Indeed, as I said earlier, linguists see a grammar (an I-language) as an interaction effect between Universal Grammar and the information available in the child’s environment. But no one gets to exclude by fiat the contribution of an innate endowment. Second, Prinz seems to make the following inference: adults manifest capacity C; therefore, the stimuli available to the child are not impoverished. Again, this is plainly question-begging. And no one can credibly run the same line with respect to language. Here, Jackendoff’s (1994) “paradox of language acquisition” is instructive. Here is how Collins (2004) summ nike air max 180 arizes it: The professional communities of linguists and psychologists have all the data they desire on, say, English, certainly much more than any child has ever enjoyed. They also pool their mature intellects, have equal data on many other languages, and design subtle experiments and conduct longitudinal studies over many years. Yet they still can’t work out the principles, rules, and concepts that constitute competence with English which the normal child masters by the time she is five! So, it is not so much that the child’s data is poor according to some absolute standard (as if such a notion makes sense); rather, if the child were relying on data, then her Susan Dwyer acquisition of language would be miraculous. The acquisition ceases to be at all miraculous if we understand the child to possess innate nike air max 360 resources which already determine most of what is to be acquired. On this view, the child’s task is so “easy” precisely because Nike air max sale she isn’t dependent on rich data, while the data nike air max 90 current inundated scientist’s task is so hard precisely because he is trying to work out what the child already knows independent of data or general principles defined over it. (p. 505) Third, the notions of imitation and internalization are nothing more than terms of wishful thinking. Imitation may approach being an explanatory notion when, for example, we have reason to believe that mirror neurons are implicated. (Needless to say, we are far from having such a reason with respect to human moral capacities.) However, to say that children internalize some set of rules is not to explain their acquisition; it is merely to restate that the rules are acquired. This has been a central failing of so-called “social-learning” accounts of morality. Let us examine, however, the more than idle speculation Prinz presents for the claim that the moral/conventional distinction can be acquired without an innate moral capacity. To begin, Prinz cites some work about differential responses to different types of transgressions. Next he concedes that I might repl nike air max 95 y that children don’t get enough information to generalize from one instance of harming, say, to all instances of harming. In this way, he inter nike air max 360 prets me as advancing the view that moral maturation involves a straightforward induction problem. The faculty moral nativist can agree that caretakers’ differential affective responses to types of behaviors their children engage in will be salient to those children. However, as I have argued elsewhere, some parents get just as hot under the collar about conventional transgressions as they do about moral transgressions. (In some middle-class households, etiquette is taken very seriously.) Moreover, it is likely that conventional transgressions outnumber moral transgressions, offering little opportunity for the child to observe the peculiar type of emotional reaction allegedly associated with a moral transgression. And, there is evidence that caretakers mor Cheap nike air max e often correct or admonish conventional transgressions than they do moral transgressions (see Nucci, 2001; Smetana, 1989). Finally, even adults have difficulty distinguishing between strong emotional reactions: is my interlocutor angry, disgusted, irritated, or disappointed with my action? It’s hardly likely that very young children are any better at making fi ne- grained discriminations between the emotionally laden responses of their care nike air max tn takers. Prinz writes, “Adults explicitly tell children not to harm others, and this formula can generalize to novel cases” (p. 393). To be fr nike air max 1 ank, this strikes Comments on Prinz 417 me as outright assertion without argument. Of course, it must be conceded that caretakers do provide explicit moral instruction. The nativist need not deny this. But she will question whether this instruction provides every child with sufficient data to acquire the capacity we are investigating. First, it’s worth noting that “You ought to keep your promises” has precisely the same form as “You ought to put the fork on the left.” “I’ve told you before, don’t do that!” is as appropriate after a hair pulling as it is after an episode of food throwing. In other words, there appears little in the positive evidence concerning rule violations generally that would cue the child as to whether a moral or a conve nike air Nike air max uk max womens ntional rule has been transgressed. Second, there may well be a paucity of negative evidence concerning the distinction between the two types of rules. Very roughly, negative evidence is evidence the child can nike air max trainers use to correct a false nike air max 97 assumption she has made or which she can use (in this case) to eliminate a candidate criterion for making the discrimination. At best, it seems that children can become aware that the adults around them exhibit some regularities, sometimes their caretakers codify those regularities by uttering “ought” statements, and their caretakers seem to care about whether those ought statements are