Innate Knowledge Research Articles

‘Guided By God’ beyond the Chilean frontier: the travelling early modern European conscience

This essay describes the journey of conscience of a sixteen‐year‐old Spaniard on the seventeenth‐century Chilean frontier as, while captive, he travelled deep into enemy territory, learned to live amongst the Mapuche, to speak their language fluently, made close friends and, to a point, shared their lives and customs whilst still endeavouring to remain Spanish and Christian. The essay analyses how the youth's conscience developed as he travelled around the indigenous Chilean landscape but also as he progressed through life and witnessed injustice and bad government causing continued suffering to those who lived near to the frontier. The boy's experience confirmed to himself and the contemporary reader the validity of Catholic notions of conscience – especially that of the innate knowledge of goodness – across cultural frontiers and throughout humanity. At the same time, the moral struggles described in Happy Captivity show the many difficulties he encountered as he realised the Mapuche's humanity whilst still trying to preserve his own individual Spanish identity. In the end, what he perceived as the universality of the innate principles of the Christian conscience took him to the point where he was able to transcend his own culture, inviting the dissolution of seemingly insoluble boundaries.

Response to Frisina’s Response

I thank Warren Frisina for his careful responses to my paper. I cannot agree more with him that we do not dispute on several key issues on WANG Yangming’s doctrine of unity of knowledge and action, and I also regret that I did not discuss in my paper ZHU Xi’s view on learning and investigating things in contrast with WANG’s view. But there are some important differences between our understandings of Wang’s notion of liangzhi 良知 and Wang’s doctrine of unity of knowledge and action. I will focus in this response on where we disagree and will respond to Frisina’s responses along the general disagreements and some specific questions clearly articulated by him. The first main disagreement between us regards the notion of liangzhi (innate knowledge). Frisina argues that I assume that liangzhi is merely cognitive and purely mental in some respect. But, he argues, liangzhi is a primordial mode of experience which is both aesthetic and moral and is not merely cognitive or purely mental according to Wang: “He sees it rooted in a pre (or non)-cognitive, immediate response to the world which is both aesthetic and in important ways moral.” This immediate response is more like the response anyone would have in the Mencius’s case of seeing a child about to fall into a well. I do not object to the idea that experience can be rooted in a pre (or non)-cognitive immediate response. It seems to me that the disagreement between us is not about whether experience is merely cognitive and purely mental but whether liangzhi is such an experience and whether an immediate response to a situation can be cognitive. It is not clear whether Frisina means, by “pre-cognitive experience,” an instinctive and non-reflective experience. If liangzhi is not an instinctive and non-reflective experience, the question is in what sense liangzhi is a pre (non)-cognitive experience. My understanding is that liangzhi is both affective and cognitive or reflective rather than instinctive or non-reflective, and an immediate response can be either instinctive/non-reflective, much like the response in Mencius’s example, or a non-instinctive and reflective response. Wang’s liangzhi or innate knowledge is perfect and ideal and differs from Mencius’ innate moral inclinations. For Mencius, the immediate response in the example is instinctive, spontaneous, and Dao (2009) 8:333–336 DOI 10.1007/s11712-009-9118-9

Bayesian approximations and extensions: Optimal decisions for small brains and possibly big ones too

We compared the performance of Bayesian learning strategies and approximations to such strategies, which are far less computationally demanding, in a setting requiring individuals to make binary decisions based on experience. Extending Bayesian updating schemes, we compared the different strategies while allowing for various implementations of memory and knowledge about the environment. The dynamics of the observable variables was modeled through basic probability distributions and convolution. This theoretical framework was applied to the problem of male fruit flies who have to decide which females they should court. Computer simulations indicated that, for most parameter values, approximations to the Bayesian strategy performed as well as the full Bayesian one. The linear approximation, reminiscent of the linear operator, was notably successful, and, without innate knowledge, the only successful learning strategy. Besides being less demanding in computation and thus realistic for small brains, the linear approximation was also successful at limited memory, which would translate into robustness in rapidly changing environments. Knowledge about the environment boosted the performance of the various learning strategies with maximal performance at large utilization of memory. Only for limited memory capacities, intermediate knowledge was most successful. We conclude that many animals may rely on algorithms that involve approximations rather than full Bayesian calculations because such approximations achieve high levels of performance with only a fraction of the computational requirements, in particular for extensions of Bayesian updating schemes, which can represent universal and realistic environments.

