As we count up, number words that occur later in our count denote greater quantities. Here, we tested whether children's understanding of this “later-greater” principle originates from associating nu...

The nativist–empiricist debate has long organized cognitive science, framing cognitive mechanisms as either innate or learned. Recent advances in controlled rearing and scalable domain-general neural networks now allow this debate to be tested with unprecedented rigor, by raising newborn animals and deep neural networks under tightly matched developmental conditions. Strikingly, when pushed to this empirical limit, the debate does not resolve: the same developmental phenomena support both radical empiricism and radical nativism. We argue that this stalemate reflects a conceptual error. The debate conflates explanatory levels and ontological orientations, with nativists emphasizing stable symbolic structures and empiricists emphasizing the subsymbolic processes that produce those structures. We propose dissolving the dichotomy within a multilevel framework of cognitive development.

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In Conceptual Form, Sandeep Prasada develops a new and original approach to the study of commonsense concepts. He argues that lexically expressible concepts ...

For centuries, scholars have debated the etiology and evolution of writing. The most persistent concerns relate to the relationship between writing and social organization, linguistic structure, and c...

Cambridge Core - Philosophy: General Interest - The Philosophy of Time Reversal

Abstract. Conditional statements often imply meanings that extend beyond their literal content, influenced by contextual factors such as the Question Under