So I've bumbled on a discovery. I've discovered that a certain 18 year old book seems to be important to controversies that are in turn important to me.
As you can see, I pursued the kind pointer of Richard Heck, mentioned here yesterday. He referenced What's Within? Nativism Reconsidered (1999). The amazon page is here: https://www.amazon.com/Whats-Within-Nativism-Reconsidered-Philosophy/dp/0195159780
This is a contribution to the old debate between rationalism and empiricism. Cowie says that empiricism, with its blank-slate mind filled by experience (or, as behaviorists came to say, by conditioning) was regnant in the Anglo-American world in the late 1940s. This was the era of Skinner's rise to prominence. It was also an era when a lot of ideas seemed to have been discredited by the recent war, by having a Teutonic sound to them, and innate ideation was a casualty.
Later, Chomsky and Fodor turned the tide: Chomsky as to language skills, Fodor as to ideas proper. Cowie takes them both to task, and wants her book to be a contribution to another such turn..
Only one substantive point in this endeavor is clear to me from the skimming I've thus far given the book. As I expected she would, Cowie charges that both of her Ur-nativists have a difficult relationship with the theory of evolution by natural selection. She thinks that each of them owes us a theory of how the capacity for the self-conscious development of language or ideas developed over time, amongst a certain set of primates. If they are in any important non-tautological sense innate then they somehow GOT to be innate, and unless either thinker is willing to make a clean break with Darwin (which has not been forthcoming) there ought to be at least a schematic explanation of how that happened, how one particular species acquired this equipment which is now pre-installed in each of its tokens.
And if either does want to make a clean break with Darwin, that needs explanation too and (since both are naturalists) sky-hooks can't be part of the alternative account.
Cowie notes somewhat drily that Plato is a rare example of an innatist who DID give an explanation of how the innate stuff got inside the head: metempsychosis! His followers have not been as helpful.
Cowie's book inspired a lengthy and biting reply by Fodor, which was Heck's specific reference to me.. She in turn replied to that. That reply puts her position in a more scannable form. Here's the
URL:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/313821440_Whistling_%27Dixie%27_Response_to_Fodor%27s_%27Doing_without_What%27s_Within%27
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