Human sound systems are invariably phonemically coded. Furthermore, phoneme inventories follow very particular tendancies. To explain these phenomena, there existed so far three kinds of approaches : “Chomskyan”/cognitive innatism, morphoperceptual innatism and the more recent approach of “language as a complex cultural system which adapts under the pressure of efficient communication”. The two...

In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, John Locke argues against the claim that there are innate ideas. His arguments consisted in the denial of universal assent, the incoherency of innate ideas, and the formation of principles by inductive means. In this paper, I attempt to show why these arguments do not work in showing that there are no innate ideas and also propose and defend Gottfried...

plato 1s doctrine of recollection is often identified witb innatism, and he is said to be an innatist. the present pape0 alongside j,vifh e:x:plaining this doctrine and other related doctrines in plato's epistemology, argues that the doctrine of recollection is not necessarily the same as innatism. it is a matter of fact that, in plato's epistemology1 perception and intellectual epist...

This work analyses the answers to a questionnaire from 8,285 in-service and pre-service teachers from 23 countries, elaborated by the Biohead-Citizen research project, to investigate teachers’ conceptions related to the genetic determinism of human behaviour. A principal components analysis is used to assess the main trends in all the interviewed teachers’ conceptions. This illustrates that inn...

Inheritors of the Calvinist Reformed tradition have long disagreed about whether knowledge of God’s nature and existence can be or need be acquired inferentially by means of the standard arguments of natural theology. Nonetheless, they have traditionally coalesced around the thought that some sense or awareness of God is naturally implanted or innate in human beings. A root of this orientation ...

Whether simple syntax (in the form of simple word order) can emerge during the emergence of lexicon is studied from a simulation perspective; a multiagent computational model is adopted to trace a lexicon-syntax coevolution through iterative communications. Several factors that may affect this self-organizing process are discussed. An indirect meaning transference is simulated to study the effe...