knowledge

      The nature of the human mind and the origin of knowledge have been mysteries that thinkers have pondered throughout time. Two major schools of thought that have developed on the subject are empiricism and nativism. Empiricism says that all knowledge is based on experience while nativism says that our perceptions depend on knowledge in order to understand our senses. Both schools have many credible sources of endorsement. But, nativism holds more credibility than empiricism when put to the test of modern science and reason.
      One major proponent of empiricism was the 17th century English philosopher John Locke. Locke argued that the human mind was born without any knowledge. He said humans are born with a "tabula rasa," or a blank slate. People can only then gain knowledge, he said, through experience.

     Let us suppose the mind to be, as we say, a white paper void of all characters, without
     any ideas:-How comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store which the       busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless variety?
     Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer, in one word,      from experience. In that all our knowledge is founded; and from that it ultimately derives       itself. (Locke, as quoted in Gleitman, 170)

Therefore, as a person lives and experiences things, they begin to learn how things happen from having experienced similar events. Painters in the Renaissance discovered techniques to create a three dimensional image on two dimensional canvas. Observers were able to see this illusion of depth, created by techniques such as linear persepctive and relative size, because previous experience told them that these distance cues correspond with phenomenon that had occurred in their experience in a three dimensional world. (Gleitman, 172)
      Locke's arguments were easily accepted in 18th century Europe because the middle class was politically eager to accept the idea that people are born into equality. Merchants and manufacturers of the time had much to gain from the idea that the human mind is born without knowledge. That meant that the land owning aristocracy and ruling monarchy were not intrinsically superior even to peasants. If all people entered life with a tabula rasa, then education and opportunity could give any person as much worth as any other, regardless of their heritage. (Gleitman, 170)
      Nativism, which was strongly advocated by German philosopher Immanuel Kant in the 18th centry, among others in history, is based on the concept that the human mind is born with some innate knowledge. Kant argued that the mind is born with a number of innate catergories which enable people to understand their senses. It is these catergories, nativists say, that make perception possible. Kant said that catergories of space, time, and causality dictate all experiences. They are, he said, a part of the mind's structure. There is no way we can look at the world except in terms of these catergories and they, therefore, must precede experience in the human mind. (Gleitman, 173) In other words, knowledge of these concepts is innate.
      Each of these schools of thought give the mind a different functional role. If the mind has no knowledge at birth and acquires knowledge only through experience, then the mind must have a passive role.(Zeitlin, 8) It is as if the mind were a video camera or tape recorder.(Gleitman, 170) It takes in information, can hold on to it and store it, but cannot think about it, organize it, or create more.
      If, on the other hand, the mind has some innate knowledge and uses this knowledge to understand the senses, then the mind must have an active role. By using
a priori knowledge to evaluate and make sense of the world, the mind is organizing, thinking, and creating knowledge. It is on this premise, and on the premise of the existence of that innate knowledge, that much of the research that will be shown in this paper supports nativism.
      There have been many distinguished thinkers and scientists, in addition to John Locke, who have tried to advance the theories of empiricism. The 19th century scientist Hermann von Helmhotz is one such person. Helmholtz "believed that the raw data of sensation were perpetually subject to judgements based on experience." (Gigerenzer, 63) He was the creator of an influential hypothesis about how an observer can judge the size and proximity of any given object. This hypothesis was based on the idea "that there is a simple inverse relationship between distance and retinal image size." (Gleitman, 249) Therefore, if an object's distance from the viewer is reduced by half, it's visual size would double. This relationship between size and distance allow people to create constancy by simple calculation. For example, if the object mentioned above orignally is 20 feet away and appears to be 2 feet wide, when it is brought to within 10 feet of the viewer it will appear to be 4 feet wide. The product in each case, 20 x 2 or 10 x 4, is the same. This is how our mind understands the constancy of the objects size and we do not believe people to be shrinking as they walk away from us. Helmholtz, of course, did not believe that we would have to do math problems all the time to understand an object's size. But, he believed our minds went through some similar process, and he called this "unconcious inference." (Gleitman, 249) This supports the empiricist way of thinking because, "It was only by experience that Helmholtz learned that distance makes large objects smaller." (Gigerenzer, 63)
     In this, Helmholtz offers a strong opinion that it is through experience which we gain the ability to understand our visual perceptions. But, even in this line of thinking there is a form of nativism. According to Helmholtz, through experience, we gain guidelines and reference points to compare what we see to what we have seen in the past. But, that very comparison of perception to experience introduces an intellectual action beyond that of a video camera or tape recorder. Simply by the requirement that we make an inference, even the unconcious inferences of Helmhotz's hypothesis, we go beyond Locke's empiricist idea of the mind being a passive gatherer of experience and memory.
      In further support of nativism, there is a large amount of evidence that the mind is not born as a tabula rasa. Charles Darwin was one researcher who offered evidence of inherited knowledge. In his "universality thesis" he said that there are certain facial expressions that are universal to all people. According to Darwin, the evolutionary forerunners of humans created a set of basic adaptive patterns that have become part our primate heritage. (Gleitman, 476) To test this idea, Darwin conducted one of the first ever cross-cultural studies. These studies offered evidence that people in less developed parts of the world, such as the Far East and isolated areas of New Guinea, had the same understandings of some facial expressions as did people in Europe, even though the two societies had had little or no contact with each other. Darwin's explenation for this is that all people are born with an innate understanding of these facial expressions. (Gleitman, 477)