The Intellect Naturalized: Roger Bacon on the Existence of Corporeal Species within the Intellect

In this paper I challenge the claim that Bacon considered the operation of species as limited to the physical and sensory levels and demonstrate that in his view, the very same species issued by physical objects operate within the intellect as well. I argue that in Bacon the concept of illumination plays a secondary role in the acquisition of knowledge, and that he regarded innate knowledge as dispositional and confused. What was left as the main channel through which knowledge is gained were species received through the senses. I argue that according to Bacon these species, representing their agents in essence, definition and operation, arrive in the intellect without undergoing a complete abstraction from matter and while still retaining the character of agents acting naturally. In this way Bacon sets the intellect as separate from the natural world not in any essential way, but rather as it were in degree, thus supplying a theoretical justification for the ability to access and know nature.

Acquisition of aspect in self-organizing connectionist models

Two connectionist networks, DISLEX and DevLex-II, were used in this study to model the acquisition of lexical and grammatical aspect. Both models use multi-layered self-organizing feature maps, connected by associative links trained according to the Hebbian learning rule. Previous empirical research has identified a strong association between lexical aspect and grammatical aspect in child language, on the basis of which some researchers argue for innate semantic categories or prelinguistic predispositions. Our simulations indicate that such an association can emerge from dynamic self-organization and Hebbian learning in connectionist networks, without the need of a priori assumptions about the structure of innate knowledge. Our modeling results further attest to the utility of self-organizing neural networks in the study of language acquisition.

Actualidad de la polémica Chomsky-Skinner

El objetivo de este trabajo es reevaluar la polémica Chomsky-Skinner, a 50 años de la publicación de Conducta Verbal. Para ello, resumiré algunas de las hipótesis de trabajo propuestas por Skinner (1), luego analizaré las críticas de Chomsky (2), y expondré algunas de las respuestas más recientes al argumento de que la complejidad lenguaje y la pobreza de estímulo implican un conocimiento gramatical innato (3). Se concluye que la actitud de rechazo hacia las tesis de Skinner por parte de muchos estudiosos del lenguaje se originó en buena medida debido a errores en las críticas de Chomsky, que la polémica Chomsky-Skinner no está cerrada, y que las propuestas de Conducta Verbal mantienen su vigencia en diversos programas de investigación.

The Prince and the Sage: Concerning Wang Yangming’s “Effortless” Suppression of the Ning Princely Establishment Rebellion

The Prince and the Sage: Concerning Wang Yangming’s “Effortless” Suppression of the Ning Princely Establishment Rebellion Larry Israel (bio) In 1519 Wang Yangming (1472–1529) was residing in southern Jiangxi after having just led campaigns to suppress rampant banditry throughout the region. Although he wished at the time to leave his post of Grand Coordinator of Southern Gan and Superintendent of Military Affairs and return home to visit his aging father and recuperate from chronic illness, he was prevented from doing so by the development of a rather different kind of threat to the security of the country. This threat was the rebellion of the Prince of Ning Zhu Chenhao (1478–1521), the great-great-grandson of Ming Taizu’s sixteenth son, the Prince of Ningxian.1 The prince initiated his rebellion on 1519/6/142, but was defeated by Wang Yangming within approximately 42 days in what must have been a rather dishearteningly ignominious conclusion to years of grandiose expectations and preparation. But the challenges for the grand coordinator did not end with the capture of Zhu Chenhao. At the very moment he was submitting victory memorials, favorites of the Zhengde emperor, (Zhu Houzhao; Ming Wuzong; r. 1506–21), had convinced their ruler to lead a force of his own to the region. These favorites in turn attempted to force Wang Yangming to hand the prince over to their custody so they could release him on Lake Poyang and create an opportunity for the emperor to lead a campaign of his own. Because Wang Yangming refused, his life was at stake for months. In the end, however, after [End Page 68] having resided for a period of time in Nanjing, the emperor chose to return to Beijing, and Wang Yangming survived the challenge. The story of Wang Yangming’s campaign and his success in navigating the harrowing aftermath have received a degree of attention in scholarship on his philosophy and intellectual development because it was just after the campaign that he began speaking extensively about what is usually considered to be his final teaching: “the extension of the innate knowledge of the good (zhi liangzhi).”3 Because the primary focus of virtually all scholarship on Wang Yangming has been his philosophy, his conduct throughout this time is typically narrated in brief and somewhat hagiographical fashion as testimony to the significance of his teaching, or at least as background context for and commentary upon his intellectual development and spiritual journey. Julia Ching, for instance, states that these trials and tribulations “proved to him the reliability of his own ‘way,’ the way to sagehood which follows the promptings of the human heart and its desire for good.”4 These promptings were the innate knowledge of the good (liangzhi) which for Wang Yangming became an “an absolute norm, an authority for itself.”5 Similarly, although Xu Fuguan is one among a very small number of Wang Yangming scholars who attempt to give serious consideration to his “meritorious achievements” in light of his philosophy, and who therefore pays attention to his large number of official communications, his conclusions are similar to those of Julia Ching. He points out that those who hold Wang Yangming’s achievements in high esteem typically point to his rapid suppression of the Prince of Ning’s rebellion. With this he is largely in agreement. According to his assessment: The rapidity with which he assembled troops, the resourcefulness and decisiveness with which he deployed the military, and [the fact] that within less than two months and seven days he pacified the rebellion,6 naturally are very striking achievements. Yet this is something a skilled general could have achieved. But amidst dangerous suspicion and shocking [circumstances], the clarity with which he saw principle, the decisiveness with which he judged matters and, after his success, [his ability] to evade suspicion and distance [End Page 69] danger, to remain unfettered by concern over safety and danger, and to look indifferently upon worldly honor and official rank—this is not something a skilled general could have done.7 Xu Fuguan believes that what is most impressive about this campaign was Wang Yangming’s ability to navigate harrowing challenges and yet remain...

