What linguistic nativism tells us about innateness

Abstract

Nativism is still a highly controversial topic in cognitive science. Not only because nativist claims remain controversial, but also because, it is not clear how innateness has to be defined as a concept. In cognitive science, Chomsky's research program played a foundational role. Chomsky showed the methodological contribution of a nativist perspective for the study of mental faculties and particularly language. The aim of this article is to investigate what meaning can be given to the innateness of the language faculty in Chomsky's theory and to show how it contributes to clarify the notion of innateness as used more generally in cognitive science.