Research On Richard Samuels's Nativism

In the second half of the 20th century,the emergence of the latest scientific achievements such as neuroscience,brain science,and artificial intelligence made the mind,which had been abandoned by empiricism,re-enter the research field of philosophers,and the theory of nativism has been strongly revived and developed in the contemporary era.Contemporary western research on innateness has experienced a turn from traditional epistemology to cognitive philosophy,and its results are mainly the transformative nativism.It is no longer confined to the traditional epistemological sense of innate concepts or cognitive problems,but expands its target to all the psychological resources of innateness and focuses on the following issues:Does man have innate mind?What is innate mind?What are the psychological structures or mechanisms of innateness?What is the primitive psychology?As one of the many theoretical achievements of the transformative nativism,Samuels's nativism mainly focuses on the original mind,trying to understand the innate psychology that is present in the formation of life.From the perspective of primitivism,Samuels attempts to further clarify and defend the concept of innateness in contemporary cognitive science and illustrates the important role of nativism in the field of mind and cognitive philosophy.By studying the relevant English literature,this paper tries to sort out the background and development of Samuels's innate ideas,and systematically discusses the core content and theoretical significance of Samuels's nativism,mainly including the following chapters:Chapter one mainly introduces the theoretical background of Samuels's nativism,including the continuous evolution of the western traditional theory of innate idea and the revival and development of the contemporary transformative nativism.Chapter two introduces the challenge and impact of contemporary nativism.Although the contemporary transformative nativism has achieved a strong renaissance,it still faces the severe conceptual challenge of the confusion.The advocates of this theory believe that the concept of innateness is so fundamentally confused that it should be abolished.At the same time,with the continuous development of science and technology,the latest experimental evidence in the field of neurobiology also caused many questions and criticisms on nativism.Chapter three discusses the main content of Samuels's nativism.In the face of these challenges and doubts,Samuels formulates psychological primitivism.First,he argues that a satisfactory account of nativism should meet a number of constraints,such as the conceptual constraints,the "logical geography" constraints,the argument constraints and the significance constraints.Secondly,he elaborates on the related concepts and core ideas of psychological primitivism.At the same time,Samuels discusses the relationship between innateness and common sense,biology and psychology,and analyzes some basic problems of contemporary research of nativism.Finally,he puts forward the overgeneralization problem of psychological primitivism and its solutions.Chapter four is mainly about Samuels's response to the conceptual challenge,his criticism of the invariance theory and Mamelli and Bateson's understanding and evaluation of psychological primitivism.The last part is the evaluation and reflection of Samuels's nativism.It mainly analyzes the rationality and limitation of the psychological primitivism,and makes a brief comparison with the study of Chinese innate mind.Samuels's nativism belongs to the research of the mind and cognition,it deepens our understanding of the mind and has a theoretical significance that cannot be ignored for the development of Western philosophy of mind.