The opposing doctrine, that the mind is a tabula rasa (blank slate) at birth and all knowledge is gained from experience and the senses, is called empiricism.
[citation needed] Nativism represents an adaptation of this, grounded in the fields of genetics, cognitive psychology, and psycholinguistics.
Nativists hold that innate beliefs are in some way genetically programmed in our mind—they are the phenotypes of certain genotypes that all humans share in common.
[citation needed] The nativist's general objection against empiricism is still the same as was raised by the rationalists; the human mind of a newborn child is not a tabula rasa but is equipped with an inborn structure.
[3] Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz suggested that we are born with certain innate ideas, the most identifiable of these being mathematical truisms.
Leibniz argues that empirical evidence can serve to bring to the surface certain principles that are already innately embedded in our minds.
Locke argued that the mind is in fact devoid of all knowledge or ideas at birth; it is a blank sheet or tabula rasa.
He argued that all our ideas are constructed in the mind via a process of constant composition and decomposition of the input that we receive through our senses.
Even a phrase such as "What is, is" is not universally assented to; infants and severely mentally disabled adults do not generally acknowledge this truism.
[2] Noam Chomsky cites as evidence for this theory, the apparent invariability, according to his views, of human languages at a fundamental level.
In this way, linguistics may provide a window into the human mind, and establish scientific theories of innateness which otherwise would remain merely speculative.
One implication of Noam Chomsky's innatism, if correct, is that at least a part of human knowledge consists in cognitive predispositions, which are triggered and developed by the environment, but not determined by it.