128 Innateness and Ontology, Part I

128 Innateness and Ontology, Part I
experience with good or typical examples of doorknobs, and good or
typical doorknobs are a very good source of evidence about doorknobs. I’ll
return to this presently.
If, by contrast, you assume that, in the course of concept acquisition,
the relation between the eliciting experience and the concept acquired is
not typically evidential—if, for example, it’s just ‘brute causal’ (for this
terminology, see Fodor 1981a)—then why shouldn’t it be experience with
giraffes that typically eventuates in locking to doorknobhood? Or vice
versa? Or both? It appears there’s more to be said for the hypothesis-testing
model of concept acquisition than even SA had supposed.8 Compare a
proposal that Jerry Samet once made for avoiding the assumption that
hypothesis testing mediates concept acquisition (and hence for avoiding
the Standard Argument): perhaps concepts are not learned but ‘caught’,
sort of like the flu (Samet 1986). No doubt this suggestion is a bit
underspecified; the ‘sort of’ does all the work. But there’s also a deeper
complaint: it’s left wide open why you generally catch DOORKNOB from
doorknobs and not, as it might be, from using public telephones (again
sort of like the flu).
UnDarwinian Digression
At this point in the dialectic, there’s a strong temptation to dump the load
on Darwin; a standard tactic, these days, when a philosopher gets in over
his head. Suppose that the mechanism of concept acquisition is indeed
non-cognitivist; suppose, for example, that it’s some sort of triggering.
Still, wouldn’t a mechanism that triggers the concept X consequent upon
experience with Xs be more of a help with surviving (or getting
reproduced, or whatever) than, say, a mechanism that triggers the concept
X consequent upon encounters with things that aren’t Xs? If so, then
maybe SIA together with not-more-than-the-usual-amount of
handwaving about Darwin might after all explain why the relation between
the content of experiences and the content of the concepts they eventuate
in locking to is so rarely arbitrary.
8 Linguistic footnote: as far as I can tell, linguists just take it for granted that the data
that set a parameter in the course of language learning should generally bear some natural,
unarbitrary relation to the value of the parameter that they set. It’s hearing sentences without
subjects that sets the null subject parameter (maybe); what could be more reasonable? But,
on second thought, the notion of triggering as such, unlike the notion of hypothesis testing
as such, requires no particular relation between the state that’s acquired and the experience
that occasions its acquisition. In principle any trigger could set any parameter. So, prima
facie, it is an embarrassment for the triggering theory if the grammar that the child acquires
is reasonable in light of his data. It may be that here too the polemical resources of the
hypothesis-testing model have been less than fully appreciated.