Abstract
The theory of natural pedagogy suggests that human infants genetically inherit a package of psychological adaptations that make them receptive to teaching. This chapter evaluates the theory of natural pedagogy, and makes it a test case for two recent theories of human nature: the nomological account and causal essentialism. However, neither of these theories captures firmly the explanatory project of which natural pedagogy is part. Instead, I offer a hybrid of the nomological account and causal essentialism, ‘evolutionary causal essentialism’. This captures both the evolutionary and the causal–explanatory characteristics of contemporary evolutionary psychology, broadly construed, and allows that natural pedagogy could be part of human nature even if, as this chapter argues, receptivity to teaching is culturally inherited.
Published Version
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