Nativism, or the doctrine of innate ideas, is the thesis that human beings possess at least some substantive knowledge innately. The doctrine has long been the subject of intense controversy among philosophers, and since the late 1950s, among cognitive scientists as well. It is generally understood in opposition to the doctrine of empiricism, according to which all substantive human knowledge derives from sense experience.

Proponents of nativism argue that experience alone cannot account, either de facto, or in principle, for the extent and specific content of human knowledge. Arguments of the first type focus on the type and amount of information actually available to a human being during a given period of empirical experience, and purport to show that the information contained in that experience is insufficient to account for a person's manifest cognitive achievements at that point. Such arguments have become known by...