Specifying Innateness in Infant Development: A Framework for Theory-Building Based on Co-Determination

Infant research has often treated early neural and behavioral expression as a privileged window into the initial state of the mind, with early-emerging capacities sometimes uncritically taken as evidence of innate knowledge. This paper evaluates the strength of such inferences through four intersecting lenses: genetics and epigenetics, cultural evolution, definitional precision, and standards of scientific explanation and falsifiability. It distinguishes among several non-equivalent forms of innateness, including claims about representational content, architectural or processing biases, developmental canalization, and maturational timing. In place of broad or underspecified appeals to innateness, it advances co-determination as a framework for theory-building that encourages specification of the biological constraints, experiential inputs, cultural ecologies, developmental timing, and interactive mechanisms proposed to produce a given outcome, as well as the patterns of variation that would support or challenge those claims. The central aim is to provide a more precise and testable basis for theorizing about the initial state of the infant mind.