Innateness and Ontology, Part I

142 Innateness and Ontology, Part I
an appearance concept; the property it expresses is constituted by the way
that things that have it (do or would) strike us (if we have had or were to
have appropriate experiences with stereotypic doorknobs). Well, if a
property is constituted by the way that things that have it strike us (under
certain circumstances), then being locked to the property requires only
that things that have it do reliably strike us that way (under those
circumstances).
The model, to repeat, is being red: all that’s required for us to get locked
to redness is that red things should reliably seem to us as they do, in fact,
reliably seem to the visually unimpaired. Correspondingly, all that needs
to be innate for RED to be acquired is whatever the mechanisms are that
determine that red things strike us as they do; which is to say that all that
needs to be innate is the sensorium. Ditto, mutatis mutandis, for
DOORKNOB if being a doorknob is like being red: what has to be innately
given to get us locked to doorknobhood is whatever mechanisms are
required for doorknobs to come to strike us as such. Put slightly
differently: if the locking story about concept possession and the minddependence
story about the metaphysics of doorknobhood are both true,
then the kind of nativism about DOORKNOB that an informational
atomist has to put up with is perhaps not one of concepts but of
mechanisms. That consequence may be some consolation to otherwise
disconsolate Empiricists.
I suppose the philosophically interesting question about whether there
are innate ideas is whether there are innate ideas. It is, after all, the thought
that the ‘initial state’ from which concept acquisition proceeds must be
specified in intentional terms (terms like ‘content’, ‘belief ’, etc.) that
connects the issues about concept innateness with the epistemological
issues about a prioricity and the like. (By contrast, I suppose the
ethologically interesting question is not whether what’s innate is strictly
speaking intentional, but whether it is domain specific and/or species
specific. Perhaps you find the ethologically interesting question more
interesting than the philosophically interesting question. And perhaps
you’re right to do so. Still, they are different questions.) Correspondingly,
the ‘innate sensorium’ model suggests that the question how much is
innate in concept acquisition can be quite generally dissociated from the
question whether any concepts are innate. The sensorium is innate by
assumption, and there would quite likely be no acquiring sensory concepts
but that this is so. But, to repeat, the innateness of the sensorium isn’t the
innateness of anything that has intentional content. Since the sensorium
isn’t an idea, it is a fortiori not an innate idea. So, strictly speaking, the
innate sensorium model of the acquisition of RED doesn’t require that it,
or any other concept, be innate.