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Nativism, Empiricism and Ockham’s razor
Simon Fitzpatrick
University of Sheffield
e-mail: [email protected]
I will challenge an argument that has been made against nativism in
philosophy and cognitive science. This argument holds that rival theories such
as empiricist theories that have sparser mental ontologies are to be preferred,
other things being equal, because they offer simpler explanations. I will argue
that it is not clear that being parsimonious with the amount of innate mental
content or structure postulated (i.e. having a sparse mental ontology) does
provide simpler explanations of human cognition. The moral we should draw is
that Ockham’s razor does not motivate a preference for a cognitive architecture
with very little innate content and structure over one with lots of innate content
and structure.
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