Doing Without What’s Within; Fiona Cowie’s Critique of Nativism
Doing Without What’s Within; Fiona Cowie’s Critique of Nativism by Jerry Fodor Rutgers University |
This is not a cry for help, Lady; this is a stick-up.
PROLOGUE: How on earth did this paper get so long? PART 1: Introduction. Do you want to know how to tell when you have gotten old? It’s when a cyclical theory of history starts to strike you as plausible. It begins to seem that the same stuff keeps coming around again, just like Hegel said. Except that it’s not “transcended and preserved”; it’s just back. So, associationism is back (see Elman et al 1996; for an unsympathetic review, see Fodor 1998b), and likewise the ancient argument about innate ideas. Cowie’s resurrection of the nativism controversy, just when I’d begun to hope that its recent demise might prove permanent, will be the topic in what follows. I’d be glad to report that something new has happened; but, as it turns out, the polemics are almost all familiar. As far as I can tell, it’s just the Eternal Recurrence recurring. I think I must have gotten old. 1.1 The polemical situation according to Cowie: Let’s start with a way of viewing the rationalism/empiricism debate that Cowie flirts with but doesn’t in the end endorse; namely “that nativism ---or empiricism, for that matter, is nothing at all… [and] the great controversy over innate ideas is not worth the paper it’s written on… (p. 25)” Eventually Cowie rejects this view since, of course, it can’t both be that the argument about innateness was empty and that the empiricists won it. But Cowie is prone to phrase this `no contest’ reading in ways that suggest invidious asymmetries. For example “The difficulty, in other words, is that the assertion of nativism often seems to be merely the denial of empiricism. And if that is so, then nativism is not a theory of the mind at all; it signifies merely our lack of such a theory.(25)”. Take home exercise: try rewriting this passage replacing `nativism’ with `empiricism’ and `empiricism’ with `nativism’ throughout. Notice that it works equally well (or badly) either way. That’s because, prior to examining particulars, the polemical situation between rationalists and empiricists is really entirely symmetrical: Nativism is merely the denial of empiricism insofar as we lack a way of saying what `innate’ comes to other than not learned. Likewise, empiricism is merely the denial of nativism insofar as we lack a way of saying what `learned’ comes to other than not innate. But even this early in the exposition, it seems something has gone badly wrong with Cowie’s geography. For, it’s hard to believe that a serious reconstruction of the argument about whether there are innate ideas could miss the point that it was an argument about whether there are innate ideas; hence, presumably not (or, anyhow, not in the first instance) about whether there are special purpose learning mechanisms, or whether there’s a place for the mind in the scientific world view. These latter issues belong, respectively, to the psychology of learning, and to metaphysics; neither sounds much like asking what ideas are innate. Likewise, as we’ll see presently, neither is what IAs or POSAs are about. PART 2: The Arguments. 2.1 What the arguments claim to show: Cowie observes that versions of POSAs and IAs have both been floating around for centuries, neither displacing the other as the flagship argument for nativism. She speculates that this is because their presumptive conclusions, though both incompatible with empiricism, are mutually independent. By contrast, though I do think Cowie is right that IAs and POSAs serve different polemical intentions, I think she’s got it utterly wrong what their conclusions are supposed to be. When that’s straightened out, they are seen not to be independent after all: Roughly, what follows from POSAs can’t be true unless what follows from the IAs is; but not vice versa. But though it’s strikingly imaginative, Cowie’s account of what POSAs and IAs are supposed to show can’t be right. On the one hand, for reasons I’m about to try to make clear, it’s very implausible to read Chomsky as holding a thesis about acquisition devices (my emphasis); or, indeed, as holding much of a view about any of the mechanisms that mediate language behavior. On Chomsky’s way of seeing things, such matters fall in the domain of `performance theories,’ a term Chomsky generally uses with invidious intent. I’ve never actually asked him, but I’m prepared to bet a dime that Chomsky really thinks there can’t be serious performance theories, and that people who try to construct them are wasting time that they could much more profitably use studying syntax. If I’m right to read him that way, then that the intended conclusion of the POSAs isn’t about acquisition mechanisms, domain specific or otherwise. To the contrary, what Chomsky proposes is a nativism of domain specific propositional attitudes (= PAs), not a nativism of domain specific “devices.” More on this presently. I’ll, for now, be very quick about what’s the intended conclusion of Impossibility Arguments; we’ll presently get to a story that’s more fine grained. First, if they are sound, IAs imply that lots of concepts are innate. No