5 myths about learning and innateness
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Highlights
- My own guess, based on my reading of the ever-controversial psychology literature, is that humans are likely innately endowed with many learning mechanisms, each with different properties. Some might possibly be tailored to language, others for observational learning, classical conditioning, hypothesis testing, cost-benefit analysis, and so on, perhaps dynamically combined and recombined in various ways in real time. The very variety of innate learning mechanisms may be central to what makes us humans special.
- If you believe in learning, you ought believe that your learning mechanisms come from somewhere. On pain of infinite regress, at least one of those learning mechanisms must be innate. So unless you believe in magic, you are already, like it or not, a nativist.