Innateness and Ontology, Part II:

HERE’S how we set things up in Chapter 6: suppose that radical conceptual
atomism is inevitable and that, atomism being once assumed, radical
conceptual nativism is inevitable too. On what, if any, ontological story
would radical conceptual nativism be tolerable?
However, given the preconceptions that have structured this book, we
might just as well have approached the ontological issues from a different
angle. I’ve assumed throughout that informational semantics is, if not selfevidently
the truth about mental content, at least not known to be out of
the running. It’s been my fallback metaphysics whenever I needed an
alternative to Inferential Role theories of meaning. But now, according to
informational semantics, content is constituted by some sort of nomic,
mind–world relation. Correspondingly, having a concept (concept
possession) is constituted by being in some sort of nomic, mind–world
relation. It follows that, if informational semantics is true, then there must
be laws about everything that we have concepts of. But how could there be
laws about doorknobs?
The answer, according to the present story, is that there is really only
one law about doorknobs (qua doorknobs); viz. that we lock to them in
consequence of certain sorts of experience.1 And this law isn’t really about
doorknobs because, of course, it’s really about us. This is quite a serious
point. I assume that the intuition that there aren’t laws about doorknobs
(equivalently, for present purposes, the intuition that doorknobs aren’t a
‘natural kind’) comes down to the thought that there’s nothing in the world
7
Innateness and Ontology, Part II:
Natural Kind Concepts
[It is] a matter quite independent of . . . wishing it or not wishing it. There
happens to be a definite intrinsic propriety in it which determines the thing
and which would take me long to explain.
—Henry James, The Tragic Muse
1 There are, of course, lots of (intentional psychological) laws about the concept
DOORKNOB; but that’s quite a different matter.