doubt, among the lots of concepts that are innate if IAs are sound are probably lots of linguistic concepts (ones that express such grammatical properties of linguistic expressions as, for example, being a noun.) But so, according to impossibility arguments, are very many other concepts: TRIANGLE, for one example, and CARBURATOR for another. There’s thus nothing particularly linguistic about IAs; and, unlike Chomsky’s POSAs, they require no empirical premises about the informational environments in which languages are acquired. Also, since IAs imply that many concepts are innate that one would otherwise have thought pretty certainly aren’t (including DOORKNOB forsooth), the conclusions IAs lead to are substantive in a way that cries for help, grindings of teeth and the like are not. The philosophically interesting issue is not whether IAs are arguments of substance; it’s whether they aren’t plain crazy. 8 2.2. The empirical arguments: POSAs. In effect, Cowie has three points to make in Chapters 8-11 of her book: 2.2.1 The inference from empirical linguistic data to the innateness of UG requires as a premise that grammars are mentally represented; and the argument that grammars are mentally represented depends on such dubious ontological and methodological assumptions as that languages are mental objects and that linguistics is `part of psychology’ 2.2.2 The empirical data that are supposed to demonstrate the paucity of information in the child’s linguistic corpus are, in fact, inconclusive. 2.2.3 There is no reason to prefer the thesis that UG is innate to the `enlightened empiricist’ thesis which says: `Yes, domain specific information is recruited in language learning; but, no, this domain specific information isn’t innate.’ I’ll consider Cowie’s arguments under these three heads. 2.2.1 What POSAs assume about languages and grammars: Cowie endorses a criticism of Chomsky’s argument for nativism that I take it goes like this.
In short, according to this line of reasoning, deciding whether the available linguistic evidence argues for UG’s innateness requires first answering such questions as: `What sort of thing is a language?’, `What is the warrant of inferences from a creature’s behavioral capacities to its cognitive states?’, `What is the evidential status of the linguistic intuitions of native informants?’ `How, if at all, should the performance/competence distinction be drawn?’ and so forth. Given that many such matters remain (ahem!) unresolved, the empirical evidence that linguists offer for the predictive/explanatory successes of grammars that satisfy UG has no direct bearing on the issue between rationalists and empiricists. Chomsky’s inclination to suppose ---a priori, apparently--- that the psychological reality of a grammar and its truth are the same thing is at the bottom of this confusion. Likewise, all that’s required to dispel it is to recognize that “a grammar could be true of language… but false of speakers’ psychologies.” (244) In any case, ”it’s an empirical psychological question whether grammars provide true theories of linguistic competence. (246).”
Please note the brevity of this argument; also its absolute and endearing freedom from any assumptions particular to the relation of linguistics to psychology, or to the ontology of languages or grammars. It could be run, just as well, on how the information that it’s polite not to dine with your hat on explains your taking your hat off at table. Likewise, it could be run by the most ardent Platonist, according to whom the truth makers for theories of languages are eternal facts about relations among nonnatural objects. Even Platonism is neutral on whether a speaker-hearer mentally represents the grammar of his language;it’s committed only on whether his doing so is what makes the grammar true. That’s just as well, since a Platonist might reasonably wish to explain the empirical success of a grammar in the same way that cognitivists do; viz. by assuming that the information it expresses is known to speaker/hearers of the corresponding language. 13 And (have I mentioned this?) nobody has the slightest idea how what a creature knows could determine its behavior unless the propositional content of its knowledge is mentally represented. -the predictive/explanatory successes of grammars that conform to UG; The inference from what Cowie concedes to the psychological reality of UG/grammar consists largely of `what else’ arguments: (What else but grammars being mentally represented could explain their empirical successes? What else but UG’s being innate could explain the child’s ability to assimilate the grammars whose predictive/explanatory success the story about grammars being mentally represented is supposed to account for?) Well, on what else if not `what else’ arguments would you expect to ground an empirical inference from data to theory? Empirical inferences are ipso facto not demonstrative 2.2.2. The status of the POSA data POSA’s strategy is to claim that there is less information in the PLDs from which children acquire language 16 than would be needed if language acquisition were a species of learning. To be sure, such claims are often impressionistic; for who knows what a language learning process would demand of its input if it lacked specific, prior information about the kind of language it is to learn? Who knows, for that matter, anything about empiricist learning processes, unless they are associationistic (a thesis to which, as previously remarked, Cowie clearly does not wish to be committed.) 