 Nativism and Empiricism are rival approaches to questions about the origins of knowledge.  Roughly speaking, Nativists hold that important elements of our understanding of the world are innate, that they are part of our initial condition, and thus do not have to be learned from experience.  Empiricists deny this, claiming that all knowledge is based in experience.  Different Nativist and Empiricist views spell out the details in different ways, depending on which elements of our knowledge are at issue, what counts as understanding, what is meant by the initial condition, how learning is to be understood, what it is for knowledge to be based in experience, and so on.  There continues to be lively philosophical debate about whether there is any satisfactory general account of what it is for something to be innate (for a review of some recent work see Gross &amp; Rey 2012).  The Nativist views discussed here differ in many respects, but all share the broad commitments of the approach.  It should be noted that the commonplace opposition of Empiricism to Rationalism reflects back on 17th and 18th century philosophical debates in which Nativism was a central plank in the Rationalist position.  The contemporary Nativist views we consider here are independent of most of the broader Rationalist commitments (see the entry on   rationalism vs. empiricism), but we note some important and often-ignored connections in section 3.3 of this entry.   Although it is misleading, it is not uncommon for the terms ‘Nativism’ and ‘Rationalism’ to be used interchangeably (see the entry on the   historical controversies surrounding innateness).