126 Innateness and Ontology, Part I

126 Innateness and Ontology, Part I
Notice that the question before us is not whether SIA permits radical
nativism; it’s patent that it does. According to SIA, having a concept is
being locked to a property. Well, being locked to a property is having a
disposition, and though perhaps there are some dispositions that must be
acquired, hence can’t be innate, nothing I’ve heard of argues that being
locked to a property is one of them. If, in short, you require your
metaphysical theory of concept possession to entail the denial of radical
nativism, SIA won’t fill your bill. (I don’t see how any metaphysics could,
short of question begging, since the status of radical nativism is surely an
empirical issue. Radical nativism may be false, but I doubt that it is, in any
essential way, confused.) But if, you’re prepared to settle for a theory of
concepts that is plausibly compatible with the denial of radical nativism,
maybe we can do some business.
If you assume SIA, and hence the locking model of concept possession,
you thereby deny that learning concepts necessarily involves acquiring
beliefs. And if you deny that learning concepts necessarily involves
acquiring beliefs, then you can’t assume that hypothesis testing is an
ingredient in concept acquisition. It is, as I keep pointing out, primarily
cognitivism about the metaphysics of concept possession that motivates
inductivism about the psychology of concept acquisition: hypothesis
testing is the natural assumption about how beliefs are acquired from
experience. But if it can’t be assumed that concept acquisition is ipso facto
belief acquisition, then it can’t be assumed that locking DOORKNOB to
doorknobhood requires a mediating hypothesis. And if it can’t be assumed
that locking DOORKNOB to doorknobhood requires a mediating
hypothesis, then, a fortiori, it can’t be assumed that it requires a mediating
hypothesis in which the concept DOORKNOB is itself deployed. In which
case, for all that the Standard Argument shows, DOORKNOB could be
both primitive and not innate.
This maybe starts to sound a little hopeful; but not, I’m afraid, for very
long. The discussion so far has underestimated the polemical resources
that SA has available. In particular, there is an independent argument that
seems to show that concept acquisition has to be inductive, whether or not
the metaphysics of concept possession is cognitivist; so SA gets its
inductivist premiss even if SIA is right that having a concept doesn’t
require having beliefs. The moral would then be that, though a noncognitivist
account of concept possession may be necessary for RTM to
avoid radical nativism, it’s a long way from being sufficient.
In short, Patient Reader, the Standard Argument’s way of getting
radical nativism goes like this:
(1) cognitivism about concept possession ® (2) inductivist (i.e.