Experience is then the only legitimate source of knowledge. Differently from nativists, empiricists think that language is entirely learned. If language and grammar can be learned this means that they are existing features of the human environment. .
Along the line drawn during the above introduction I would like to avail myself with the thoughts and theories of such philosophers starting with the ones with a more nativist position until reaching the ones with a deeper focus on the environment in order to deeply analyze how these theories have become the basis for a more in deep psychology analysis of the nature-nurture debate. In fact, one of the hugest interrogatives of current psychology is based around this essential question: Are certain behavioral characteristics such as gender development, intelligence, and personality more influenced by heredity or by the environment? For centuries philosophers, scientists and other intellectuals have speculated on how we become the people we are, and there has been a long and controversial debate regarding the ways in which genetic inheritance and our environment combine each other in order to cause development. This is the basis of the nature-nurture issue. On one hand psychologists such as Noam Chomsky with his child language acquisition theory can be paralleled to the philosophic nativist theory, while behaviorist psychologists can be strictly related to the nurture vision of empiricist philosophers, such as John Watson with his "Little Albert Experiment". In the end I would like to bring to attention the opinion of James Hillman, famous American psychoanalyst and philosopher who in my opinion can be seen as a meeting point between such different approaches; The latter can be found in his The Soul's Code book1. .
The thought of the first psychologist that I would like to present in this discussion is by Noam Chomsky, in particular in relation to his belief around the acquisition of language by children.
