Specifying Innateness in Infant Development: A Framework for Theory-Building Based on Co-Determination

Infant research has often treated early neural and behavioral expression as a privileged window into the initial state of the mind, with early-emerging capacities sometimes uncritically taken as evidence of innate knowledge. This paper evaluates the strength of such inferences through four intersecting lenses: genetics and epigenetics, cultural evolution, definitional precision, and standards of scientific explanation and falsifiability. It distinguishes among several non-equivalent forms of innateness, including claims about representational content, architectural or processing biases, develo