Alternatives to Innate Knowledge: Why Development is Crucial to Understanding Human Representational Change

Alternatives to Innate Knowledge: Why Development is Crucial to Understanding Human Representational Change

Connectionist Models of Language Processing

Traditional approaches to language processing have been based on explicit, discrete representations which are difficult to learn from a reasonable linguistic environment—hence, it has come to be accepted that much of our linguistic representations and knowledge is innate. With its focus on learning based upon graded, malleable, distributed representations, connectionist modeling has reopened the question of what could be learned from the environment in the absence of detailed innate knowledge. This paper provides an overview of connectionist models of language processing, at both the lexical and sentence levels. Although connectionist models have been applied to the full range of perceptual, cognitive, and motor domains (see McClelland, Rumelhart, & PDP Research Group, 1986; Quinlan, 1991; McLeod, Plunkett, & Rolls, 1998), it is in their application to language that they have evoked the most interest and controversy (e.g., Pinker & Mehler, 1988). This is perhaps not surprising in light of the special role that language plays in human cognition and culture. It also stems in part from the considerable difference in goals and methods between linguistic and psychological approaches to the study of language. This rift goes deeper than a simple dichotomy of emphasizing competence versus performance (Chomsky, 1957)—it cuts to the heart of the question of what it means to know and use a language (Seidenberg, 1997). Traditional approaches to language processing have been based on explicit, discrete representations which are difficult or impossible to learn from a reasonable linguistic environment (Gold, 1967). Therefore, it has come to be accepted that much of our linguistic representations and knowledge is innate. With its focus on learning based upon graded, malleable, distributed representations, connectionist modeling has reopened the question of what could be learned from the environment in the absence of detailed innate knowledge. Although the need to learn internal representations potentially gives connectionist networks great power and flexibility, it also introduces limitations. These limitations are important and, ideally, will reflect limitations observed in human language processing.

Two problems of easy credit

This paper defends the theory that knowledge is credit-worthy true belief against a family of objections, two instances of which were leveled against it in a recent paper by Jennifer Lackey. Lackey argues that both innate knowledge (if there is any) and testimonial knowledge are too easily come by for it to be plausible that the knower deserves credit for it. If this is correct, then knowledge would appear not to be a matter of credit for true belief. I will attempt to neutralize these objections by drawing a distinction between credit as praiseworthiness and credit as attributability.