2.2.3. Enlightened empiricism. Suppose it turns out (as I’d expect it to on the balance of the evidence so far) that the PLD isn’t so rich as to make nativist speculations about the language acquisition mechanism patently otiose. Suppose, even, that it turns out that language acquisition requires a lot of domain specific information of the kind that would be expressed by a motivated formulation of UG. Still, it doesn’t follow that UG is innate. Maybe, rather, children start with principles that are innate but not domain specific (or, anyhow, not specific to the language domain). Couldn’t the integration of such information with the child’s’ nonlinguistic experience get him into a mind set that will, when he finally gets around to learning his language, require his hypotheses about the PLD to conform to UG? "It’s impossible to think that the learner was told that grammatical rules are structure-dependent. But it is certainly possible that she may have had other experiences that would lead her to seek deep rather than surface regularities.(182)." "Enlightened empiricism" (=EE) allows that language acquisition may crucially require prior knowledge of the domain specific sort that UG provides. That’s what makes EE "enlightened". But it insists that this prior knowledge is itself acquired rather than genotypically specified, and that the procedures by which it is acquired are (eventually) domain neutral. That’s what makes EE empiricism. 2.3 General learning mechanisms: Almost everybody thinks that some things must be learned; and almost nobody thinks that the basic mechanisms of belief formation could be among them. Well, if it’s common ground that some things are surely innate and it’s likewise common ground that other things surely aren’t, what (other than matters of degree) could there be left for nativists to argue with empiricists about? One might thus wonder why modern rationalists take so strong a line on acquisition mechanisms being domain specific. Even if, pace Cowie, the domain specificity of learning devices isn’t what they take to be the moral of POSA arguments, it’s clearly true that most nativists are pretty grumpy about domain neutrality. Why is that, do you suppose? ---------- Figure 1: Flow diagram for a GPQA `Pshaw!’ the sensible people replied; `for how could such a black box work?’ 2.2.4 Essentialism: I remarked, at the beginning of the discussion of POSAs, that quite a lot of Cowie’s polemic amounts to reiteration of points that are familiar from the linguistic and psycholinguistic literature. She does, however, offer one line of pro-Empiricist argument that is, as far as I know, quite without precedent: "[According to Chomsky] Linguistic Theory characterizes the essential properties of languages; it delimits the set of possible natural languages. But it is in general false that we need to know about the essential properties of a thing in order to learn about it. … a child’s grip on cathood predates her excursions into zoology…. Reflection on the nature of learning tout court, I’m suggesting, should have alerted us .. to the possibility that Chomskyan theories of language learning are on the wrong track. (273)" |
Doing Without What’s Within; Fiona Cowie’s Critique of Nativism by Jerry Fodor Rutgers University |
PART 3: The Impossibility Arguments. I’m afraid I am now required to set out some background. I must trace the course of an argument I’ve been having (mostly with myself) for the last twenty five years or so, as to whether, given plausible empirical premises, it is even coherent to hold that there is such a process as concept learning. And, if it’s not, what nativistic alternatives there might be. 3.3 Cowie’s objections to the impossibility argument. In an earlier draft of this paper, I allowed myself a little grumble about Cowie’s tendency to offer, against some proposition she has under attack, a fardel of arguments the conjunction of whose premises is not consistent and some of which must therefore be unsound.31 It’s hard on the weary exegete that Cowie generally doesn’t say which arguments she proposes to give up in case she can’t have them all. In the event, however, I decided to delete that passage. (I think it is good for my character occasionally to resist the temptation to grumble. Very occasionally.) But the reader should be advised that we’ve now come to a polemical situation of this kind. 3.3.1. Cowie’s argument against protoconcepts. (This is a short argument.) Innate concepts (like concepts that aren’t innate; for that matter, like anything at all) are in want of principles of individuation. Now, patently, concepts are individuated by their contents inter alia; viz `semantically’. 