Lecture 09b | Origins of Mind (Warwick 2020)

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Origins of Mind : 10

[email protected]

Our overall project is to understand something about the emergence of knowledge of minds, objects, colours and the rest in human development. My proposal is that we have to take two factors into account. One is core knowledge, the other is social interaction. Our current project is to understand where abilities to communicate fit into this picture---to understand, that is, what role they might play in explaining how humans come to know things.

Increasingly sophisticated forms of social interaction continue to combine with core knowledge to yield increasingly sophisticated forms of cognition, resulting in konwledge itself.

\section{Pointing: Reference and Context}

From around 11 or 12 months of age, humans spontaneously use pointing to ...

request
inform
initiate joint engagement (‘Wow! That!’)

From around 11 or 12 months of age, humans spontaneously use pointing to ...

request
inform
initiate joint engagement (‘Wow! That!’)

Let's have a look at the evidence for informative pointing.

Liszkowski et al 2008, figure 3

Liszkowski et al 2008, figure 5

Subjects are 12-month olds. Fig. 5. Experiment 2. Mean proportion of trials with a point in the experimental (E is ignorant) and control (E is knowledgeable) conditions.

From around 11 or 12 months of age, humans spontaneously use pointing to ...

request
inform
initiate joint engagement (‘Wow! That!’)

Why is this significant? Because it implies that infant pointing is not just a matter of getting you to do things for the infant, nor of getting you to do things with the infant. Instead it can be used where the infant has no expectation that you will do anything with or for the infant. And this matters because it constrains how an infant could understand pointing.

A Puzzle about Pointing

\section{A Puzzle about Pointing}

How do infants understand pointing actions?

Explain this in terms of models.

Hypothesis: ‘shared intentionality’ / communicative intention

This is Tomasello et al's hypothesis.

Observe the quotes: I'm doubtful that there is any such thing as shared intentionality, but I have to suspend belief in order to try to work out what their view is.

By the way, this is related to the essay topic on shared intentionality.

Tomasello takes infants' pointing to be based on what he calls shared intentionality.

shared intentionality

‘infant pointing is best understood---on many levels and in many ways---as depending on uniquely human skills and motivations for cooperation and shared intentionality, which enable such things as joint intentions and joint attention in truly collaborative interactions with others (Bratman, 1992; Searle, 1995).’

Tomasello et al (2007, p. 706)

\citep[p.\ 706]{Tomasello:2007fi}

I don't want to pursue this here; I'm just mentioning it because you might want to draw on pointing in your seminar essays.

Instead I want to ask in a simpler way, how should we understand pointing as other non-linguistic forms of communication?

To approach this question, it's helpful to compare and contrast humans with other, nonhuman apes.

Here is a beautifully simple story. Humans are highly cooperative from birth. Being highly cooperative enables them to communicate, linguistically and non-linguistically. Being able to communicate in turn enables them to acquire knowledge of minds, physical objects, numbers and the rest. This is a beautiful story and conceptually simple. Of course the challenge is to get from the story to the details.

But Tomasello doesn't stick with the simple story. Instead ...

There is this additional element, shared intentionality. I don't understand what it is, but Tomasello and his colleagues are extraordinay scientsits so I think it's worth exploring.

That's it for now: all I want to do is highlight that our thinking about pointing is going to connect with questions about shared intentionality.

But why suppose that ‘infant pointing is best understood … is best understood … as depending on … shared intentionality’?

It's goingt to take a while to answer this question ...

Why suppose this?

Hare & Tomasello, 2004

There is a need to contrast understanding action with understanding pointing. After all, there are subjects (chimpanzees) who can comprehend a failed reach but not a pointing action. How does understanding these actions, the failed reach and the pointing action differ? Moll and Tomasello offer a view ...

