  Before Chomsky, Nativism suffered from two disabilities. The older charge, which we alluded to briefly at the start, was that the doctrine was in some way incompatible with a naturalistic or scientific approach to the world. It is true that the Nativist view, as defended by many early modern Rationalists including Descartes (1996/1641 and 1911/1647) and Leibniz (1981/1764), did contain (what we now regard as) a supernaturalist element: what was innate was presumed to have been placed in us by God. But beside this taint of anti-naturalism, there seemed to be another problem, highlighted by Locke: simplicity. Locke (1979/1690) argued that, all things being equal, we ought to prefer the simpler Empiricist doctrine, which posits only sense experience and general associationist learning, to the Nativist view, which adds inborn materials. It is this presumption in favor of Empiricism that was inherited by modern versions of Associationist psychology; it was taken for granted that if there were equally good Empiricist and Nativist accounts, the Empiricist account would be methodologically preferable on the grounds of simplicity.