32 Let’s assume some or other sort of `externalist’ metaphysics of content (eg. that the content of a concept supervenes on world-to-mind causal interactions.) Well, unactivated innate concepts ---those that are, as it were, waiting around to be triggered--- are presumably ipso facto not causally connected to anything in the world. So, according to externalism, they can’t have any contents; so they can’t be content-individuated; so they can’t be concepts. "There is simply nothing for protoconcepts to be" compatible with, on the one hand, concepts being necessarily semantically individuated and, on the other hand, protoconcepts being de facto causally inert. 33 Mendel’s problem: What becomes of the properties of organisms when they aren’t phenotypically expressed? In both cases, there is the same crucial constraint on the answer. Unexpressed phenotypic properties needn’t just `go away’; they can skip generations and cause the offspring of heterozygotes to be more similar to their grandparents than they are to their parents. Likewise, the behavioral (etc.) expressions of one’s propositional attitudes are typically discontinuous; often, you can remember your name even across an interval of dreamless sleep. By contrast, however, causal chains can’t skip links; they require that something going on all the time between the first component cause and the last component effect. So, what’s to do? How can it be that mental contents that aren’t being thought, and phenotypic traits that aren’t being instantiated, are nonetheless among the links in causal chains? These questions must have answers, whatever you may think about innate ideas and such. 3.4 Cowies argument for prototypes. It’s common ground that some such premise as 3.2.1 appears essentially in Impossibility Arguments 36 For, suppose that most concepts are prototypes after all. Then most concepts are complex, and could be learned by confirming hypotheses that identify the prototype. If the concept FISH is the prototype `wet, lives in the ocean and has scales’ then learning that fish are (typically) wet, scaly and ocean dwelling is all there need be to learning FISH. So sans an argument that most concepts aren’t prototypes, IA fails. 3.5 The `Constitution’ Thesis. Concepts suggests an alternative to inductivist solutions of the d/D problem. True, we generally acquire DOORKNOB from doorknobs (indeed, from good (roughly, paradigm) instances of doorknobs). So be it. But maybe that’s not after all because concept acquisition is hypothesis confirmation; maybe it’s because of what property being a doorknob is. The idea is that being a doorknob is mind-dependent. To be a doorknob is to have that property that minds like ours `lock’ to 40 in consequence of the kinds of experiences from which our kinds of mind learn the doorknob prototype. In effect, the proposal is to do for (or to) being a doorknob what Locke did for being red (and what Hume’s `second definition’ proposes to do for being a cause (Treatise, Bk. 1 Sect. XIV)); namely make it a property that’s defined relative to us. If one takes this line, then `how come DOORKNOB is generally learned from doorknobs?’ is to be answered in the same way that Locke dealt with `How come it’s typically red-sensations that red things cause us to have?’ The answer, in both cases, is `that’s of the essence of the properties concerned’. Notes 1_ All Cowie references are to (1999) 2_ This is the very same Fiona Cowie who accuses rationalists in general (and me in particular; see p. 106 and passim) of having at best a "mystery mongering" account of learning on offer. Let me see if I’ve got this right: When I say that learning is a mystery, that’s me merely mongering. When she says that learning is mysterious and miraculous, that’s Cowie bravely facing up to the facts. 3_ This is one of the places where Cowie appears to forget that the empiricist and rationalist are equally in want of independent construals of their key notions `learned’ and `innate.’ Compare Part 1. 4_ I won’t discuss Cowie’s treatment of the historical figures, though I do find some of it pretty peculiar. For a quick example: Cowie thinks that Leibniz thought that you can’t be an Empiricist unless you believe in metaphysically real causation. For, if you don’t, "what this means, metaphysically speaking, is that [the] bearing that our experience appears to have on our mental life is strictly an illusion.(60)" But if not believing in metaphysically real causation makes you not an empiricist, then I suppose even Hume doesn’t qualify. Just this once in what has been in many ways a life of self-denial, I am prepared to invoke a paradigm case argument. 5_ It is , however, not always Chomsky’s way to make life easy for his exegetes. His frequent references to an innate `language organ’ do indeed invite the reading that POSAs are about what mechanisms are available in the `initial state’ of the language acquisition process. In fact, for reasons about to be offered, I doubt very much that that could be the intended force of the metaphor. Rather, Chomsky has it in mind to emphasize the continuity of his nativism with standard biological methodology and theory. About that he is, of course, absolutely right. 