In this experiment, we contrast failed reaches with pointing ... Hare and Call (\citeyear{hare_chimpanzees_2004}) contrast pointing with a failed reach as two ways of indicating which of two closed containers a reward is in. Chimps can easily interpret a failed reach but are stumped by the point to a closed container. You are the subjects. This is what you saw (two conditions). Your task was to choose the container with the reward. Infants can do this sort of task, it's really easy for them \citep{Behne:2005qh}. (And, incidentally, they distinguish communicative points from similar but non-communicative bodily configurations.) The pictures in the figure stand for what participants, who were chimpanzees, saw. The question was whether participants would be able to work out which of two containers concealed a reward. In the condition depicted in the left panel, participants saw a chimpanzee trying but failing to reach for the correct container. Participants had no problem getting the reward in this case, suggesting that they understood the goal of the failed reach. In the condition depicted in the right panel, a human pointed at the correct container. Participants did not get the reward in this case as often as in the failed reach case, suggesting that they failed to understand the goal of the pointing action. (Actually the apes were above chance in using the point, just better in the failed reach condition. Hare et al comment ;chimpanzees can learn to exploit a pointing cue with some experience, as established by previous research (Povinelli et al. 1997; Call et al. 1998, 2000), and so by the time they engaged in this condition they had learned to use arm extension as a discriminative cue to the food’s location' \citep[p.\ 578]{hare_chimpanzees_2004}.)% \footnote{% The contrast between the two conditions is not due merely to the fact that one involves a human and the other a chimpanzee. Participants were also successful when the failed reach was executed by a human rather than another chimpanzee \citep[][experiment 1]{hare_chimpanzees_2004}. }

\textbf{Note that} chimpanzees do follow the point to a container \citep[see][p.\ 6]{Moll:2007gu}.

‘to understand pointing, the subject needs to understand more than the individual goal-directed behaviour. She needs to understand that by pointing towards a location, the other attempts to communicate to her where a desired object is located’

\citep[p.\ 6]{Moll:2007gu}.

Moll & Tomasello, 2007 p. 6

\subsection{pointing vs linguistic communication}

‘the most fundamental aspects of language that make it such a uniquely powerful form of human cognition and communication---joint attention, reference via perspectives, reference to absent entities, cooperative motives to help and to share, and other embodiments of shared intentionality---are already present in the humble act of infant pointing.’ \citep[p.\ 719]{Tomasello:2007fi}

‘cooperative communication does not depend on language, […] language depends on it.’ \citep[p.\ 720]{Tomasello:2007fi}

‘Pointing may […] represent a key transition, both phylogenetically and ontogenetically, from nonlinguistic to linguistic forms of human communication.’ \citep[p.\ 720]{Tomasello:2007fi}

\section{What is a communicative action?}

What is a communicative action?

First approximation: An action done with an intention to provide someone with evidence of an intention with the further intention of thereby fulfilling that intention

(compare Grice 1989: chapter 14)

Hare & Tomasello, 2004

Moll & Tomasello, 2007 p. 6

Let’s try to apply this idea to our pointing study ...

What is the confederate doing if she's pointing to inform?

First approximation: An action done with an intention to provide someone with evidence of an intention with the further intention of thereby fulfilling that intention

(compare Grice 1989: chapter 14)

Recall the comprehension of pointing case; what is the confederate doing if she's pointing to inform?

The confederate means something in pointing at the left box if she intends:

\begin{enumerate}

\item that you open the left box;
\item that you recognize that she intends (1), that you open the left box; and
\item that your recognition that she intends (1) will be among your reasons for opening the left box.

\end{enumerate}

(Compare Grice, 1967 p. 151; Neale, 1992 p. 544)

So to mean something by pointing, you have to have to have an intention about my recognition of an intention of yours concerning my reasons.

An inconsistent tetrad \begin{enumerate} \item 11- or 12-month-old infants produce and understand declarative pointing gestures. \item Producing or understanding pointing gestures involves understanding communicative actions. \item A communicative action is an action done with an intention to provide someone with evidence of an intention with the further intention of thereby fulfilling that intention. \item Pointing facilitates the developmental emergence of sophisticated cognitive abilities including mindreading \end{enumerate}

Inconsistent tetrad

1. 11- or 12-month-old infants produce and understand declarative pointing gestures.

