Innateness and the Structure of the Mind: “This interdisciplinary conference will investigate the nature of the innate capacities, processes, representations, biases, and connections in the human mind. What elements of the mind are plausibly innate? How do these innate elements feed into a story about the development of our mature cognitive capacities? Which of these elements are shared with other members of the animal kingdom? What is the structure of the innate mind?” Part of a three year interdisciplinary project sponsored by the Arts & Humanities Research Board of the UK.

Following many years of neglect, nativist theorizing is now thriving. This resurgence owes much to the pioneering arguments of Noam Chomsky, which have stimulated a great deal of productive work in linguistics and cognitive psychology. But nativist theorizing has also received a powerful impetus from work in genetics and evolutionary biology, as biological thinking has begun to permeate psychology and philosophy of mind. As a result of these influences, there has been a huge amount of work in the cognitive sciences inspired by nativist theorizing in the past 15 or 20 years.

The roster of participants is a roll-call of luminaries in cognitive science, evolutionary psychology and philosophy of mind. University of Sheffield (UK) Dept. of Philosophy