Aristotle argued that people are born as a blank slate

(tabula rasa) and begin to ll their mind as they grow older and acquire their behaviours and attitudes from their life experiences. Modern psychology has used adoption studies and twin studies to explore this claim.

Steven Pinker in The Blank Slate makes the claim that humans are pre-programmed to develop certain traits (IQ, gender identity and alcoholism). Pinker is specically interested in language and argues that people are born with innate dispositions toward spoken language (2016).

Pinker is not referring to any specic language but simply language as the more general ability to understand and apply grammar and vocabulary to explain our world. This characterizes the classic debate between innatism (or nativism) and the concept of tabula rasa Where does language come from? Is it innate or learned?