This is what we have evidence for

2. Producing or understanding pointing gestures involves understanding communicative actions.

This is the rejection of the ‘block-slab’ model of communication

3. A communicative action is an action done with an intention to provide someone with evidence of an intention with the further intention of thereby fulfilling that intention.

This is the theory I take Tomasello & Moll to endorse (although they are not very explicit about it, it’s based on their use of the term ‘shared intentionality’).

4. Pointing facilitates the developmental emergence of sophisticated cognitive abilities including mindreading.

Which claim should we reject?

I’d like to be able to reject (3). But to do that of course we have to supply an alternative account of what a communicative action is, one that doesn’t involve appeal to intention.

From Joint Action to Communication

\section{From Joint Action to Communication}

Grasping and orienting are object-directed actions. Now referring is not an action in this sense. But it might be that infants understand if it were an action.

grasping / orienting vs pointing

Consider grasping as our model. You can grasp an object with your hand, mouth or foot. You can use a precision grip or a power grip or grip it in many other ways. In each case you are grasping the object.

Note that grasping is basic in the sense that the ability to produce or recognise grasping is (arguably) not a matter of being able to produce or recognise more basic actions.

individual vs joint

These things can also be joint actions --- we can collectively orient to, and grasp an object (at least we can if it’s large enough).

(Here I mean joint action in a minimal sense: our actions have the collective goal that we grasp, or orient to, the object. And we each expect this collective goal to occur as a common effect of our actions, yours and mine.)

Why not think of pointing as an action too?

You might object that pointing is an action with a communicative goal, and so needs to be understood in terms of communicative intention. After all, What extra-communicative goal might all pointing actions have?

The answer is so obvious that it is easy to miss. One extra-communicative goal of all pointing actions is to point. For comparison, consider a grasping action. To grasp something is not merely a matter of it becoming somehow secured in your fingers, hands, toes, elbows, knees or mouth: it is to perform an action directed to the goal of grasping that thing. The same applies to kicking, reaching, throwing and other actions. What distinguishes grasping a ball from it merely ending up secured in your fingers (say) is that to grasp it is to perform an action directed to the goal of grasping that ball. Similarly, to point at something is to perform an action directed to the goal of pointing to that object.

We might suppose that infants similarly think of pointing and verbally labelling objects as related much as different ways of grasping.

So their early understanding of communication with language and of non-linguistic referential communication is a matter of how they categorise actions.

*todo: Contrast both the pure use (block-slab) view, the Gricean view advocated by Tomasello et al view (they have to understand an intention that the action be interpreted in a certain way).

production : pointing is done to initiate joint action

Do something, however futile.

objection : infants point when there is no possibility of joint action

reply: from the infant point of view, this is a joint action

(mis)comprehension : in pointing, others engage in joint action with me

\begin{enumerate} \label{your_goal_is_my_goal} \item You are about to attempt to engage in some joint action\footnote{ We leave open the issue of how joint action is to be characterised subject only to the requirement that all joint actions must involve collective goals. Attempts to characterise joint action in ways relevant to explaining development include \citet{Tollefsen:2005vh}, \citet{Carpenter:2009wq}, \citet{pacherie_framing_2011} and \citet{Butterfill:2011fk}. } or other with me. %(for example, because you have made eye contact with me while I was in the middle of attempting to do something). \item I am not about to change the single goal to which my actions will be directed. \end{enumerate} % Therefore: % \begin{enumerate}[resume] % \item A goal of your actions will be my goal, the goal I now envisage that my actions will be directed to. \end{enumerate}

Your-goal-is-my-goal

1. You are about to attempt to engage in some joint action or other with me.

For example, because you have made eye contact with me while I was in the middle of attempting to do something)

2. I am not about to change the single goal to which my actions will be directed.

Therefore:

3. A goal of your actions will be my goal, the goal I now envisage that my actions will be directed to.

I claim (i) you could know the premises without already knowing the conclusion, and (ii) knowing the premises could put you in a position to know the conclusion. So the inference is a route to knowledge.

It describes how interacting interpreters might come to know facts about the goals of others’ actions.

