NATIVISM, EMPIRICISM, AND THE ORIGINS OF KNOWlEDGE

What aspects of knowledge emerge in children prior to their first contacts with the objects of their knowledge, and what aspects emerge through the shaping effects of experience with those objects? What aspects of knowledge are constant over human development from the moment that infants begin to make sense of the world, and what aspects change as children grow and learn? What aspects of knowledge are universal, and what aspects vary across people in different cultures or with different educational backgrounds? Finally, what aspects of knowledge can people change in themselves or their children with sufficient insight or effort, and what aspects are invariant? These questions are central to a dialogue that has spanned more than 2000 years of intellectual history. Contributors to the dialogue have raised the questions in order to shed light on larger concerns about human nature, child development, education, science, and society. Although contributors have tended to be labeled “nativists” or “empiricists” according to the kinds of answers they thought most plausible, most have viewed these questions as empirical matters to be resolved not by ideology but by studies of the origins and development of knowledge. Research on cognition in infancy remained a dormant enterprise throughout most of the history of the nativist-empiricist dialogue, however, because the tools then used to probe human knowledge were not appropriate for young children. Today, the study of early cognitive development has overcome this longstanding barrier to progress. A number of tools have been developed over this century for investigating human cognitive states and processes, and some of these tools have been adapted for studies of preverbal children. New tools of enormous promise are appearing, moreover, with the rapid development of cognitive neuroscience. For the first time, these tools allow