Abstracts
Year three conference: Reflections on innateness
Conference speakers' titles and abstracts (where available).
The creative aspect of language use and non-biological notions of innateness
Mark C. Baker, Rutgers University
In striking contrast to 'first generation' cognitive scientists (eg Chomsky, Fodor), current evolutionary psychology (eg Pinker, Tooby, Cosmides) claims that there are large explanatory benefits to understanding innate mental representations and processes as being genetically encoded and as evolving by natural selection.
In this paper, I question this claim in so far as it applies to the human capacity for language. In this domain, innateness is a rich and powerful theoretical tool for the working linguist, but neurology, genetics and evolution add very little explanatory value. The particular feature of language that I focus on here is what Chomsky refers to as "the creative aspect of language use" (CALU) - our ability to create sentences that are new, of unbounded complexity, not determined by our environment, but yet appropriate to the situation.
On the one hand, I argue that this capacity is innate for the standard suite of reasons: it is universal in the species, it is acquired early, poverty of stimulus arguments apply, etc. On the other hand, there is no evidence from neurolinguistics or the study of developmental dysphasias that this capacity per se is differentially affected by brain damage or genetic defects. Nor is there evidence for a parallel capacity in other animals that the CALU could naturally have evolved out of.
Indeed, there is not even any abstract computational model of this capacity, given that it is blatantly abductive, and classical computation cannot do abduction (cf. Fodor, 2001). Therefore, the standard biological framework adds virtually nothing to our understanding of this capacity, and we should remain open to the possibility that there are aspects of innateness that are not to be explicated in these terms.
Evolved intuitive ontologies and the living vs dead distinction
Clark Barrett, Anthropology, UCLA
Despite many years of research, there is still uncertainty about what children understand about death, and when. One view is that there is no core architecture subserving the living/dead distinction, and that acquisition of death understanding therefore requires 'theory change'.
However, there have been few attempts to consider the ecological contexts in which distinguishing living from dead things might be useful, and that might therefore have selected for early and reliably developing domain-specific expertise.
Here I propose that one function of death understanding is to allow children and adults to discriminate between living animals, which could hurt them, and dead animals, which not only cannot hurt them, but can also be eaten. This could be a useful skill in a species that interacts with other animals both as predators and prey.
I present the results of two experiments suggesting that children possess distinct ontological categories for living things (intentional agents) and dead things (biological substances, or meat), and that they can use cues to death to remap an animal from one category to the other.
Genes and human psychological traits
Thomas J. Bouchard Jr., Psychology, University of Minnesota
In this presentation I defend the proposition that, when assessed in the normal range of environments, genetic factors substantively influence individual differences in nearly every reliably measured human psychological trait. I review the evidence in three major domains of differential psychology; mental abilities, personality and social attitudes.
The evidence in the domain of mental abilities, particularly for the 'g' factor, is extensive and strongly supported by ancillary studies of genetic influence on brain size, a correlate of 'g'. The evidence in the domain of personality is less extensive than that for mental abilities, but strongly supported by a large and rapidly developing body of research on personality in animals. The evidence in the domain of social attitudes is much more recent and more limited than in the other domains, but compelling nevertheless.
Taken as a whole the major consequence of this work is that studies of environmental influence that make use of variation in ordinary biological families (historically a large portion of the relevant research) confound genetic and environmental influence and are consequently uninterpretable or, at best, misleading.
Simple heuristics meet massive modularity
Peter Carruthers, Philosophy, Maryland
This chapter investigates the extent to which claims of massive modular organisation of the mind (espoused by some members of the evolutionary psychology research program) are consistent with the main elements of the simple heuristics research program.
A number of potential sources of conflict between the two programs are investigated and defused, including the claim that the simple heuristics program undermines one of the main arguments in support of massive modularity. Nevertheless, the result of the discussion will be to force us to re-examine the way in which the notion of modularity in cognitive science should best be understood.
Steps toward the evolutionary psychology of a culture-dependent species
Daniel M. T. Fessler, Anthropology, University of California, Los Angeles
Despite a long history of interest in evolution, anthropology has failed to keep pace with developments in evolutionary social science. At the same time, although the new field of evolutionary psychology has developed powerful explanations of human psychology, it has largely overlooked the importance of culture in human behaviour.
If culture is our species' principal means of coping with our physical and social worlds, we can expect that natural and sexual selection will have produced specialised mental mechanisms designed to function in a culturally-constituted world.
An effective strategy for investigating human psychology is therefore to begin by asking what tasks a culture using mind must perform. A preliminary list includes the acquisition of socially transmitted information, the internalisation of norms, the maintenance of conformity with shared standards, and the motivation of punishment for rule violators.
At a proximate level, these mechanisms often manifest as emotions, including admiration, shame, pride, and moral outrage. Importantly, once such mechanisms exist they then influence the content of shared understandings. Recent results from ongoing studies illustrate the complex interdigitation of evolved psychological mechanisms and cultural information.
The concept of innateness: Taking the 'concept' part seriously
Paul E. Griffiths, History and Philosophy of Science, Pittsburgh
In previous work I have suggested that results from the empirical study of folkbiology throw light on the concepts of 'innateness', 'instinct' and 'human nature' that are used in the sciences of the mind today. Here I examine the prospects for a more directly empirical approach to the contemporary concept of innateness.
