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as to whether the initial state is an intentional state; it's all true whether or not the initial
state is an intentional state. So it's all true whether or not the initial state for
DOORKNOB acquisition is in the domain of cognitive neuropsychology (as opposed, as
it were, to neuropsychology tout court).
None of this could be much comfort to a disconsolate Empiricist, since none of it is
supposed to deny, even for a moment, that a lot of stuff that's domain specific or species
specific or both has to be innate in order that we should come to have the concept
DOORKNOB (or for that matter, the concept RED). But the issue isn't whether acquiring
DOORKNOB requires a lot of innate stuff; anybody with any sense can see that it does.
The issue is whether it requires a lot of innate intentional stuff, a lot of innate stuff that
has content. All the arguments I know that say that innate intentional stuff has to mediate
concept acquisition depend on assuming either that concept acquisition is inductive or
that the explanation of the d/D effect is psychological or both. Well, where a primitive
concept expresses a mind-dependent property, it is very unclear that either of these kinds
of argument will work.
Maybe there aren't any innate ideas after all.
end p.143
Appendix 6A Similarity
 Hey, aren't you just saying that all that has to be innate in a DOORKNOB-acquisition
device is the capacity to learn to respond selectively to things that are relevantly similar
to doorknobs? And didn't Quine say that years ago?
No, I'm not and no, he didn't. Not quite.
There are two ways to understand the claim that the process of acquiring DOORKNOB
recruits an innate  similarity metric . One is platitudinous, the other is committed to
innate ideas in effect, to the innateness of the concept SIMILAR TO A DOORKNOB.
The geography around here is pretty familiar, so we can settle for a quick tour.
On the first way of running it, the similarity story is just the remark that, given
appropriate experience of doorknobs, creatures like us converge on a capacity to respond
selectively to things that are like doorknobs in respect of their doorknobhood. This is
perfectly self-evidently true; nobody reasonable could wish to deny it. It doesn't,
however, explain the fact that we learn DOORKNOB from doorknobs; it just repeats the
fact that we do. So construed, the similarity story is completely neutral on the issues this
chapter is concerned with, viz. whether the structures in virtue of which we are able to
converge on selective sensitivity to doorknobhood need to be innate, and whether they
need to be intentional.
On the other, unplatitudinous, way of running the similarity theory, it is itself a version of
concept nativism: it's the thesis that what's innate is the concept SIMILAR TO A
DOORKNOB. There seems, to put it mildly, to be no reason to prefer that view to one
that has DOORKNOB itself be innate. (Indeed, the first would seem to imply the second;
since the concept SIMILAR TO A DOORKNOB is, on the face of it, a construct out of
the concept DOORKNOB, it's hard to imagine how anyone could think the one concept
unless he could also think the other.) None of this bothers Quine much, of course,
because he pretty explicitly assumes the Empiricist principle that the innate dimensions
of similarity, along which experience generalizes, are sensory. But Empiricism isn't true,
and it is time to put away childish things.
Quine's story is that learning DOORKNOB is learning to respond selectivity to things
that are similar to doorknobs. What the story amounts to depends, in short, on how being
similar to doorknobs is construed. Well, there's a dilemma: if being similar to doorknobs
is elucidated by appeal to doorknobhood, then the story is patently empty;  How is the
concept that expresses doorknobhood acquired? is the very question that it was supposed
to be the answer to. If, on the other hand, being similar to
end p.144
doorknobs is spelled out by reference to properties other than doorknobhood, Quine has
to say which properties these are, where the concepts of these properties come from, and
how radical nativism with respect to them is to be avoided.
Like Quine, I've opted for the second horn of the dilemma. But, unlike Quine, I'm no
Empiricist. Accordingly, I can appeal to the doorknob stereotype to say what  similarity
to doorknobs comes to, and since  the doorknob stereotype is independently
defined I can do so without invoking the concept DOORKNOB and thereby courting
platitude.
So I'm not saying what Quine said; though it may well be what he should have said, and
would have said but for his Empiricism. I often have the feeling that I'm just saying what
Quine would have said but for his Empiricism.18
7 Innateness and Ontology, Part II: Natural Kind Concepts
Jerry A. Fodor
[It is] a matter quite independent of . . . wishing it or not wishing it. There happens to be a
definite intrinsic propriety in it which determines the thing and which would take me long
to explain.
 Henry James, The Tragic Muse
Here's how we set things up in Chapter 6: suppose that radical conceptual atomism is
inevitable and that, atomism being once assumed, radical conceptual nativism is
inevitable too. On what, if any, ontological story would radical conceptual nativism be
tolerable?
However, given the preconceptions that have structured this book, we might just as well
have approached the ontological issues from a different angle. I've assumed throughout
that informational semantics is, if not self-evidently the truth about mental content, at
least not known to be out of the running. It's been my fallback metaphysics whenever I
needed an alternative to Inferential Role theories of meaning. But now, according to
informational semantics, content is constituted by some sort of nomic, mind world
relation. Correspondingly, having a concept (concept possession) is constituted by being
in some sort of nomic, mind world relation. It follows that, if informational semantics is
true, then there must be laws about everything that we have concepts of. But how could
there be laws about doorknobs?
The answer, according to the present story, is that there is really only one law about [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]