The Concept of Innateness in Evolutionary Psychology

Abstract

Some of the literature pertaining to certain evolutionary cognitive disciplines is here reviewed.It is shown that there is at least one important connotation associated to the term “innate” as it is used in those disciplines; to wit, that an innate feature is one which is the product of evolution by natural selection. Then three recent proposals are examined characterizing innateness through concepts and ideas from biology —i.e., André Ariew’s, WilliamWimsatt’s and mine—and conclude that, although Ariew’s and Wimsatt’s proposals capture the aforementioned evolutionary connotation, they must be rejected since they either have serious internal problems, or else are incompatible with other important connotations associated to the term innate in evolutionary cognitive disciplines. It is also shown in this paper that my proposal does not share the problems that the previous ones had, but does share some of their advantages.