6_ In accordance with the usual practice, I’ll sometimes speak of grammars (and of UGs) as true or false, thus equivocating between grammar qua the speaker/hearer’s (putative) internal representation of his language and grammar qua the linguist’s theory of the speaker/hearer’s (putative) internal representation of his language. It’s only the latter about which questions of truth value straightforwardly arise; but fudging the distinction helps a lot with the exegesis, and nothing essential will turn on doing so, as far as I can tell. 7_ Let a grammar of L be `descriptively adequate ’ iff it specifies all and only the sentences of L together with their correct structural descriptions. 8_ I’m told from time to time that the thesis that DOORKNOB is innate is prima facie very implausible. Often, the earnest tone in which this observation is proffered suggests it’s a point that I’ve been supposed not to have noticed. Actually, I do understand that it seems implausible that DOORKNOB is innate. The trouble is, I find it very hard to see what’s wrong with the arguments that appear to require that conclusion. Nor do the plausibility intuitions with which several centuries of uncritical empiricism (to say nothing of a century and a half of Pop-Darwinism) have left us strike me as likely to bear much weight in the long run. 9_ This assumes what all parties to the present discussion agree about: That PAs have concepts as their constituents, and that the constituent structure of a PA is among its essential properties. Only connectionists deny this; and they wouldn’t either if they could figure out some way to stop their connectionism from entailing it. (As, in fact, they’ve occasionally tried to do, but with no success. see Smolensky (1988); Fodor and McLaughlin; and Fodor (both in Fodor (1998b) ). 10_ If you are inclined to deny that there could, I suppose that’s not on account of your views about nativism/empiricism per se, but rather because you hold some form of` `theory/theory’ (or `inferential role’ theory) about the nature of conceptual content. That kind of metaphysics does entail that no concepts can be innate unless some PAs are. For present purposes, you’re welcome to whatever metaphysical assumptions about content you like. Suffice it that, unless you make some, there’s no inference from nativism about concepts to nativism about PAs. 11_ Echt laws of association are supposed to be sensitive only to spatio-temporal relations (`frequency and contiguity’) among the Ideas that they apply to. However, so hopeless is that sort of view as a theory either of learning or of thought, that empiricists have often let `similarity’ and the like determine associations too. That was cheating, of course, unless there’s a domain neutral notion of similarity, (which, of course, there isn’t.) Unsurprisingly, the impulse to cheat this way came back when associationism did. See (eg) the exchange between Churchland (1998), and Fodor and Lepore (1999). 12_ One might argue that the kind of knowledge that explains linguistic capacities is `knowing how’ not `knowing that’, hence that having it doesn’t require believing or cognizing anything. But such a view leads to the rejection, not just of a mentalistic reading of nativism, but to a mentalistic reading of empiricism as well. It is therefore not Cowie’s line. Cowie wants rationalism to be false compatible with the cognitive turn in psychology having been Quite A Good Thing. 13_ Note how Plato (himself a bit of a Platonist) explains the slave-boy’s ability to do geometry in the Meno. Holding that what one knows explains one’s capacities is entirely compatible with holding that the objects of one’s knowledge are non-natural. 14_ A puzzling passage this. One might have thought that I just couldn’t have a better reason for preferring my theory to yours than that yours doesn’t exist. (Assuming, of course, that mine does.) Notice, by the way, how much the "yet" is tendentious. Likewise the "real" in the sentence that follows .Cowie is rather prone to obiter dicta about what "really" explains what.; see below. 15_ My wife is in this line of work, and she assures me that is so. Maybe Cowie should go argue with her. 16_ More precisely, in the PLDs from which they could acquire language, consonant with the normality of the process. Critical experiments, in which the conditions of language acquisition are systematically controlled, are of course not possible; so the distinction between what is merely typical of the acquisition process and what it actually requires is hard to draw. This is a kind of point of which ethologists are forever reminding us: Birds "learn" to fly if they are given normal opportunities to practice. But, as it turns out, they also "learn" to fly if they’re not. 17_ A great lot of the cross-disciplinary discussion of Chomsky’s theory has turned on whether the PLD reliably exhibits sentences whose derivations require structure-dependent operations. That’s what Chomsky gets for offering an example that’s easy to understand. It therefore bears emphasis that structure dependence is only one of very many constraints that UG is supposed to impose upon grammars; hence to which the PLD must testify if the thesis that children approach the PLD with a UG already in mind is to be supposed untrue. 