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Understanding Contemporary Nativist-Empiricist Debates: What Nativists and Empiricists Do (and Do Not) Disagree About

March 5, 2010
3:00 pm - 4:00 pm
Center for Cognitive Science 1961 Tuttle Park Place Room 210 (Conference Room)

Spring 2010 Debate Speaker Series Presents:

Richard Samuels, Department of Philosophy

Though disputes between nativist and empiricist accounts of mind have exerted an enormous influence in many areas of cognitive science, the precise nature of these disputes is often hard to discern and frequently misunderstood. In this talk, I aim to clarify these recent nativist-empiricist debates: to explain what the central points of controversy are, as well as those points on which there is substantial agreement. In doing so, we will need to consider a range of issues about the notion of innateness, and its relationship to claims about genetic determination, learning and domainspecificity.

Seminar Series 2010