  The Classical Nativist-Empiricist debate is an expression of a disagreement about a bigger question: what is the (cognitive) mind and what is it for?  For the Empiricist (Hume 1975/1738 being an especially clear example), the mind is first and foremost a pattern detector, and it is for prediction.  For the Humean, all we have to work with is one experience and then another.  Cognitive processing is at bottom experience mining: deploying our domain general cognitive machinery like statistical learning routines, memory retrieval, attentional mechanisms, associative connectivity, and so on, to detect patterns in the sequences of traces (Hume’s ideas) that experience leaves behind in memory.