18_ We Ancients remember `subtle cues’ very well. They used to pop up whenever, on the one hand, a psychologist was hell-bent to explain the organization of a creature’s behavior by appeal to the structure of its environment; but, on the other hand, a survey of the creature’s environment failed to reveal psychophysical counterparts of the structure it was presumed to have. Thus Skinnerian behaviorists thought there must be some `stimulus properties’ that are reliable indicators of (as it might be) the bankruptcy of a financial institution; because, after all, some human organisms (viz. accountants) are able to respond in a way that discriminates bankrupt institutions from others in environments that contain the relevant account books. Just what `stimulus property’ controls such selective responses as `the capitalization would appear to be inadequately fluid’ remains, to be sure, a matter for further research. Beyond doubt, it’s one of those `subtle cues.’ 19_ There is no indication, either in Cowie or in the literature she cites, how such information (about transition probabilities among phonemes, as it happens) might be employed to isolate anything that’s grammatically pertinent except morpheme boundaries. The rest of a statistical theory of language learning has "yet" to be "worked out." 20_ Rather oddly, Cowie appears to hold both that there’s no case for the child’s lack of negative information in language acquisition and that "there is a dearth of negative evidence in every domain in which people learn. .For example, you learn what Curry is without being told about all the things that curry isn’t (215, my italics)." In fact, Cowie remarks, "human beings learn an awful lot, about bewildering variety of topics, from sketchy and largely positive data. That they can do so… is miraculous and mysterious. It is not, however, a reason to accept a nativist explanation of the miracle as the solution of the mystery" (216). She doesn’t, however, say why it’s not except for remarking that "it’s just absurd to suppose that the domain-specific principles required for learning about curries are innate (215). "Why, one wonders, does Cowie think so? It looks like what’s absurd isn’t supposing that learning about curry requires lots of information that is innate and domain specific, but rather supposing that curry is the domain to which the innate information is specific. (Try food; and see the introduction of practically any serious cookbook; where there’s likely to be an attempt to make some of the relevant domain-specific generalizations explicit.) Likewise, nativists about language don’t suppose that the domain of the innate information that’s used to learn English is English; they only claim that English is in that domain. It’s an open, empirical question --- indeed, one that linguistics is devoted, almost entirely, to answering--- what else is in there too (what it is that all and only the possible natural languages have in common.) 21_ Empiricists are forever giving nativists edifying lectures on this point. Thus Cowie: "Conservative politicians, moralists, and jurists apparently find overwhelming the inference from `innate` to `right’ and `inevitable’… [But] to suppose that something is right just because it is innate is to commit the fallacy of deriving `ought’ from `is’ …. the inference is … being made all the time, with potentially devastating consequences. (x-xi; see also Ellman et al))." 22_ Bear in mind, by the way, that’s not all a child has to keep him busy. He has to learn a lot of vocabulary too. To say nothing of the geometrical structure of perceptual space, the intuitive physics of middle-sized objects; the intuitive intentional psychology of his conspecifics, and so on; all of which information enlightened empiricists, just like their unilluminated empiricist colleagues, presumably take not to be genotypically carried. (Also, infants sleep a lot.) Since Cowie sticks exclusively to the issue of nativism about language, she is never required to discuss the overall plausibility of the empiricist view of cognitive development. It is probably wise of her not to do so. 23_ Notice, in passing, that the PLD is better evidence for the grammar of L than it is for UG; which suggests (pace EE) that if both are learned, it’s the grammar, and not UG, that should be learned first. L’s grammar expresses the structural similarities that sentences exhibit in virtue of their all belonging to L. UG, by contrast, expresses only the very abstract structural similarities that sentences exhibit in virtue of their all belonging to some natural language or other. (Read `some language’ with short scope relative to the `all’.) 24_ Since P entails P, it’s not clear that EE adds anything at all to the assumption that the child can’t learn the language unless he knows P. 25_ Cowie appears to hold that iteration arguments somehow require as a premise that UG is psychologically real (see p. 273). But she is quite wrong to think that; as, indeed, the present discussion shows. I’ve used nothing about the ontological status of UG; I’ve assumed only what EE grants: that you can’t learn a first language unless you know that grammatical rules are structure dependent. 