132 Innateness and Ontology, Part I

132 Innateness and Ontology, Part I
concepts, then there aren’t any concepts at all. And if there aren’t any
concepts all, RTM has gone West. Isn’t it a bit late in the day (and late in
the book) for me to take back RTM?
Help!
Ontology
This all started because we were in the market for some account of how
DOORKNOB is acquired. The story couldn’t be hypothesis testing
because Conceptual Atomism was being assumed, so DOORKNOB was
supposed to be primitive; and it’s common ground that the mechanism
for acquiring primitive concepts can’t be any kind of induction. But, as it
turned out, there is a further constraint that whatever theory of concepts
we settle on should satisfy: it must explain why there is so generally a
content relation between the experience that eventuates in concept
attainment and the concept that the experience eventuates in attaining. At
this point, the problem about DOORKNOB metastasized: assuming that
primitive concepts are triggered, or that they’re ‘caught’, won’t account
for their content relation to their causes; apparently only induction will.
But primitive concepts can’t be induced; to suppose that they are is
circular. What started as a problem about DOORKNOB now looks like
undermining all of RTM. This is not good. I was relying on RTM to
support me in my old age.
But, on second thought, just why must one suppose that only a
hypothesis-testing acquisition model can explain the doorknob/
DOORKNOB relation? The argument for this is, I’m pleased to report,
non-demonstrative. Let’s go over it once more: the hypothesis-testing
model takes the content relation between a concept and the experience it’s
acquired from to be a special case of the evidential relation between a
generalization and its confirming instances (between, for example, the
generalization that Fs are Gs and instances of things that are both F and
G). You generally get DOG from (typical) dogs and not, as it might be,
from ketchup. That’s supposed to be because having DOG requires
believing (as it might be) that typical dogs bark. (Note, once again, how
cognitivism about concept possession and inductivism about concept
acquisition take in one another’s wash.) And, whereas encounters with
typical dogs constitute evidence that dogs bark, encounters with ketchup
do not (ceteris paribus). If the relation between concepts and experiences
is typically evidential, that would explain why it’s so often a relation of
content: and what other explanation have we got?