 Although the clutter hypothesis captures what is ontologically at stake in debates over nativism, it does not explain why the associated conceptual confusion has been so difficult to resolve. Admittedly, ambiguities are by no means unknown to science (Cowie 2009; Samuels 2007). However, the tenacity of nativism debates in psychology seems unusual. One might reasonably expect that psychologists would have, by now, disambiguated this concept and developed experimental criteria for detecting specific i-properties. Such questions as whether a trait is present at birth, a functional adaptation, developmentally sensitive to some environmental factor, and so on should be regarded by psychologists as independent research hypotheses (Griffiths 2002). On the contrary, there is a stubborn tendency to conflate these issues by simply asking whether some trait is “innate.” Even among researchers who acknowledge on the one hand that “innate” is a multiply ambiguous term will, in other contexts, slide between different i-properties apparently without realizing it (Linquist et al. 2011). Such observations have prompted a number of recent questionnaire experiments, conducted largely by philosophers, analyzing the “folk” concept of innateness and comparing it to scientific conceptions.