Innate Mind Need Not Be Within Riin Kõiv 1 Received: 25 October 2019 /Accepted: 22 June 2020/ # Springer Nature B.V. 2020 Abstract It is a widely accepted thesis in the cognitive sciences and in naturalistic philosophy of mind that the contents of at least some mental representations are innate. A question that has popped up in discussions concerning innate mental representations is this. Are externalist theories of mental content applicable to the content of innate representations? Views on the matter vary and sometimes conflict. To date, there has been no compre- hensive assessment of the relationship between content externalism and content innate- ness. The aim of this paper is to provide such an assessment. I focus on the notions of innateness that are employed in innateness hypotheses within the cognitive sciences and adjacent fields of philosophy, and on causal externalist theories of content. I distinguish between three accounts of what being innate might amount to in innateness hypotheses within the cognitive sciences, and between three types of causal externalism. I explain what the possibility of innate externalistically individuated representations depends upon given all nine combinations. I explain why causal externalism can be true of innate mental representations, given but one of these combinations. 1 Introduction The concept of innateness has been criticized in recent decades. It has been criticized for being explanatorily idle, metaphysically suspect, conceptually confused, and dangerous in practice. Despite this, hypotheses to the effect that a trait is innate continue to be common in explanatory contexts both within psychology and biology. Among such hypotheses is the widely accepted thesis in the psychological sciences and naturalistic philosophy of mind that the contents of some mental representations are innate. For example, in addition to basic perceptual representations (e.g., of redness), our innate representational repertoire has been argued to include concepts like CAUSE, 1 OBJECT, AGENT (Carey 2009; Spelke 1990), FACE (Diamond and Carey 1986), DANGEROUS ANIMAL (Barrett and Broesch 2012), various taxonomic categories of the animate world (Atran and Medin https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-020-00441-1 1 Following the tradition, I use capital letters to denote representations. * Riin Kõiv riin.koiv@ut.ee 1 Department of Philosophy, Institute of Philosophy and Semiotics, University of Tartu, Jakobi 2-323, 51005 Tartu, Estonia Published online: 21 July 2020 Acta Analytica (2021) 36:101–121