138 Innateness and Ontology, Part I

138 Innateness and Ontology, Part I
acquire the concept X from experiences whose intentional objects are
properties belonging to the X-stereotype.13
Notice that this is not a truism, and that it’s not circular; it’s
contingently true if it’s true at all. What makes it contingent is that being
a doorknob is neither necessary nor sufficient for something to have the
stereotypic doorknob properties (not even in ‘normal circumstances’ in
any sense of “normal circumstances” I can think of that doesn’t beg the
question). Stereotype is a statistical notion. The only theoretically interesting
connection between being a doorknob and satisfying the doorknob
stereotype is that, contingently, things that do either often do both.
In fact, since the relation between instantiating the doorknob stereotype
and being a doorknob is patently contingent, you might want to buy into
the present account of DOORKNOB even if you don’t like the Lockean
story about RED. The classical problem with the latter is that it takes for
granted an unexplicated notion of ‘looks red’ (‘red experience’, ‘red sense
datum’, or whatever) and is thus in some danger of circularity since “the
expression ‘looks red’ is not semantically unstructured. Its sense is
determined by that of its constituents. If one does not understand those
constituents, one does not fully understand the compound” (Peacocke
1992: 408). Well, maybe this kind of objection shows that an account of
being red mustn’t presuppose the property of looking red (though Peacocke
doubts that it shows that, and so do I). In any event, no parallel argument
could show that an account of being a doorknob mustn’t presuppose the
property of satisfying the doorknob stereotype. The conditions for
satisfying the latter are patently specifiable without reference to the former,
viz. by enumerating the shapes, colours, functions, and the like that
doorknobs typically have.
It’s actually sort of remarkable that all of this is so. Pace Chapter 5,
concepts really ought to be stereotypes. Not only because there’s so much
evidence that having a concept and having its stereotype are reliably closely
correlated (and what better explanation of reliable close correlation could
there be than identity?) but also because it is, as previously noted, generally
stereotypic examples of X-ness that one learns X from. Whereas, what
you’d expect people reliably to learn from stereotypic examples of X isn’t
13 How much such experience? And under what conditions of acquisition? I assume
that there are (lots of) empirical parameters that a formulation of the laws of concept
acquisition would have to fill in. Doing so would be the proprietary goal of a serious
psychology of cognitive development. Which, to quote a poet, “in our case we have not
got”.