He makes that clear in a pleasingly understated way:
The book is framed around the contrast between Lockean empiricism and Cartesian nativism. Locke held that the contents of the mind are more-or-less veridically impressed upon it from without. McGinn devotes considerable time to arguing that this is untenable, on a variety of grounds. The mind is not, and cannot be, a blank slate. It has structure, resulting from the unfolding of a genetic program. But of course no contemporary empiricist denies this. Almost everyone now allows that our sensory systems embody implicit knowledge of the structure of the world. Indeed Fodor (1981, 2008), whose nativism is in many respects even more extreme than McGinn's, grants to the empiricist what McGinn claims as his own crowning contribution to nativism: that structure-determining sensory systems and primitive sensory concepts are innate. The contemporary disputes are mostly about the nature of the processes that take one from sensory content to the rest of the mind's contents.
(Interestingly, Fodor is not mentioned once in McGinn's book. McGinn asserts, furthermore, "None of the central figures of twentieth-century philosophy had anything much to say about the question [of innateness]." [p.90.] One can deduce that McGinn doesn't take Fodor to be a major figure. I disagree.)
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In fact much of the debate between contemporary nativists and empiricists concerns the nature of learning. All agree that the basic structure of the mind is innate (including mechanisms of learning), and most agree that most of the contents of the mind are learned. (Fodor is an exception.) The disagreements are about whether learning is all a matter of general-purpose statistical or probabilistic inference of some sort, or whether it involves structured domain-specific learning mechanisms (somewhat like the language-faculty, on a Chomskian view of the latter). Other debates concern whether there is "core knowledge" of particular domains outside of our sensory faculties, structured out of innate concepts. (For articles that engage with both sets of debates from a broadly nativist perspective, see the papers collected in Carruthers et al., 2005, 2006, 2007.) There are extensive literatures on these topics that McGinn would need to take account of in order to contribute usefully to 21st century nativism, but he does not.
None of this would matter if McGinn were intending only to offer an assessment of the disagreements about nativism that took place early in the modern era. But he isn't. His aim is to convince us that nativism is true, and then to convince us that it is deeply mysterious how it can be true. But to do either of these things he would first have to frame the nativist hypothesis to be consistent with what we already know about the structure of the mind and the course of its development, and he would then need to engage with the controversies that remain. But he does neither of these things.
As for McGinn's mysterianism about the innate mind, this is more asserted than argued for. Indeed, it is quite demanding to demonstrate that something cannot in principle be explained, but McGinn doesn't even make the attempt....
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