The teleological stance is one route to knowlegde of other’s goals, and this is another.

(mis)comprehension : in pointing, others engage in joint action with me

comprehension : in pointing, others engage in joint action with me

Inconsistent tetrad

1. 11- or 12-month-old infants produce and understand declarative pointing gestures.

This is what we have evidence for

2. Producing or understanding pointing gestures involves understanding communicative actions.

This is the rejection of the ‘block-slab’ model of communication

3. A communicative action is an action done with an intention to provide someone with evidence of an intention with the further intention of thereby fulfilling that intention.

This is the theory I take Tomasello & Moll to endorse (although they are not very explicit about it, it’s based on their use of the term ‘shared intentionality’).

4. Pointing facilitates the developmental emergence of sophisticated cognitive abilities including mindreading.

I’ve just argued that we can reject (3). I’ve supplied an alternative account of what a communicative action is, one that doesn’t involve appeal to intention.

Conclusions and Questions

\section{Conclusions and Questions}

the question

This course was based on a simple question. The question is,

How do humans first come to know about---and to knowingly manipulate---objects, causes, words, numbers, colours, actions and minds?

At the outset we know nothing, or not very much. (Like little Wy here.) Sometime later we do know some things. How does the transition occur?

Have we made any progress in answering this question?

In the first year of life

humans already possess a range of sophisticated abilities

which do not involve, and are isolated from, knowledge.

Therefore the transition must be a process of rediscovery.

As this is not something infants could achive alone, rediscovery must be a joint action.

This creates a special, as yet barely explored role for joint action in development. Coming to know your first facts about particular objects, minds and actions is a process of rediscovery, which is a joint action.

To more fully specify goal-tracking we need a theory that specifies both the models and the processes involved in goal-tracking.

1. models (How are things in the domain related from the point of view of a 3/6/9-month-old?)

2. processes (What links the model to the infant?)

puzzles matter

domain	evidence for knowledge in infancy	evidence against knowledge
colour	categories used in learning labels & functions	failure to use colour as a dimension in ‘same as’ judgements
physical objects	patterns of dishabituation and anticipatory looking	unreflected in planned action (may influence online control)
number	--""--	--""--
syntax	anticipatory looking	[as adults]
minds	reflected in anticipatory looking, communication, &c	not reflected in judgements about action, desire, ...

Core Knowledge

The leading answer is that involves a ‘third type’ of representation, something distinct from perception and knowledge

‘there is a third type of conceptual structure,
dubbed “core knowledge” ...
that differs systematically from both
sensory/perceptual representation[s] ... and ... knowledge.’

Carey, 2009 p. 10

I have questioned this ...

I think the Crude Picture of the Mind is surprisingly useful in getting a fix on developmental discrepancies, particularly compared to theories which postulate either knowledge (incorrect predictions) or core knowledge (no predictions).

Contra the view suggested by Carey, it seems that, at least in the domain of physical objects, there is no need to postulate ‘core knowledge’ as something distinct from the epistemic, motoric and perceptual

Crude Picture of the Mind

epistemic
(knowledge states)
broadly motoric
(motor representations of outcomes and affordances)
broadly perceptual
(visual, tactual, ... representations; object indexes ...)

metacognitive feelings
(connect the motoric and perceptual to knowledge)

I also think the importance of metacognitive feelings may have been overlooked.

When it comes to explaining how different bits of the mind interact, or how knowledge emerges in development, we need metacognitive feelings because, aside from effects on behaviour and control of attention, \textbf{it is only metacognitive feelings that connect the motoric and perceptual to knowledge}.

Metacognitive feelings have been quite widely neglected in philosophy and developmental psychology. They are a means by which cognitive processes enable perceivers to acquire dispositions to form beliefs about objects’ properties which are reliably true. Metacognitive feelings provide a low-cost but efficient bridge between non-conscious cognitive processes and conscious reasoning.

‘if you want to describe what is going on in the head of the child when it has a few words which it utters in appropriate situations, you will fail for lack of the right sort of words of your own.

