Again, I'm looking at Fiona Cowie's book on innatism, past and present. My last post on this book discussed Descartes in connection with what Cowie calls the "special faculties" hypothesis in innatism, the view that certain features of our mind are modular, so that learning X is an qualitatively different thing from learning Y. Cowie distinguishes this from what she calls the "mystery" hypothesis in innatism, aka rationalism. Rationalists, like empiricists for that matter, "understand that both experience and our innate endowment play critical roles" in our development, learning, etc. The first issue that divides them, as we have seen, is whether the innate endowment is to be understood in a unitary or in a modular manner. The second issue that divides them is the idea of mystery, the idea prominent in the writings of the classical rationalists that there is no natural explanation of these special faculties, that they resist empirical invest...