Innateness and Ontology, Part I:

RTM requires there to be infinitely many concepts that are complex and
finitely many that are primitive. RTM also requires concepts to have their
contents essentially. The versions of RTM that are currently standard in
philosophy and in cognitive science, however, want still more: most lexical
concepts should not be primitive, and the content of concepts should be
determined, at least inter alia, by their inferential-cum-causal relations to
one another. I think, however, that the evidence is getting pretty solid that
the last two conditions can’t be met; lexical concepts typically don’t act as
though they were internally structured by either psychological or linguistic
6
Innateness and Ontology, Part I:
The Standard Argument1
I find only myself, every time, in everything I create.
—Wotan in Die Walküre, Act II
Are you also puzzled, Socrates, about cases that might be thought absurd,
such as hair or mud or dirt or any other trivial and undignified objects. Are
you doubtful whether or not to assert that each of these has a separate
form? . . . Not at all, said Socrates. In these cases, the things are just the
things we see; it would surely be too absurd to suppose that they have a
form.
—Plato, Parmenides
Virginia Woolf has summed up this state of things with perfect vividness
and conciseness in the words, ‘Tuesday follows Monday’.
—E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare’s Last Plays
1 This chapter reconsiders some issues about the nativistic commitments of RTMs that
I first raised in Fodor 1975 and then discussed extensively in 1981a. Casual familiarity with
the latter paper is recommended as a prolegomenon to this discussion.
I’m especially indebted to Andrew Milne and to Peter Grim for having raised (essentially
the same) cogent objections to a previous version.
The Standard Argument 121
test. And the question which aspects of a concept’s inferential role are the
ones that determine its meaning appears to be hopeless. Thus far has the
World Spirit progressed.
I propose, therefore, that we scrap the standard versions of RTM and
consider, in their place, a doctrine that I’ll call Informational Atomism.
(IA for short.) IA has an informational part and it has an atomistic part.
To wit:
—Informational semantics: content is constituted by some sort of
nomic, mind–world relation. Correspondingly, having a concept
(concept possession) is constituted, at least in part, by being in some
sort of nomic, mind–world relation.
—Conceptual atomism: most lexical concepts have no internal structure.
As far as I can tell, nobody but me thinks that IA has a prayer of being
true; not even people who are quite sympathetic to RTM. Now, why is
that, do you suppose?
I can imagine three objections to IA (however, see Appendix 7A). The
first of these I’m prepared not to take very seriously, but the second two
need some discussion. Most of this chapter and the next one are devoted
to them. I should say at the outset that I regard what follows as very
tentative indeed. Though the standard versions of RTM have been
explored practically to death, IA is virgin territory. The best I hope for is
a rough sketch of the geography.
First objection: If atomism is true and most lexical concepts have no
internal structure, then there is no such thing as the analysis of most of the
concepts that philosophers care about. That BROWN COW has a
philosophical analysis (into BROWN and COW) isn’t much consolation.
Reply: Strictly speaking, you can have conceptual analysis without
structured concepts since, strictly speaking, you can have analyticity
without structured concepts (see Appendix 5A). You do, however, have to
live with the failure of attempts to reduce analyticity to conceptual
containment. And you have to live with the general lack of empirical
sanction for claims that satisfying the possession conditions for some
concept A requires satisfying the possession conditions for some other
concept B. As far as I can tell, there is little or no evidence for such claims
except brute appeals to intuition; and, as we saw in Chapter 4, a case can
be made that the intuitions thus appealed to are corrupt.
On the other hand, who cares about conceptual analysis? It’s a
commonplace that its successes have been, to put it mildly, very sparse.
Indeed, viewed from the cognitive psychologist’s perspective, the main
point about conceptual analysis is that it’s supposed to fail. For all sorts of
122 Innateness and Ontology, Part I
quotidian concepts, its answers to ‘What is their content?’ and to ‘How do
you acquire them?’ are, respectively, ‘It has none’ and ‘You don’t’. It’s
worth bearing in mind that analytic philosophy, from Hume to Carnap
inclusive, was a critical programme. For the Empiricists, the idea was to
constrain the conditions for concept possession a priori, by constraining
the acceptable relations between concepts and percepts. It would then turn
out that you really don’t have many of the concepts that you think you
have; you don’t have GOD, CAUSE, or TRIANGLE at all, and though
perhaps you do have DOG, it’ s not the sort of concept that you had
supposed it to be. “When we run over the libraries, persuaded of these
principles, what havoc must we make?” (Hume 1955: 3.) Post-Positivist
philosophical analysis has wavered between reconstruction and
deconstruction, succeeding in neither. Most practitioners now hold that we
do have DOG, CAUSE, and TRIANGLE after all; maybe even GOD.
But they none the less insist that there are substantive, a priori,
epistemological constraints on concept possession. These, in the fullness
of time, analysis will reveal; to the confusion of Sceptics, Metaphysical
Realists, Mentalists, Cartesians, and the like. Probably of Cognitive
Scientists too.
But, between friends: nothing of the sort is going to happen. In which
case, what’s left to a notion of conceptual analysis that’s detached from its
traditional polemical context? And what on earth are conceptual analyses
for?
Second objection: The informational part of IA says that content is
constituted by nomic symbol-world connections. If that is true, then there
must be laws about everything that we have concepts of. Now, it may be
there are laws about some of the things that we have concepts of (fish,
stars, grandmothers(?!)). But how could there be laws about, as it might be,
doorknobs ? 2 Notice that it’s only in conjunction with conceptual atomism
that informational semantics incurs this objection. Suppose the concept
DOORKNOB is definitionally equivalent to the complex concept . . .
ABC . . . Then we can think the former concept if there are laws about
each of the constituents of the latter. In effect, all informational semantics
per se requires for its account of conceptual content is that there be laws
about the properties expressed by our primitive concepts. However, IA says
that practically every (lexical) concept is primitive. So, presumably, it says
that DOORKNOB is primitive.3 So there must be laws about doorknobs
2 For discussions that turn on this issue, see Fodor 1986; Antony and Levine 1991;
Fodor 1991.
3 Actually, of course, DOORKNOB isn’t a very good example, since it’s plausibly a
compound composed of the constituent concepts DOOR and KNOB. But let’s ignore that
for the sake of the discussion.