(Davidson 1999, p. 11)

I love this: Davidson says we will fail. So encouraging. But why will we fail?

Is he suggesting the issue is merely terminological? Not quite ...

we do know what is in between

What is in between:

object indexes

motor representations

metacognitive feelings

...

One moral: If we want to understand the developing mind, it is often useful to think about forms of adult cognition which are more primitive than knowledge and belief.

... But how might appealing to these capacities enable us to explain the developmental emergence of knowledge? We are still very far from an explanation!

Minimal approaches

to mindreading, joint action

and referential communication

do not presuppose

and may therefore explain

knowledge knowledge.

development as (re)discovery

Joint action transforms which abilities core knowledge makes possible, and it is reflection on these abilities and the experiences they case that is the ultimate source of our knowledge.

Well, maybe there is a big idea after all.

(I'm hesitant to mention this because it's not well established and, anyway, you should find your own big idea. But ...)

Through joint action you are able to rediscover what is in some sense already encoded in your core knowledge.

That, anyway, is one idea about how humans come to know about objects, causes, minds and the rest.

end

So what does a Dual Process Theory of Mindreading claim? The core claim is just this:

Dual Process Theory (core part)

Two (or more) X-tracking processes are distinct:
the conditions which influence whether they occur,
and which outputs they generate,
do not completely overlap.

\textbf{You might say, this is a schematic claim, one totally lacking substance.} You’d be right: and that’s exactly the point.

A key feature of this Dual Process Theory is its \textbf{theoretical modesty}: it involves no a priori committments concerning the particular characteristics of the processes.

Dual Processes and Development

There are two, or more, processes which involve different models of the domain.

One of these processes first appears early in development, the other later.

The model involved in the early-developing processes does not change over development.

The model involved in the other processes does.

end

Syntax / Innateness

\section{Syntax / Innateness}

So far we have considered examples of core knowledge. But we have ignored a paradigm case, one which has inspired much work on this topic (although it is not a case Spelke or Carey would recognize! *todo: stress throughout) ...

core knowledge of

physical objects
[colour]
mental states
action
number
...

Human adults have extensive knowledge of the syntax of their languages, as illustrated by, for example, their abilities to detect grammatical and ungramatical sentences which they have never heard before, independently of their meanings. To adapt a famous example from Chomsky, ...

The turnip of shapely knowing isn't yet buttressed by death.
*The buttressed turnip shapely knowing yet isn't of by death.

We need to task two questions.

core knowledge of syntax is innate (?)

First, what is this thing, syntax, which is known?

This thing they know, the syntax, isn't plausibly just a list of which sentences are grammatical.

Because people can make judgements about arbitrarily long, entirely novel sentences.

Rather, the thing known must be something that enables people to make judgements about sentences.

We might think of it roughly as a theory of syntax.

It's like a theory in this sense: knowledge of it enables you to make judgements about the grammaticality of arbitrary sentences.

The second question is, Is it *knowledge* we have syntax or something else?

There's something interesting.

The knowledge can be revealed indirectly, by asking people about whether particular sentences are grammatical.

But people can't say anything about how they know the sentence is grammatical.

It's like perceiving the shape of something: there isn't much to say about how you know.

So the theory of syntax isn't something we can discover by introspection:

we have to *rediscover* it from scratch by investigating people's linguistic abilities.

Knowledge of syntax therefore seems to have some of the features associated with core knowledge.

First, it is domain-specific.

Second, it is inaccessible. That is, it can't guide arbitrary actions.

In what follows I want to suggest that syntax provides a paradigm case for thinking about core knowledge.

In addition, I want to use the case of syntax for thinking about the question, What is innate in humans?

I was astonished how many people considered this question in the unassessed essay, some people seem really fascinated by it.

But almost no one discussed the case of syntax in depth. If you're going to talk about innateness, you really need to know a little bit about syntax.

So I'm also going to provide you with that understanding.

Consider a phrase like 'the red ball'.

What is the syntactic structure of this noun phrase?

In principle there are two possibilities.

the red ball

Lidz et al (2003)

How can we decide between these?

