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Dr. Masoud Jasbi, Young Language Science Scholar (University of California, Davis)
February 28, 2025
9:00 am
Foster Auditorium, Pattee and Paterno Library

Dr. Masoud Jasbi, Young Language Science Scholar (University of California, Davis)

How to Win the Debate: Nativism and Empiricism in the Acquisition of Logical Words

This talk revisits the longstanding debate between nativism and empiricism through a novel lens from the philosophy of science, alongside empirical data on children's acquisition of disjunction and negation as case studies. Masoud Jasbi proposes that nativism and empiricism can be understood as scientific โ€œstancesโ€. He defines "logical nativism" as the stance that logical concepts such as negation, conjunction, and disjunction are innate and part of the language faculty. In contrast, โ€œlogical empiricism" is the stance that such concepts are learned and abstracted from experience using domain-general learning mechanisms. Adopting an empiricist stance, He presents experimental, corpus, and statistical modeling evidence on children's acquisition of disjunction, suggesting that a key nativist constraint on its semantics need not be innate but can be learned through domain-general learning mechanisms. Then he takes a nativist stance and present corpus evidence suggesting that contrary to what previous empiricist or constructivist accounts suggest, the available evidence is compatible with negation being an innate abstract and context-general concept present from early childhood. Summarizing his seemingly contradictory stances, he argues that viewing nativism and empiricism as scientific stances allows researchers to contribute to both sides of the nativist-empiricist debate in a systematic and coherent manner, ultimately helping us win the debate!