 But a number of developments have led to a resurgence of Nativism, beginning with Chomsky’s revolutionary work in linguistics in the 1950s and 1960s.  This entry places this resurgence in its scientific and philosophical context, and will discuss a few important areas of research to give a taste of the kinds of experimental approaches, hypotheses, and theories that have been advanced. A word about the focus of this entry. Most philosophical discussions about innateness begin with careful analyses of the variety of meanings innateness claims can have, consider the sorts of entities that might be at issue in such claims (beliefs, ideas, concepts, knowledge, etc.), discuss the epistemological standing of these innate elements, and so on. These questions are no doubt interesting—and sometimes the answers are interesting too—and such work has its place. But the real action for philosophers is more in the details of the current empirical research, and less in the philosophical bookkeeping. Cognitive scientists are beginning to reveal some of the basic, or one might say ‘primal’, patterns of human cognition. They are using experimental evidence to paint a detailed picture of how we human beings understand the world—both the physical world around us, and ourselves and other selves that are parts of that world. Developmental scientists are trying to figure out to what extent and in what ways we are built by nature to arrive at these understandings. Those we identify as Nativists accord a significant role to our natures, and lean towards the view that we are not built to be initially neutral about the world we encounter, in the way that classical Empiricism would lead us to expect. This growing body of scientific thinking is of general interest, as evidenced by the attention of science magazines and newspapers like the NY Times. But the character of our primal understandings and their innate bases are intimately connected to the central concepts and questions that philosophers have always been most interested in. Getting clear on how we naturally think and how we come to think that way is, arguably, a critical element in our understanding of human beings.