Abstract

The paper critiques the Khalidi-Stich triggering model of innateness, arguing that it fails to account for paradigm cases of innate cognitive abilities, such as causal perception. This triggering model implicitly relies on a high degree of what I call trigger specificity, a requirement that the development of causal perception does not meet. In response to this shortcoming, I propose that trigger specificity should be understood as a spectrum rather than a binary property. This revision not only resolves the problem posed by causal perception but also helps articulate a more nuanced conception of innateness tailored specifically to the explanatory goals of cognitive science.