Genes, Brains, and Human Potential The Science and Ideology of Intelligence

202 A CREATIVE COGNITION

BASIC PRESUPPOSITIONS

Th eories of cognition today, are, basically, elaborations of one or the

other (or some combination) of three sets of presuppositions. Th ese have

been around for at least the past two hundred years but have roots stretch-

ing as far back as ancient Greece (circa 2,500 years ago). I summarize

these assumptions as briefl y as pos si ble.

Nativism
So- called nativists have always argued that there must be some ver y clever
data- handling pro cesses built into the cognitive system. Th is is because—
as I mentioned regarding vision in chapter 6— the raw stimuli alone are
too fuzzy and unreliable to specify percepts or concepts. Th is is called
the “poverty of the stimulus” argument. So nativists argue that some
prestructured operations must be genet ically specifi ed and more or less
pres ent at birth or early development. Recent exponents of this view in-
clude Noam Chomsky, Jerome Fodor, and Steven Pinker.
Th e view has also been popu lar with so- called evolutionary psycholo-
gists. Th ey argue that cognitive functions consist of specifi c modules, or
dedicated brain cir cuits, as specifi c biological adaptations. Th rough natu-
ral se lection, such modules have evolved to pro cess the data characteristic
of specifi c aspects of our ancestral environments. Th ese modules auto-
matically deal with the natu ral, day- to- day variation in experience, because
they possess pro cessing rules, like computer programs. Th ey operate by
setting up internal repre sen ta tions of current inputs and matching them
to ones in memory. Suitable responses, such as categorizations or motor
action, can then follow according to these built-in pro cessing rules.
Note that this idea has involved a nature- nurture debate diff er ent from
the one about individual diff erences. It concerns the degree to which those
so- called rules of cognitive function are shaped by genes in evolutionary
time or instead by experience during the course of development. In his
book, Th e Blank Slate, Steven Pinker argues that anyone who denies the
ge ne tic view of native pro cesses is basically denying human nature.
But the issue is poorly framed, either way. Th e main prob lem—as dis-
cussed in chapter 4—is that any form shaped over evolutionary time, by

This content downloaded from 139.184.14.159 on Tue, 17 Oct 2017 13:54:24 UTC

http://www.ebook3000.com