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 broad evidence of innate knowledge. This paper evaluates the strength of such inferences through four intersecting lenses: genetics and epigenetics, cultural evolution, definitional precision, and historical and contemporary 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 greater specificity in accounts of co-determination as a framework for theory-building that encourages delineation of biological constraints, experiential inputs, cultural ecologies, developmental timing, and interactive mechanisms proposed to produce a given outcome, as well as patterns of variation that would support or challenge those claims. The central aim is to provide a more tractable and testable basis for theorizing about the initial state of the infant mind.