In the second half of the 20th century, N. Chomsky gave a new impetus to the debate between empiricism and nativism by proposing the concept of a universal grammar. Today this discussion is unfolding within the framework of cognitive science and consists in determining the peculiarities of cognitive mechanisms necessary to create a cognitive agent. The disagreement between the proponents of empiricism and nativism is whether these mechanisms are domain-general or domain-specific. At the same time, modern scientific literature on this issue does not take into account, on the one hand, Kantian intuitions about a priori cognition and, on the other hand, the results of the discussion between philosophers and physiologists in the second half of the 19th century. The aim of this article is to actualize the potential of the Kantian concept of apriorism in modern discussions between empiricism and nativism, for this purpose the concept of Kantian apriorism is analyzed and its influence on different stages of the discussion between empiricists and nativists is considered. The study concludes that Kantian apriorism allows us to adjust the strategy of realization of a cognitive agent, which cannot leave out the idea of conditioning of experience by a priory cognitive mechanisms and their peculiarities as innate potencies, as well as the specificity of their development in direct interaction with experience.
David Rozhin (Mon,) studied this question.