Is the syntactic structure of ‘the red ball’ (a) flat or (b) hierachical?

\begin{center}

\includegraphics[scale=0.25]{../www.slides/src/raw/img/lidz_2003_fig0.neg.png}

\end{center}

\begin{center} from \citealp{lidz:2003_what} \end{center}

\begin{enumerate}

\item ‘red ball’ is a constituent on (b) but not on (a)
\item anaphoric pronouns can only refer to constituents
\item In the sentence ‘I’ll play with this red ball and you can play with that one.’, the word ‘one’ is an anaphoric prononun that refers to ‘red ball’ (not just ball). \citep{lidz:2003_what,lidz:2004_reaffirming}.

\end{enumerate}

What I've just shown you is, in effect, how we can decide whihc way an adult human understands a phrase like 'the red ball'.

We can discover this by finding out how they understand a sentence like 'I’ll play with this red ball and you can play with that one.'.

But how could we do this with infants who are incapable of discussing sentences with us?

infants?

Here's how the experiment works (see \citealp{lidz:2003_what}) ...

The experiment starts with a background assumption:

‘The assumption in the preferential looking task is that infants prefer to look at an image that matches the linguistic stimulus, if one is available’ \citep{lidz:2003_what}.

Look, a yellow bottle!	control: What do you see now? test: Do you see another one?
[yellow bottle]	[yellow bottle]	[blue bottle]

So the key question was whether infants would look more at the yellow bottle (which is familiar) or the blue bottle (which is novel).

If they think 'one' refers to 'bottle', we'd expect them to look longer at the blue bottle;

and conversely if they think one refers to 'yellow bottle', then they're being asked whether they see another yellow bottle.

And, as always, we need a control condition to check that infants aren't looking in the ways predicted irrespective of the manipulation.

Lidz et al (2003)

And here's what they found ...

Lidz et al (2003, figure 1)

What can we conclude so far?

From 18 months of age or earlier, infants represent the syntax of noun phrases in much the way adults do.

So there is core knowledge of syntax ... or is there?

Core knowledge is often characterised as innate.

I think this is a mistake (more about this later), but many of you do not.

But are these representations innate?

How could we tell whether these representations are innate?

What do we mean by innate here?

The easy answer is: not learned.

But I think there's a more interesting way to approach understanding what 'innate' means.

Quite a few people pointed out that there isn't agreement on what innateness is.

But this is not very interesting by itself because there's disagreement about most things and potential causes of disagreement include ignorance and stupidity.

It's also important that the mere fact that a single term is used with multiple meanings isn't an objection to anyone.

As philosophers, some of you are tempted to catalogue different possible notions of innateness.

I encourage you to resist this temptation; if you want to collect something, pick something useful like banknotes.

There's a much better way to approach things.

Let's see what kind of findings are, or would be, taken to show that something is innate.

We can use these to constrain our thinking about innateness.

We will say: assuming that this is a valid argument that X is innate, what could innateness be?

\subsection{Poverty of stimulus arguments}

The best argument for innateness is the poverty of stimulus argument.

We need to step back and understand how poverty of stimulus arguments work.

Here I'm following \citet{pullum:2002_empirical}, but I'm simplifying their presentation.

How do poverty of stimulus arguments work? See \citet{pullum:2002_empirical}.

First think of them in schematic terms ...

Poverty of stimulus argument

\begin{enumerate}

\item
Human infants acquire X.
\item
To acquire X by data-driven learning you'd need this Crucial Evidence.
\item
But infants lack this Crucial Evidence for X.
\item
So human infants do not acquire X by data-driven learning.
\item
But all acquisition is either data-driven or innately-primed learning.
\item
So human infants acquire X by innately-primed learning .

\end{enumerate}

compare Pullum & Scholz 2002, p. 18

This is a good structure; you can use it in all sorts of cases, including the one about chicks' object permanence.

Now fill in the details ...

In our case, X is knowledge of the syntactic structure of noun phrases. (Caution: this is a simplification; see\citet[p,\ 158]{lidz:2004_reaffirming}).)

