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Nativism, Empiricism and Ockham's Razor

Simon Fitzpatrick, University of Sheffield (13 Dec 2003)

SPPA 2003 Winter Conference, University of St Andrews

I will challenge a common argument that has been made against nativism in cognitive science, this I call the 'argument from parsimony'. According to this argument, parsimony dictates that a theory of cognitive architecture should postulate a mental inventory that is as sparse as possible in its explanation of human cognition. The null hypothesis in cognitive science should be that the mind is closer to a 'blank slate' than it is to some richly structured nativist model. While this argument is widely adhered to in cognitive science it runs into very serious problems when one takes a closer look at the philosophical problem of simplicity. Philosophers of science have struggled to find a general motivation for a principle of parsimony and have tended to be very sceptical about the epistemic value of parsimony arguments in science. The purpose of this paper is to suggest what implications these concerns have for cognitive science. I will argue that parsimony may potentially play an important and well-motivated role but it is not clear that it will produce a preference against nativist theories. Indeed, it may be that we end up with a preference for strongly nativist theories.

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