26_ It testifies to Kant’s genius that he saw that a cognitive theory that posits across-the-board structural preferences, is in need of a transcendental argument that the world can be relied on to comply with them. But most people doubt that he actually had one. 27_ It’s a considerable irony that the notion of having a concept that Chomsky thinks is needed for such very special purposes as explaining language learning, is much the same one that philosophers who confuse metaphysics and semantics with epistemology think is satisfied by the possession of empirical concepts quite generally: They think that to have a concept is to know `in principle’ how to identify the things it applies to, and/or to know `in principle’ how to bring about states of affairs in which the concept applies. My guess is that Cowie has taken some such verificationist view of concept possession for granted. Putting that together with the observation that, in the general case, concept acquisition doesn’t require a grasp of essences, gives Cowie the argument presently under examination. 28_ Typical avatars of this venerable confusion include the various semantic holisms that so many empiricists now endorse. (The latest being the `theory theory’ of concept individuation, according to which the identity of a concept is determined by the beliefs it is embedded in rather than the other way ‘round.) In semantics (as elsewhere), outbreaks of holism are invariably signs of a foundational blunder. For discussion of this complex of issues, see Fodor and Lepore (1992). 29_ We’ve already seen one reason why 3.2.4 must be true; viz that concepts are ontologically prior to the kinds of things that can be (dis)confirmed. The argument now unfolding waives that objection and assumes, for the sake of the discussion, that the notion of concept learning by hypothesis testing is coherent; but it claims, even so, that primitive concepts can’t be learned that way. 30_ Cowie apparently thinks that "deferential" concepts are somehow an exception. My own view is that the category belongs to sociology, not semantics (see Fodor (1994)). But it will do for present purposes that you can’t reason with a concept unless somebody already has it. That’s a truism, no? 31_ One is reminded of a familiar parody of lawyerly arguments: `My client didn’t do it, he wasn’t there; and even if was there, he didn’t have a gun; and even if he was there and had a gun, it wasn’t loaded; and even if he was there and had a gun and it was loaded…. usw. 32_ Which is not to deny what `methodological solipsism’ claims: viz. that a mental processes applies to the concepts in its domains "solely in virtue of" their nonsemantic properties. That mental processes are syntactically driven doesn’t at all imply that metal representations are syntactically individuated. I can’t begin to tell you how many philosophers have been confused about this over the years. 33_ As I’ve already suggested, this line of thought depends on taking for granted the (fashionable) externalist view of the supervenience base for semantic properties. Let’s grant this assumption, for which, however, Cowie offers only the following strange argument: "… protoconcepts [can’t] be conceptual roles understood dispositionally as networks of potential [sic] causal/inferential interactions. For protoconcepts are supposed to be innately specified, whereas the dispositions that our concepts have to interact causally or inferentially… are not. I was not born such that my tokenings of PLATYPUS are disposed to cause tokenings of MONOTREME…. (85)" This is, I think, the only argument I’ve ever heard against a conceptual role semantics that doesn’t work. The most it shows is that somebody who is both an internalist and a nativist about concepts shouldn’t also be an unmitigated semantic holist. Rather, he ought to hold that a concept’s innateness requires only the innateness of its constitutive inferences; and, by assumption, much less than every inference that a concept enters into is constitutive. In fact, practically every internalist does hold something like this (often at the price of endorsing an analytic/synthetic distinction.) So, what’s the problem about internalists being nativists? 34_I’m not, of course, supposing that anything so simple would work as a metaphysics of the content of innate concepts; just that the proposal is perfectly bona fide qua externalist. If you want an externalist metaphysics of the content of innate concepts that’s not just bona fide but true, I’m afraid there isn’t one "yet". (But, there isn’t one for learned concepts either; or for words. I don’t suppose that’s an argument that there aren’t any words or concepts.) 35_In passing, and quite independent of issues about nativism: there’s every reason for an externalist to take content to supervene on possible (including nonactual) causal relations. He thereby disencumbers himself of such embarrassments as Donald Davidson’s `Swampman.’ (According to Davidson, since Swampman has no causal history, he ipso facto has no intentional states.) In semantics as elsewhere, what’s actual doesn’t matter much to the metaphysics; it’s the counterfactuals that count. 36_ I assume (as does Cowie) that the other familiar account according to which `most’ concepts are complex ---viz that they are definitions--- is no longer seriously in the running. For arguments, See Fodor (1998a, Ch.3). 