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A fundamental insight of philosophical rationalism is that human creativity crucially depends on an innate system of concept generation and combination. According to Chomsky, children display “ordinary” creativity—appropriate and innovative use of complexes of concepts—from virtually their first words. With language, they bring to bear thousands of rich and articulate concepts when they play, invent, and speak to and understand each other. They seem to know much more than they have been taught—or even could be taught. Such knowledge, therefore, must be innate in some sense. To say it is innate, however, is not to say that the child is ...(100 of 5208 words)