This is what the Lidz et al experiment showed.

Note that no one takes this to be evidence for innateness by itself.

What is the crucial evidence infants would need to learn the syntactic structure of noun phrases?

This is actually really hard to determine, and an on-going source of debate I think.

But roughly speaking it's utterances where the structure matters for the meaning, utterances like 'You play with this red ball and I'll play with that one'.

\citet{lidz:2003_what} establish this by analysing a large corpus (collection) of conversation involving infants.

What can we infer about innateness from this argument?

First, think about what is innate. The fact that knowledge of X is acquired other than by data-driven learning doesn't mean that X is not innate; it just means that something which enables you to learn this is.

Second, think about the function assigned to innateness. That which is innate is supposed to stand in for having the crucial evidence.

This, I think, is the key to thinking about what we *ought* to mean by innateness.

So attributes like being genetically specified are extraneous---they may be typical features of innate things, but they aren't central to the notion.

By contrast, that what is innate is not learned must be constitutive (otherwise that which is innate couldn't stand in for having the crucial evidence)

Contrary to what many philosophers (including Stich and Fodor) will tell you ...

‘the APS [argument from the poverty of stimulus] still awaits even a single good supporting example’

Pullum & Scholz 2002, p. 47

\citep[p.\ 47]{pullum:2002_empirical}

But they wrote this before \citet{lidz:2003_what} came out.

What is innate in humans?

I asked you this question, but what do I think?

I'd approach it by distinguishing two sub-questions (the second of which has two sub-sub-questions)

**todo: Stress other conceptions and arguments good; start with a project from \citet{spelke:2012_core} or from \citet{haun:2010_origins} and you reach a different point!

What evidence is there?

What does the evidence show is innate?

Type: knowledge, core knowledge, modules, concepts, abilities, dispositions ...

Content: e.g. universal grammar, principles of object perception, minimal theory of mind ...

Arguments from the poverty of stimulus are the best way to establish innateness.

The argument concerning syntax we've just been discussing is quite convincing, although if you follow up on the references given in the handout you'll see it's not decisive (as always).

For things other than knowlegde of syntax, the evidence concerning humans is far less clear.

There are, however, quite good cases in nonhuman animals, as many of you know.

So it's not unreasonable to conjecture that learning in the several domains where infants appear to know things early in their first year is innately-primed rather than entirely data-driven.

But, one or two cases aside, there's enough evidence to rule out the converse conjecture.

I don't think what is innate is knowledge, nor do I think it's concepts.

But I think there's a good chance that modules are innate (and therefore core knowledge if I'm right to suppose that 'core knowledge' is a term for the fundamental principles describing the operation of a module).

On content: I think quite a lot is known about the modules thanks to detailed tests that have little to do directly with controversy about inateness.

So let me put the innateness issue aside and get back to what I think matters most ...

Innateness / Syntax Conclusions

Adults have inaccessible, domain-specific representations concerning the syntax of natural languages.
So do infants (from 18 months of age or earlier, well before they can use the syntax in production).
These representations are a paradigm case of core knowledge.
These representations plausibly enable understanding and play a key role in the development of abilities to communicate with language.

This paradigm allows me to highlight something about core knowledge. I would be a mistake to suppose that there is some core knowledge which later becomes knowledge proper --- e.g. the fact that barriers stop solid objects is first core knowledge then later knowledge. The content of the core knowledge is a theory of syntax (let's say). Or, in another case, the content of core knowledge is some principles of object perception. These are things that human adults do not typically know at all, at least not in the sense that they could state the principles. So core knowledge enables us to do things, like anticipate where unseen objects will re-appear or communicate with words. It doesn't seem to be linked directly to the acquisition of concepts.

I'll re-explain development by (re)discovery with syntax as the illustration?

I don't think you should mention this in your essays, I'm still trying to work it out myself.

development as (re)discovery

Keyboard Shortcuts?

A Puzzle about Pointing

From Joint Action to Communication

Conclusions and Questions

Syntax / Innateness

Keyboard Shortcuts`?`