37_ For simplicity, I ignore such content properties of C1 as may be determined by the arrangement of its constituents (i.e. by its `syntax’). This is, to be sure, no small matter; it’s presumably such arrangement features that distinguish (eg.) A PERSON’S FAVORITE CAT from A CAT’S FAVORITE PERSON. But abstracting from the effects of syntax on conceptual content won’t affect our present purposes, and it simplifies the exposition. 38_ There’s some question whether the `second’ component of a concept is to be an extension determiner, or an extension. My own view (but not Cowie’s, as far as I can make out) is that extensions are much the better if those are the choices. For one thing, it’s a lot more plausible that extensions compose than that the world-to-mind relations do that are supposed by externalists to be what fix semantic values. For another thing, it would be nice if the content of a concept were ipso facto at least part of what the concept expresses. This will be so if contents are semantic values, but not if they are the mechanisms that mediate world-to-mind connections. Maybe DOG expresses the set of dogs, or the property of being a dog, or the like. But it certainly doesn’t express whatever the causal hookup is that, by assumption, connects DOG to dogs or to dogness. 39_ To say nothing of not having the concept FROM. Prototype theorists tend to keep an extremely low profile in respect to the possession conditions for concepts that express relations; as well they might since, prima facie anyhow, relation concepts would seem not to have prototypes. Cowie doesn’t discuss the issue. 40_ `Locking’ is a place holder for your favorite (externalist) theory of the relation such that, if it holds between a thought type and a property, then the property is the intentional object of tokens of that thought type. 41_ However, see the footnote before last. God only knows what, if anything, corresponds to prototypes in the case of relational concepts. 42_ Reading `prototypical doorknobs’ rigidly; i.e. as prototypical of actual-world doorknobs. 43_ He has fallen from a window and is half way down. 44_ More precisely, contrary to what many of them have supposed themselves to suppose. If you look closely at paradigm empiricist/constructivist theories of concept acquisition, it’s not at all clear to what extent they endorse intentionalist solutions. Locke and Hume thought that you get RED `brute causally’ from stimulations of the sensorium. Dewey thought you get new concepts by doing some "doing and undergoing"; (whatever that is, it doesn’t sound much like anything intentional.) Piaget thought you get them by doing some "assimilating and accommodating.," (to which the same applies.) References Block, N. (1980) Readings in The Philosophy of Psychology, 2 vols. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Chomsky, N. (1965) Aspects of The Theory of Syntax, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA Chomsky, N. (1972) Language And Mind, Harcourt Brace Javonovich NY. Churchland, P.M. (1998) "Conceptual similarity across sensory and neural diversity," in Churchland, P.M. and Churchland, P. On The Contrary, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Cowie, F. (1999) What's Within? Nativism Reconsidered, Oxford University Press, NY. Elman, J. et al (1996), Rethinking Innateness, A Connectionist Perspective on Development, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Fodor, J. A. (1981) "The Present Status of the Innateness Controversy", in his Representations, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Fodor, J. A. (1994) The Elm and The Expert, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA Fodor, J. A. (1998a) Concepts: Where Cognitive Science Went Wrong. New York: Oxford University Press. Fodor. J. A., (1998b), In Critical Condition, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Fodor. J. A., (1998b_4), "There Are No Recognitional Concepts - Not Even RED" Chapter 4 in (1998b) Fodor. J. A., (1998b_5), "There Are No Recognitional Concepts - Not Even RED, Part 2: The Plot Thickens" Chapter 5 in (1998b) Fodor, J. A., (1998b_10) "Connectionism and the Problem of Systematicity (continued): Why Smolensky's Solution Still Doesn't Work", Cognition 1996, 62, 109-119, reprinted as Chapter 10 of (1998b). Fodor, J. A. (1998c) Unambiguous triggers,’ Linguistic Inquiry, 29.1, 1-36. Fodor, J. A. (2000) The Mind Doesn’t Work That Way, MIT Press, Cambridge MA. Fodor, J. and Lepore, E. (1992), Holism, A Shopper’s Guide, Oxford, Blackwell. Fodor, J. and Lepore, E (1999) "All at sea in semantic space; Paul Churchland on meaning similarity" Journal of Philosophy XCVI, no. 8, August. 381-403. Fodor, J. A. and McLaughlin, B. (1990) "Connectionism and the Problem of Systematicity: Why Smolensky's Solution Doesn't Work", Cognition, 35, 183-204, reprinted as Chapter 9 of (1998b). Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1992) Beyond Modularity, MIT Press, Cambridge MA. Nozick, R. (1981) Philosophical Explanations, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Putnam, H. (1975), "The meaning of 'meaning’", in Gunderson, K. (ed.) Minnesota Studies in The Philosophy of Science, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, Minn. Smolensky, P. (1988) "The proper treatment of connectionism,: Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 11, 1-23. |
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