Rapid learning of an abstract language-specific category: Polish children's acquisition of the instrumental construction

Rapid acquisition of linguistic categories or constructions is sometimes regarded as evidence of innate knowledge. In this paper, we examine Polish children's early understanding of an idiosyncratic, language-specific construction involving the instrumental case - which could not be due to innate knowledge. Thirty Polish-speaking children aged 2 ; 6 and 3 ; 2 participated in a elicited production experiment with novel verbs that were demonstrated as taking nouns in the instrumental case as patients. Children heard the verbs in sentences with either masculine or feminine nouns (which take different endings in the instrumental case), and were tested with new nouns of the same and of the opposite gender. In both age groups, a substantial majority of children succeeded in generalizing from one gendered form of the instrumental case to the other (especially to the masculine), thus indicating that they have some kind of abstract understanding of the instrumental case in this construction. This relatively early abstract knowledge of an idiosyncratic construction casts doubt on the view that early acquisition requires innate linguistic knowledge.

Bigrams and the Richness of the Stimulus

Recent challenges to Chomsky's poverty of the stimulus thesis for language acquisition suggest that children's primary data may carry "indirect evidence" about linguistic constructions despite containing no instances of them. Indirect evidence is claimed to suffice for grammar acquisition, without need for innate knowledge. This article reports experiments based on those of Reali and Christiansen (2005), who demonstrated that a simple bigram language model can induce the correct form of auxiliary inversion in certain complex questions. This article investigates the nature of the indirect evidence that supports this learning, and assesses how reliably it is available. Results confirm the original finding for one specific sentence type but show that the model's success is highly circumscribed. It performs poorly on inversion in related constructions in English and Dutch. Because other, more powerful statistical models have so far been shown to succeed only on the same limited subset of cases as the bigram model, it remains to be seen whether stimulus richness can be substantiated more generally.

Relationships among Preservice Science Teachers’ Epistemological Beliefs, Epistemological World Views, and Self‐efficacy Beliefs

This study discusses preservice elementary science teachers’ (PSTs) epistemological beliefs and the relationships among their epistemological beliefs, epistemological world views, and self‐efficacy beliefs. Four hundred and twenty‐nine PSTs who were enrolled in five large universities completed the Schommer Epistemological Questionnaire (SEQ), the Epistemological World Views Scale, andthe Science Teaching Efficacy Belief Instrument. Factor analysis results revealed four factors for the SEQ. These factors were Innate Ability, Simple Knowledge, Certain Knowledge, and Omniscient authority. Multiple regression analysis suggests that for “Innate Ability” factor scores, three of the predictor variables—self‐efficacy, outcome expectancy, and world view—contributed significantly to the model. For “Simple Knowledge,” only one predictor variable—epistemological world view—contributed significantly to the model. For “Certain Knowledge” factor scores, only one predictor variable—outcome expectancy—contributed significantly to the model. None of the predictor variables significantly contributed to the “Omniscient Authority” factor scores. Results revealed that in Turkish culture, PSTs’ epistemological beliefs support the multidimensional theory. In addition, while PSTs developed more sophisticated beliefs in some of the SEQ dimensions, they had less sophisticated beliefs in other dimensions. Also PSTs indicated that, when they want to teach science with student‐centered methods, they believed that they would be successful only if their students memorize the scientific concepts and facts.

Is Structure Dependence an Innate Constraint? New Experimental Evidence From Children's Complex‐Question Production

According to Crain and Nakayama (1987), when forming complex yes/no questions, children do not make errors such as Is the boy who smoking is crazy? because they have innate knowledge of structure dependence and so will not move the auxiliary from the relative clause. However, simple recurrent networks are also able to avoid such errors, on the basis of surface distributional properties of the input (Lewis & Elman, 2001; Reali & Christiansen, 2005). Two new elicited production studies revealed that (a) children occasionally produce structure-dependence errors and (b) the pattern of children's auxiliary-doubling errors (Is the boy who is smoking is crazy?) suggests a sensitivity to surface co-occurrence patterns in the input. This article concludes that current data do not provide any support for the claim that structure dependence is an innate constraint, and that it is possible that children form a structure-dependent grammar on the basis of exposure to input that exhibits this property.

Migratory programme of juvenile pied flycatchers, Ficedula hypoleuca, from Siberia implies a detour around Central Asia

Field studies suggest that in autumn, passerine Siberian-African migrants make a detour around Central Asia. We tested whether it results from an innate spatiotemporal programme. We hand-raised juvenile pied flycatchers from Europe and western Siberia in captivity and studied their migratory orientation by testing in Emlen funnels. The birds were kept outdoors in the local natural magnetic field throughout the experiment. Siberian birds showed a purely westerly orientation in mid August–mid September, before changing direction in late September. These data suggest that juvenile Siberian pied flycatchers indeed have an innate spatiotemporal programme that brings them to Europe before migration to West African winter quarters. Siberian pied flycatchers displaced to the Baltic area as nestlings, raised and tested there showed no significant second-order orientation vector in August; in September their mean orientation direction was south-southwestern (202°) and differed significantly from the western direction shown by their conspecifics in Siberia in August–mid September. A possible explanation is that the displaced birds detected displacement on the basis of the innate knowledge of some signposts. They may have ‘skipped’ the section of the route from Siberia to Europe and ‘switched on’ their migratory programme when in Europe, already towards the south-southwest.

