This is in contrast to the "blank slate" or tabula rasa view, which states that the brain has inborn capabilities for learning from the environment but does not contain content such as innate beliefs.
However, empiricists largely remain open to the nature of learning algorithms and are by no means restricted to the historical associationist mechanisms of behaviorism.
The philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) argued in his Critique of Pure Reason that the human mind knows objects in innate, a priori ways.
1954), who argue that humans from birth have certain cognitive modules (specialised genetically inherited psychological abilities) that allow them to learn and acquire certain skills, such as language.
Instead, they have outlined alternative theories of how modularization might emerge over the course of development, as a result of a system gradually refining and fine-tuning its responses to environmental stimuli.
[6] The term universal grammar (or UG) is used for the purported innate biological properties of the human brain, whatever exactly they turn out to be, that are responsible for children's successful acquisition of a native language during the first few years of life.
In generative grammar the principles and parameters (P&P) framework was the dominant formulation of UG before Chomsky's current Minimalist Program.
)[12] Further, modern nativist theory makes little in the way of specific falsifiable and testable predictions, and has been compared by some empiricists to a pseudoscience or nefarious brand of "psychological creationism".
For example, nativism was at least partially motivated by the perception that statistical inferences made from experience were insufficient to account for the complex languages humans develop.
In part, this was a reaction to the failure of behaviorism and behaviorist models of the era to easily account for how something as complex and sophisticated as a full-blown language could ever be learned.
Indeed, several nativist arguments were inspired by Chomsky's assertion that children could not learn complicated grammar based on the linguistic input they typically receive, and must therefore have an innate language-learning module, or language acquisition device.
In a previous paper, Griffiths argued that innateness specifically confuses these three distinct biological concepts: developmental fixity, species nature, and intended outcome.