      There is also evidence of recognition abilities in newborns. "The infancy literature abounds with examples of the wealth of complex, domain-specific knowledge with which the human infant enters the world." (Karmiloff-Smith, 173) It has been shown that very young infants are surprised when they are presented with impossible images of solid objects passing through one another. It has also been shown that within the first hour of life they will recognize face-like patterns more than other patterns. (Karmiloff-Smith, 173)
      There have been some who claimed empericism in infancy development. Twentieth century Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget investigated physical knowledge in infancy. In order to do so, he created experiments with the idea that physical knowledge is truly exhibited only when a child deals with a problem in a way that does not resemble some previously developed habit and that shows that they are trying something that is new to them.(Spelke, 136)
      These experiments, Piaget concluded, showed that infants under 18 months of age had no knowledge of physical laws of motion because they looked for hidden objects in places that were not possible. But, these findings have been questioned because of the observations on which they depend. It was found that children under 18 months of age may not have been able to perform the tasks required of them by Piaget's experiments simply because they did not have the sensorimotor coordination to show their knowledge. Because of this, Piaget's findings on the subject were discredited and later studies have found evidence of physical knowledge in infants under 3 months of age and that elements required by Piaget's experiments are not fair expectations to showing phyiscal knowledge in children of that age. (Spelke, 147)
      The Schema Paradigm offers further evidence that discredits the thinking of John Locke and other empiricists. This theory for explaining cognitive development criticizes the empiricist idea that incoming sensory data arrives at the brain as meaningless stimulus, which is then run through a cognitive system of the brain so that it can be compared to stored data. In the Schema Paradigm, "Past experiences and other personal characteristics are not stored in a seperate warehouse awaiting consultation by reasoning," as empiricists say happens. "Rather, they are ingrained in the constitution of the cognitive system in the form of certain cognitive schemas." (Ben-Ze'ev, 81) A "cognitive schema" is a term for the way that learning experience is organized. "The organization is shaped by both the agent's innate dispositions and by acquired personal characteristics." (Ben-Ze'ev, 82) According to this view, the experience of learning something is not simply an addition to our mass of stored information. It is a "dynamic change of the whole system." (Ben-Ze'ev, 82) With each bit of information we learn, our cognitive system evolves. This is not to say that we have to go through a system of evolution every time we experience something. This process "has modified or tuned our cognitive schemas in such a way that our surroundings become meaningful." (Ben-Ze'ev, 82)
      The Schema Paradigm's intent is to discredit the empricist school of thought. In doing so, it strongly endorses nativism. The proposition that cognitive schema are shaped by our "innate dispositions" means that we cannot be born with a tabula rasa. And, the idea that learning creates a "dynamic change" in the cognitive system, an idea which is at the very base of the Schema Paradigm, indicates that the mind does not have the passive role proposed by empiricists. It is organizing and evolving in an active role, as nativists say.
      In the state of science today, nativism has more support than empiricism. "Cognitive scientists adopt nativism to answer," where the functional architecture of the brain comes from, "and argue that it is an innate property of the brain that is the product of human (cognitive) evolution." (Dawson, 235) According to a researcher in cognitive development, Annette Karmiloff-Smith, "All the new neonate and infancy data that are accumulating serve to suggest that the nativists have won the battle in accounting for the initial structure of the human mind," (Carey, 173) It has also been concluded that, "The nativist view of (visual perception) was more accurate." (Gleitman, 252)
      Further evidence in favor of nativism can be found in one's every day life. The very fact that this paper is being written indicates that the mind has the active role prescribed by nativists. Information in favor of empricism and nativism are being perceived by the author, whose mind is then comparing, contrasting, and evaluating this information.
     These actions are being represented by words created by the author's mind. These actions of the mind, in addition to the evidence shown that infants demonstrate knowledge from the very first hour of birth, indicates that Immanuel Kant's conception of nativism has more modern credibility than John Locke's empiricist theories.

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WORKS CITED

Ben-Ze'ev, Aaron. "Cognitive Development: Two Paradigms" Geissler, Link, and Townsend       67-90

Carey, Susan and Gelman, Rochel. The Epigenisis of Mind. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence       Erlbaum Associates, Inc., 1991

Dawson, Michael R. W. Understanding Cognitive Science. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers
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Geissler, Hans-Georg; Link, Stephen W.; and Townsend, James T., ed. Cognition,
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     Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.,   1992

Gigerenzer, Gerd and Murray, David J. Cognition as Intuitive Statistics. Hillsdale, New
     Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.1987

Gleitman, Henry; Fridlund, Alan J., and Reisberg, Daniel. Psychology. 5th ed. New York,
     London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1999

Karmilhoff-Smith, Annette. "Beyond Modularity: Innate Constraints and Developmental
      Change" Carey and Gelman 171-198

Spelke, Elizabeth S. "Physical Knowledge in Infancy: Reflections on Piaget's Theory" Carey        and Gelman 133-170

Zeitlin, Irving. Ideology and the Development of Sociological Theory. Englewood Cliffs,
     New Jersey: Prentice-Hall Inc., 1968