Bird song learning as an adaptive strategy.

Parallels are often drawn between bird song learning and human language learning. The analogies include an early sensitive period for learning, separation of sensory and motor phases of learning, 'innate knowledge' of language or song, and specialized neural systems. Nevertheless, in distinction to human language learning, song learning is usually viewed as a purely auditory process. This view is implied in the typical experimental paradigm for studying song learning, in which the bird is isolated in a sound-proof chamber and exposed only to tape-recorded song. This paradigm remains the major method of studying song learning despite recent demonstrations of the importance of social variables, and it contains the implicit assumption that non-auditory variables, especially social and ecological variables, play only a minor role in this process. I will argue here that understanding the functions of song learning requires that we investigate it in the field, where social and ecological variables have full play. We have done just this for the song sparrow, and when viewed in this perspective song learning in the song sparrow takes on the clear outlines of an adaptive strategy.

Modularity in SLA

This paper reports on a study of the acquisition of reflexive and reciprocal forms in L2 Italian from the point of view of their argument structure. The results are interpreted with respect to the debate about whether transfer is monolithic (Schwartz and Sprouse 1996, Whong-Barr 2005) or modular (Montrul 1997), considering at the same time other relevant factors — innate mechanisms and L2 input. On the basis of the acceptability judgements of Serbian and English learners, compared to native speakers of Italian, it is argued that a modular approach is more realistic, as different types of transfer were identified for morphology (direct transfer of L1 marking) and argument structure (indirect influence of L1 general properties). Possible reliance on innate knowledge was detected at the argument structure level, while the input (examined through a corpus study) was found to influence both domains in different ways. It is also suggested that the three factors should be looked at jointly rather than in isolation.

Reconsidering the aims of analysis in a probabilistic universe: Containment and coniunctio

This paper explores the relationship between our attempts to define the aims of analysis and the acceptance of probability in New Physics. It draws attention to the influence of physicists on both Jung and Bion, which is well documented. It presents an argument for process-based aims rather than the recognition of innate knowledge as an aim. Two processes from different traditions (Jungian and Kleinian) are suggested as central to the aims of analysis: containment and coniunctio. The coniunctio/disiunctio axis in Jung's writing is paralleled with the axis PS<->D of the post-Kleinians. Clinical material is presented supporting the necessity of differential aims and illustrating development/stasis along this axis. A case is made for analysis to embrace the reality of uncertainty and to work with the psychic obstacles in patients, and in analysts, that result from coming to terms with probability.

Learning sensitivity derivative by implicit supervision

In control theory, variables called sensitivity derivatives quantify how a system's performance depends on the commands from its controller. Knowledge of these derivatives is a prerequisite for adaptive control, including sensorimotor learning in the brain, but no one has explained how the derivatives themselves could be learned by real neural networks, and some say they aren't learned at all but are known innately. Here we show that this knowledge can't be solely innate, given the adaptive flexibility of neural systems. And we show how it could be learned using forms of information transport available in the brain. The mechanism, which we call implicit supervision, explains how sensorimotor systems cope with high-dimensional workspaces, tools, and other task complexities. It accelerates learning and explains a wide range of findings on the limits of adaptability, which are inexplicable by any theory that relies solely on innate knowledge of the sensitivity derivatives.

Can innate linguistic knowledge be eliminated from theories of SLA?

The extent to which it is possible to eliminate the assumption of innate linguistic knowledge from a theory of second language acquisition is considered briefly. The agreement-with-subject possibilities of copula be discussed by O’Grady (this issue) are reconsidered, and it is suggested that there are some problematic data for a non-linguistic linear processor. It is also argued that some emergentist accounts of the acquisition of plural marking and agreement make assumptions that are tantamount to innate linguistic knowledge. Finally, it is proposed that an appropriate model of input is an important component of a nativist theory of second language acquisition.