Introduction

TL;DR: This chapter introduces the book, contextualizing the rationalism-empiricism debate by tracing its history from Noam Chomsky's work to contemporary cognitive science, highlighting the need to address philosophical and theoretical questions amidst empirical data.

Abstract: Abstract This chapter provides an introduction to the book as a whole. It contextualizes the contemporary rationalism-empiricism debate about the origins of concepts, tracing it back to Noam Chomsky’s seminal work in the 1960s and 1970s, which drew an explicit link between twentieth-century linguistics and the historical philosophical debate about innate ideas, particularly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The chapter illustrates how the wealth of empirical data that is now available through research in cognitive science has transformed the debate. At the same time, it makes clear that this doesn’t mean that the philosophical debate has now simply been reduced to a straightforward empirical question. Bringing this wealth of empirical data to bear on the debate requires addressing a broad range of philosophical and theoretical questions, some old and some new.