in this book.

This raises the question of why the organism has the initial state it has? If something is innate why is it innate? Different theorists have different answers. Plato (1980) thought that innate items were the product of an earlier life and Descartes (1985) thought they were implanted by God. Few contemporary scholars would find such claims plausible so an alternative answer is needed. According to one such answer what is innate is encoded in the genes and so is grounded in the state of the fertilised egg – the zygote – from which the organism develops. That genetic material comes from the father and the mother, from the genetic material in the relevant egg and sperm cell. In other words, the initial state of an organism is a matter of the genetic material in the fertilised egg from which the organism develops and all innate characteristics result from that genetic material without external involvement.

At first blush such a form of genetic determinism seems to offer a plausible way to be a contemporary nativist. For, I suspect, many folks who have a passing interest in contemporary biology are confident that the characteristics that they regard as innate are grounded in our genes in this way. With respect to myself, such innate characteristics might include my eye colour, my overall body plan, my allergies, and so on. This list can include items that are specific to me – that reflect my unique genotype – and items that are universal across the species and reflect our shared human genetic makeup. Moreover, the thought might go, we should expect some aspects of our minds to be innate as the state of our mind is grounded in the state of our brain, a biological organ within a broader biological system. Those innate mental characteristics might relate to the overall structure and functioning of the mind – that it contains certain components that interact with one another in certain specific ways – and to some of its specific contents with respect to knowledge and concepts.

Some philosophers of biology would no doubt protest that all this reflects an outmoded understanding of the role of genes in development, one that seriously underplays the role of factors outside of an organism’s genome in shaping how it develops (Griffiths and Stotz, 2013). Ultimately, I think such worries are overplayed but they need to be dealt with and to do this we need to look a little more closely into how genes work.

Some basic genetics

We humans are multi-celled biological organisms and are made up of some 30-odd trillion cells (Bianconi et al., 2013). Being eukaryotes all of our cells have a nucleus containing exactly the same set of genes organised over 23 pairs of chromosomes.⁵ Half of this genetic material comes from our mother and half from our father and this is brought together when a sperm cell from the father fertilised the egg cell from the mother. There are approximately 20,000 genes in each of our cells. There isn’t all that much genetic diversity from one person to the next as we share 99 per cent of our DNA with one another. That explains why we are all so similar and differ from every other species. However, we do bare genetic similarities to all other organisms as we ultimately all evolved from a common ancestor and in the course of evolution certain genes have been utilised again and again in a range of quite different organisms (Carroll, 2006). As chimpanzees are the living species with the most recent common ancestor shared with us – a common ancestor that is widely regarded as having lived some six million years ago (Dunbar, 2014) – we are genetically most like them sharing approximately 96 per cent of our DNA. Nevertheless, barring cosmic accident and identical twins, each of us is genetically unique. Genetic differences are possible because given genes often have different versions known as alleles. Generalised, people differ genetically when they have different alleles of a given gene on at least one of their chromosomes; the more such differences there are the more they will differ genetically. Generally speaking, you will share more genes with people who are closely related to you than with those who are less closely related to you. For example, you will be genetically more like your parents than you will be like your siblings, but more like your siblings that you are your cousins, and so on.

Genes are made out of molecules of DNA. DNA is composed of mononucleotides, which are complex molecules made out of a base, a pentose sugar, and a phosphate group. There are four different versions of base, namely, adenine, thymine, cytosine, and guanine. Mononucleotides are strung together to from long strands of DNA which are polynucleotides. Strands of DNA are themselves joined together by means of hydrogen bonds between complementary bases to form the familiar double helix structure so associated with Watson and Crick (1953). Within the double helix, adenine bonds with thymine and cytosine bonds with guanine.

What exactly is a gene? The standard answer is that a gene is a strand of DNA that codes for a protein; that is to say, a gene corresponds to a particular protein that is produced when the gene is expressed. Proteins are complex molecules made out of amino acids. Genes themselves employ a code that is sometimes figuratively referred to as the language of the genes (Jones, 1993). Each mononucleotide contains a base, either adenine, thymine, cytosine, or guanine. A protein is coded for by means of a long string of DNA. This string is made up of triplets of bases, for example, TGT, CGC, GTG, and so on. Each triplet, also known as a codon, corresponds to a specific amino acid. For example TGT corresponds to Cysteine, CGC to Arginine, and GTC to Valine. As there are 64 distinct codons and only 20 distinct amino acids some amino acids have more than one distinct codon corresponding to them. When a gene is expressed the relevant string of DNA is ‘unzipped’ so as to expose the strings of codons. One of the complementary strings will be read codon by codon beginning with a codon that indicates the start of a gene. Such a codon doesn’t code for an amino acid but, in effect, says ‘begin here.’ AUG is an example of such a start codon. Similarly, there are codons, for example, TAG, that mean ‘end here’ that indicates the end of gene. Just as the codons belonging to a gene have a particular order so do the amino acids making up a protein and the ordering of the codons in genes corresponds to – and so codes for – the ordering of amino acids in the proteins they code for. Thus, when a gene is expressed both the identity and order of its constituent codons are read and are reflected in the gene product that is manufactured.

Hence, expressing a gene involves manufacturing the protein that it codes for. This is a two-stage process. Genes are contained in the nucleus of a cell whilst the proteins they code for are manufactured outside of the nucleus by cell structures (organelles) known as ribosomes. The first stage of this process is known as transcription where a string of messenger RNA (mRNA) corresponding to the gene is manufactured. mRNA molecules are similar to DNA molecules, one key difference being that the base uracyl is used instead of thymine. Transcription is executed by an enzyme known as RNA polymerase. This enzyme ‘reads’ one of the complementary strands of DNA exposed when the bonds between two strands are broken (this serves as a template for the gene product). As each DNA codon is read the corresponding mRNA codons are gathered and joined together to a form a molecule of mRNA that corresponds to the gene in question. Once transcribed the mRNA molecules are carried to the ribosomes where the second stage of protein manufacture takes place. This is known as translation and involves transfer RNA molecules carrying the amino acid corresponding to each of the mRNA codons to the ribosome where they are bound together to form the target protein. Of the twenty amino acids used to build proteins in this way ten are manufactured within our cells from scratch and twenty are obtained from the food we eat.

Much of the DNA contained in the nuclei of our cells does not code for proteins and is traditionally known as junk DNA reflecting the fact that, historically, it was widely seen as not performing any function. Today the role of junk DNA is a major topic with some biologists arguing that it does in fact play an important role in our cells.⁶ In addition, not all of the components of genes serve a coding function and such components serve to interrupt the coding sequence of codons. They are initially copied into mRNA (where they are known as introns as opposed to exons that serve to code for amino acids) before being removed by a process known as splicing so that the mRNA molecules that leave the cell nucleus do not contain irrelevant material. However, the exons that are joined together can be so joined in different ways so as to code for non-identical proteins (this is known as alternative splicing). As a result of alternative splicing there are many more proteins manufactured in our cells than there are genes.

This description of the role of genes as DNA molecules that code for proteins implies that genes are quite passive. They do play a causal role in the manufacture of proteins within our cells but they are not the active units in this process of manufacture; rather activity should be attribut...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1 The nature of innateness
• 2 Defending the concept of innateness
• 3 Concepts
• 4 Modules, core cognition, and culture
• 5 The theory theory and the theory of mind
• 6 Mathematical cognition and Quinian bootstrapping
• 7 Language acquisition and linguistic nativism
• 8 The challenge to linguistic nativism
• 9 Morality and innateness
• 10 Moral convictions and mechanisms
• 11 Conclusion
• References
• Index