The Vernacular Concept of Innateness

Abstract

The proposal that the concept of innateness expresses a 'folk biological ' Innateness and Folk BiologyIt is a truism that the term 'innate' is vague and ambiguous. According to ethologist Patrick Bateson, "At least six meanings are attached to the term: present at birth; a behavioral difference caused by a genetic difference; adapted over the course of evolution; unchanging throughout development; shared by all members of a species; and not learned. … Say what you mean (even if it uses a bit more space) rather than unintentionally confuse your readers by employing a word such as innate that carries so many different connotations" (Bateson, 1991, p. 21-22). The rejection of the term 'innate' . Acknowledgements: Griffiths and Linquist were supported by Australian Research Council grant FF0457917. We thank Patrick Bateson, Ron Mallon, Matteo Mameli and Shaun Nicholls for helpful comments on an earlier draft.

Does Experimental Philosophy Have a Role to Play in Carnapian Explication?

“…Indeed, on the latter point, Shepherd and Justus are in agreement, writing that the

empirically rigorous studies of the kind experimental philosophers conduct [can] outline a concept's features and its dependence relations with other concepts. Work on ‘innateness’ reveals its central features and indicates the problematic relationships between them (Griffiths et al ). And work on ‘free will’ has uncovered connections between ‘consciousness’ and capacities for agential behaviour (Shepherd ).

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The Concept of Innateness as an Object of Empirical Enquiry

“…Rather than seeking to define "innate," the goal has been to describe the sort of mental processes and representations that underlie our thought about innateness. In this section, I set out one intriguing proposal, initially suggested by Paul Griffiths (2002), and later explored by Griffiths in collaboration with Edouard Machery, Stephan Linquist, and Karola Stotz. According to this proposal, which they call the three-feature hypothesis, the concept of innateness is a manifestation of certain core aspects of our folk biology (Griffiths 2002;Griffiths, Machery, and Linquist 2009;Linquist et al 2011).…”

“…It can be divided into two main parts. The first is that folk judgments about innateness reflect our ordinary tendency to think in essentialist terms about biological kinds (Griffiths 2002;Griffiths, Machery, and Linquist 2009). Specifically, Griffiths and his collaborators propose the following:…”

“…To test these predictions, Griffiths and his collaborators ran a series of studies in which they p resented vignettes describing the song of different bird species (Griffiths, Machery, and Linquist 2009;Linquist et al 2011). The vignettes systematically varied whether a trait was species t ypical, whether its development was dependent on the environment and whether it was functional.…”

“…According to the standard criticism, widely endorsed by philosophers and theoretically oriented biologists, the concept of innateness is unfit for scientific purposes because it encodes a prescientific conception of development that conflates several distinct biological issues and thereby leads researchers to commit fallacies of ambiguity (Bateson 1991;Griffiths 2002). Furthermore, the most vociferous recent advocates of this standard criticism maintain that it is bolstered by empirical research on innateness judgments (Griffiths, Machery, and Linquist 2009).…”