136 Innateness and Ontology, Part I

136 Innateness and Ontology, Part I
a property that is constituted by the mental states that things that have it
evoke in us must ipso facto be constituted by the sensory states that things
that have it evoke in us.
All right, all right; you can’t believe that something’s being a doorknob
is “about us” in anything like the way that maybe something’s being red is.
Surely ‘doorknob’ expresses a property that a thing either has or doesn’t,
regardless of our views; as it were, a property of things in themselves? So
be it, but which property? Consider the alternatives (here we go again): is
it that ‘doorknob’ is definable? If so, what’s the definition? (And, even if
‘doorknob’ is definable, some concepts have to be primitive, so the present
sorts of issues will eventually have to be faced about them.) Is it that
doorknobs qua doorknobs have a hidden essence? Hidden where, do you
suppose? And who is in charge of finding it? Is it that being a doorknob
is ontologically ultimate? You’ve got to be kidding.11
If you take it seriously that DOORKNOB hasn’t got a conceptual
analysis, and that doorknobs don’t have hidden essences, all that’s left to
make something a doorknob (anyhow, all that’s left that I can think of) is
how it strikes us. But if being a doorknob is a property that’s constituted by
how things strike us, then the intrinsic connection between the content of
DOORKNOB and the content of our doorknob-experiences is
metaphysically necessary, hence not a fact that a cognitivist theory of
concept acquisition is required in order to explain.
To be sure, there remains something about the acquisition of
DOORKNOB that does want explaining: viz. why it is the property that
these guys (several doorknobs) share, and not the property that those guys
(several cows) share, that we lock to from experience of good (e.g.
stereotypic) examples of doorknobs. And, equally certainly, it’s got to be
something about our kinds of minds that this explanation adverts to. But,
I’m supposing, such an explanation is cognitivist only if it turns on the
evidential relation between having the stereotypic doorknob properties and
being a doorknob. (So, for example, triggering explanations aren’t
have an experience (as) of doorknobs, I suppose only a mind that has the concept
DOORKNOB can do so.
‘But how could one have an experience (as) of red if one hasn’t got the concept RED?’
It’s easy: in the case of redness, but not of doorknobhood, one is equipped with sensory
organs which produce such experiences when they are appropriately stimulated. Redness
can be sensed, whereas the perceptual detection of doorknobhood is always inferential. Just
as sensible psychologists have always supposed.
11 The present discussion parallels what I regard as a very deep passage in Schiffer 1987
about being a dog. Schiffer takes for granted that ‘dog’ doesn’t name a species, and (hence?)
that dogs as such don’t have a hidden essence. His conclusion is that there just isn’t (except
pleonastically) any such property as being a dog. My diagnosis is that there is too, but it’s
mind-dependent.