Let me add some comments to Mitch Green's and Gabriel Segal's. (And a quick plug: you might want to check out my entry on "Nativism" in the new edition of the Macmillan Encyclopedia of Philosophy, due out soon.) Two quick points, and then a longer one. First: Showing that a trait has a "biological basis" is not the same thing as showing that it is "natural" in any sense that can be opposed to "nurtural" (is that a word? It should be.) Unless you are a dualist, you shouldn't be surprised to find that psychological states are correlated with, depend upon, or are flatout identical with biological states. (Indeed, you shouldn't be surprised even if you are a dualist, but that's another story.) But that means that any acquired trait will have some biological effect. Showing, therefore, that the brains of musically accomplished individuals are different from people who aren't hardly shows (as one NPR story reported, I swear to God) that musical talent is innate. ...

The term "representation" is a very slippery one in philosophy. The U.S. philosopher H. P. Grice ( some info can be found at http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~philos/MindDict/grice.html ) distinguished two sense of the word "meaning," but his distinction has relevance to contemporary talk about "representation". Grice asks us to reflect on the difference between sentences like these two. 1 -- Those spots mean measles 2 -- The "occupied" sign means that someone is using the lavatory. He points out that if sentence 1 is true, then the occurrence of spots entails the existence of measles. Equivalently, if the occurrence of spots doesn't entail the existence of measles, then it's not correct to say that the spots mean measles. If, for example, the same sorts of spots can be produced by an allergic reaction to penicillin, then one should have said, "those spots mean either measles or an allergic reaction to penicillin." On the other hand, the truth of sentence 2 doesn't ...