  The defining feature of Behaviorism is its anti-mentalism—the methodological claim that one can (must) provide a psychological account of human beings without referencing internal mental states. Chomsky’s attack on Skinner zeroes in on this  anti-mentalism.[2] The connection between Behaviorism and Nativism, on the other hand, is typically given less prominence. Although Behaviorism is closely tied to Empiricist associationism and is therefore ‘officially’ anti-Nativist, theories like Skinner’s do incorporate significant Nativist elements. Specifically, Skinner took it for granted that every animal has a range of naturally emitted behaviors. Some of these behaviors are responses to stimuli (Skinner’s respondents—e.g., the baby’s suckling response), while others are just emitted (Skinner’s operants—e.g., the baby’s babbling). These behaviors are the raw materials that can be shaped by experience—Skinner’s conditioning and the law of effect. So the notion of an innate behavioral repertoire, and of innately specified links between environmental stimuli and elements of that repertoire, are very much part of the Behaviorist picture. This innate repertoire was, as any good Darwinian would expect, highly information rich, because it was shaped by the history of problem solving by the animal’s forebears. All parties take it for granted that babies babble, and suckle in the presence of the right stimuli, because such behaviors are part of their biological heritage. There might be disagreements about the underlying mechanisms and epistemological standing of that heritage, but it is hard to deny that humans are in some sense pre-informed that they need to suck to get milk from the breast. This is a ‘factory settings’ for babies. So if we set aside the controversy over the subject matter of psychology (behavior or the internal mind?), and the controversy over the right explanatory constructs (schedules of reinforcement or cognitive processes?), we find that Behaviorism is actually committed to innateness claims, and doctrinally opposed to any kind of ‘blank-slate-ism’. But this isn’t how things actually played out. Behaviorism was for the most part truer to its affiliations with philosophical Empiricism and Associationism, and its Nativist commitments were obscured. One important lesson is that in the Nativism-Empiricism debate we are often dealing with ideology, not theory (Pinker 2002).