Drawing on recent and current research that I and my collaborators have conducted to investigate the diversity of meanings of 'gene' across different areas of the biosciences, I investigate how to identify experimentally differences in meaning that may be playing an unhelpful role in some well-known disputes about innateness.
Genes, environments and the concepts of inheritance
Matteo Mameli, Philosophy, Cambridge
There are two concepts of biological inheritance. One is the common sense concept that gives us a way to think about the like-begets-like phenomenon. This concept refers to the process responsible for the reliable reoccurrence of biological features within lineages. We can call this process 'in-F' (inheritance of features).
The other concept of inheritance is technical. It was introduced by Darwin and it is essentially linked to Darwinian population thinking. This concept refers to the process responsible for the reliable reoccurrence of biological differences between lineages. We can call this process 'in-V' (inheritance of variation).
The received view explains both in-F and in-V exclusively in terms of DNA-copying and DNA-transmission. In The Extended Phenotype, in an attempt to refine the received view, Dawkins says that environmental (nongenetic) factors are necessary for in-F but play no role with respect to in-V.
I argue instead that, in many (biologically important) cases, environmental factors are responsible for reliably-reoccurring (heritable) variation. These environmental factors are responsible for environmental variation that can be naturally selected. That is, genetic variation is not the exclusive target of natural selection. The received view of inheritance, variation and selection needs to be revised.
Is innateness a confused notion?
Richard Samuels, Philosophy, King's College London
Poverty of stimulus arguments in language and folk psychology
Gabriel Segal, Philosophy, King's College London
Food preferences and the development of core disgust elicitors
Tom Simpson, Philosophy, University of Sheffield
Food preferences and disgust play a central role in human life. We make moral and other character judgements based on the foodstuffs people prefer, and we frequently decide whether someone is 'really one of us' by observing what that person claims to find disgusting, and what that person does and does not prefer to eat.
In consequence, there has been much research into food preferences and disgust, and this work has generated a wealth of rich and fascinating data. This work has also produced detailed models of our adult disgust response, and of the substances, objects and events by which this response is elicited.
However, the development of our disgust response as yet remains much less well understood. There is little agreement over the processes such development involves, or over which models provide the best route to understanding how the elicitors of disgust are acquired.
My talk aims to work toward such an agreement. I will introduce and then assess two possible models for the development of the disgust response, highlighting the particular explanatory strengths and weaknesses of each.
My overall intention is to clarify what must be determined if agreement is to be reached over the development of our disgust response, and to suggest the most fruitful routes by which such determination can be made.
Adaptationist and culturist explanations of human behaviour
Chandra Sekhar Sripada, Rutgers University
It is sometimes thought that if an adaptationist explanation of some behavioural phenomenon is true, then this fact shows a culturist explanation of that very same phenomenon is false, or else the adaptationist explanation pre-empts, or crowds out the culturist explanation in some way.
There is in fact, however, a straightforward way of reconciling these two kinds of explanations. Adaptationist and culturist explanations don't compete, and indeed complement each other, when it's adaptive to conform to culture. More specifically, if it could be shown that it was a recurrent feature of ancestral environments that conformity to culture was in one's long-term evolutionary interests, then adaptationist reasoning predicts that people would have evolved mechanisms that dispose them to conform to culture.
In this case, there is a division of labour between adaptationist and culturist explanations, because they operate at two very different levels. A culturist explanation appeals to the conformist proximal mechanisms that make people conform to culture. An adaptationist explanation gives an account of why the conformist mechanisms evolved.
The preceding reconciliation strategy relies on the idea of adaptive conformity, ie the idea that, at least in certain contexts, it's adaptive to conform to culture. One goal of this talk is to distinguish two ways of understanding how adaptive conformity might work.
According to the Informational Conformity Model, it's adaptive to conform to culture because culture is spectacularly rich repository of adaptive information. According to the Strategic Conformity Model, it's adaptive to conform to culture because, given that others conform to culture as well, conformity is in one's long-term selfish interests.
A second goal of this talk is to distinguish two kinds of divisions of labour between adaptationist and culturist explanations of human behaviour, which are suggested by these models. The first is the historical division of labour mentioned above. Adaptationists and culturists are appealing to different levels of explanation, ie proximal versus ultimate.
The second is a psychological division of labour. Adaptationists and culturists are appealing to relatively rigid versus relatively flexible parts of human psychology, respectively, and both parts play a role in determining overall behavioural outcomes.
Two theories about the cognitive architecture underlying morality
Daniel Kelly and Stephen Stich, Department of Philosophy, Rutgers University
In this paper we compare two theories about the cognitive architecture underlying morality. One theory, proposed by Sripada and Stich, posits an interlocking set of innate mechanisms which internalise moral norms from the surrounding community and generate intrinsic motivation to comply with these norms and to punish violators.
The other theory, proposed by Elliott Turiel, Larry Nucci and others, posits two distinct mental domains - the 'moral' and the 'conventional' - each of which gives rise to a characteristic suite of judgments about the rules in that domain and about transgressions of those rules. The Moral/Conventional Domain theory is supported by an impressive body of empirical research.
However, we argue that there are already a substantial number of findings in the literature that are consistent with the Sripada and Stich theory but incompatible with Moral/Conventional Domain theory. We also maintain that there would be many more findings of this sort if 'moral/conventional task' experiments used a broader range of moral rules and transgressions. To support this claim, we'll sketch some pilot studies currently underway.
Innateness as a developmental phenomenon
Denis Walsh, Philosophy