  Even without its 17th century metaphysical and theological ‘baggage’, the Nativist view, and the entire controversy surrounding it, came to be seen as born in conceptual confusion about the proper task of a theory of knowledge. Real philosophical questions are about the nature of our ideas and about the structure and justification of our knowledge. Nativism deflects attention from these issues, and distracts us with empirical claims about the genesis of ideas and beliefs.  Kantianism, the main 19th century alternative to the Empiricist project, presses many of these ideas. The modern scientific temperament was influenced by both these approaches, and eventually to be identified with Empiricism. We learn about the world only from our perceptual encounter with it; nothing is revealed to us beforehand. So innateness was triply condemned: it was born of superstitious religious thinking, it is empirically false, and it is philosophically beside the point.