 The question, “what are nativism debates about?” has been carefully analyzed by Fiona Cowie (1998), who distinguishes two arguments historically deployed in defense of nativism. Poverty of the stimulus arguments claim that the environment lacks sufficient information for an organism to learn some belief, cognitive disposition, or behavior. If an individual nonetheless acquires that cognitive trait, then the process must have involved some amount of “innate” information. A second type of argument, which Cowie (1998) calls impossibility arguments, claim that certain traits must be innate not because the environment is impoverished, but rather because scientific accounts of the acquisition process are doomed to failure. This distinction leads Cowie (1998) to propose two fundamental disagreements underlying debates over nativism. The “special faculties” debate concerns the basic architecture of the mind. Nativists posit special-purpose learning faculties to explain acquisition, whereas anti-nativists explain acquisition in terms of domain general learning. The “mystery” debate, however, turns on a skeptical claim about the limits of scientific explanation. As Cowie explains: