On Applying Learnability Theory to the Rationalism-Empiricism Controversy

Abstract

The seventeenth century dispute between “rationalists” and “empiricists” regarding the innateness of ideas and principles has received a good deal of attention from both linguists and philosophers of mind during the past two decades. Traditionally, rationalists have claimed that certain human cognitive capacities such as the capacity for language, for arithmetic, and for geometric reasoning, should be accorded a special status within the full repertoire of human cognitive skills. This was expressed in a combination of psychological and epistemological hypotheses about the causal and methodological bases of these components of human knowledge. Thus, while some rationalist arguments rested straight-forwardly on empirical claims, the more persuasive arguments were intended to establish what would today be regarded as foundational claims regarding the very possibility of acquiring these skills on the basis of exposure to the relevant experiences. Empiricist philosophers were by and large concerned to subsume these skills under a theory of general psychological mechanisms which would operate in the same way in each of the several domains of language, arithmetic, and geometry.

I wish to thank R. J. Matthews, E. P. Stabler Jr. and S. Weinstein for comments on earlier drafts. Support of research by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada is gratefully acknowledged.