Nativism

Innatism is the doctrine that some knowledge (or all knowledge) is innate, that is, not acquired through learning or experience. It is said that we are born knowing them or that we are determined to acquire them. The word "innateness" already suggests some kind of idea, knowledge or mental content that is present at the moment an organism is born, that is, that is not acquired or learned by it.

Variants of nativism

Analysts sometimes divide the philosophy of nativism into two areas:

• Innatism knowledge: this doctrine affirms that human beings have access to the knowledge they possess by nature
• Idea innatism: This doctrine affirms that human beings have access to certain innate ideas

Innateness knowledge seems to imply idea innateness. Idea nativism does not necessarily imply knowledge nativism, although this is debatable. A nativist could endorse a nativist account of ideas or of knowledge, or of both ideas and knowledge.

Rationalism

Innateness is a characteristic that usually occurs in rationalist systems and that is required by the need to find a source of knowledge other than experience, that is, information that comes from the senses. If knowledge is not made from the senses, then it has to come from somewhere else. In particular, it is possible to think that before any experience, some basic knowledge is necessary. For example, it is possible to doubt that the idea of infinity, of substance or of God can be acquired empirically. In principle, any nativist doctrine almost always ends up having a link with the doctrines related to rationalism. Thus, innate theories are present in the father of all rationalists, Plato, and in modern authors who group around the rationalism of the 17th and 18th centuries, such as René Descartes, Baruch Spinoza or Gottfried Leibniz, among others.

At the other extreme, philosophers who maintain empiricist positions, such as Aristotle, John Locke and David Hume, deny the possibility of innate ideas or mental contents, being able to summarize their position in the traditional adage Nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu ("There is nothing in the mind that was not previously in the senses").

It is noteworthy that rationalist authors, and consequently, nativists, give great importance to mathematics as a model of knowledge. It is also true that the complementary tradition, empiricism, has developed above all in the Anglo-Saxon sphere and much less in continental thought, unlike rationalism.

Kant

Immanuel Kant tried to bridge the opposition between rationalism and empiricism without completely abandoning nativism. For Kant, although all knowledge begins with experience, not all knowledge is justified by it. The notions of space, time and categories, being a condition of possibility of experience, are independent of it, and can be investigated with a priori methods, giving rise to a transcendental philosophy ("of the conditions of possibility of experience")

Chomsky

Noam Chomsky proposed his innate theory in the 1960s, but he was talking about something similar years before this. In 1965, Chomsky published the book Aspects of the Theory of Syntax , where he explored the concept of innate theory, and universal grammar. In this book, and in articles from a similar time period, Chomsky noted that we had no explanation for how quickly children learn and master their own language. According to Chomsky, it was extremely difficult to find a theory that was "rich enough to meet the condition of empirical adequacy". The nativist theory was more intuitive, manifesting itself in the experience of every person who has had child's learning experience. To give a possible and theoretical explanation, Chomsky theorized about the existence of a universal grammar.

In the beginning, the universal grammar was outlined as a solution and an explanation for the poverty of stimuli. In his books and articles, Chomsky reasons that the structure of grammar across languages has more similarities than differences, and there is a basic unit that each language follows. He argued that the brain has an innate preference for this structure, and that is why children can learn so quickly due to their innate mechanism.

Constructivism

In addition, constructivism, despite not precisely defending the notion of «universal reason» or empiricism, exposes a form of innateness sui generis in which there is an innate consciousness that orders and builds experiences and gives them meaning, but does not postulate the existence of innate ideas. That is to say that somehow there is an innate self that builds an interpretation of their experiences.