Krytyka natywizmu jawnego i ukrytego w badaniach nad dziecięcymi teoriami umysłu
A Critique of Explicit and Implicit Nativism in Research on Children’s Theories of Mind

Summary/Abstract: The traditional theories of theory-of-mind development – modularist nativism, theory theory, and the two-systems theory – share a common model of mental representation. According to that model, the normative content of representation is encoded in its physical vehicle. In the present article, I point out that this claim entails the view that representation cannot emerge out of non-representational phenomena. This leads to the need of positing foundational mental content – foundationalism – and viewing cognitive development only as a reconfiguration of the innately given representations. As a result, all three models are forced to claim innate mental content, although only the modular nativists explicitly acknowledge it. Further, the idea that mental content is innate faces its own challenges: nativism does not seem to be a tenable position in either the “biological” or “psychological” sense of the term. I argue that nativism is a symptom of theoretical limitations, not a legitimate division of labor between psychology and other sciences.

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