The Standard Argument 123

The Standard Argument 123
qua doorknobs, as it were, not qua ABCs. But how could there be laws
about doorknobs? Doorknobs, of all things!
Third objection: If most lexical concepts have no internal structure, then
most lexical concepts must be primitive. But primitive concepts are, ipso
facto, unlearned; and if a concept is unlearned, then it must be innate. But
how could DOORKNOB be innate? DOORKNOB, of all things!! Prima
facie, this objection holds against (not just IA but) any version of RTM
that is not heavily into conceptual reduction; that is, against any theory
that says that the primitive conceptual basis is large. In particular, it holds
prima facie against any atomistic version of RTM, whether or not it is
informational.
Objections two and three both turn on the peculiarly central roles that
primitive concepts play in RTMs. Primitive concepts are supposed to be
the special cases that problems about conceptual content and concept
acquisition reduce to. But if not just RTM but also conceptual atomism
is assumed, then the special case becomes alarmingly general. If, for
example, DOORKNOB is primitive, then whatever metaphysical story we
tell about the content of primitive concepts has to work for DOORKNOB.
And so must whatever psychological story we tell about the acquisition of
primitive concepts. And the metaphysical story has to work in light of the
acquisition story, and the acquisition story has to work in light of the
metaphysical story. Hume wouldn’t have liked this at all; he wanted the
primitives to be just the sensory concepts, and he wanted them to be
acquired by the stimulation of an innate sensorium. Pretty clearly, he gets
neither if DOORKNOB is among the primitives.
I propose, in this chapter, to explore some of the ways that these issues
play out in IA versions of RTM. We’ll consider how, because of the way
it construes conceptual content, IA is maybe able to avoid some extremes
of conceptual nativism to which other atomistic versions of RTM are
prone. (Though at a price, to be sure. No free lunches here either.) In
Chapter 7, I’ll take up the question about laws.
The Standard Argument
There is a plausible argument which says that informational atomism
implies radical conceptual nativism; I’ll call it the ‘Standard Argument’
(SA). Here, in very rough form, is how the Standard Argument is supposed
to go.
SA begins by assuming that learning a concept is an inductive process;
specifically, that it requires devising and testing hypotheses about what the
property is in virtue of which things fall under the concept. This is
124 Innateness and Ontology, Part I
relatively unproblematic when the concept to be acquired is a definition.
If the concept BACHELOR is the concept UNMARRIED MALE, you
can learn BACHELOR by learning that things fall under it in virtue of
being male and being unmarried. But, on pain of circularity, the
(absolutely) primitive concepts can’t themselves be learned this way.
Suppose the concept RED is primitive. Then to learn RED inductively
you’d have to devise and confirm the hypothesis that things fall under
RED in virtue of being red. But you couldn’t devise or confirm that
hypothesis unless you already had the concept RED, since the concept
RED is invoked in the formulation of the hypothesis. So you can’t have
learned the concept RED (or, mutatis mutandis, any other primitive
concept) inductively, by hypothesis testing and confirmation. But SA
assumes that induction is the only sort of concept learning that there is. So
it follows that you can’t have learned your primitive concepts at all. But if
you have a concept that you can’t have learned, then you must have it
innately. So the Standard Argument says.What, if anything, is wrong with
this?
To begin with, it might be replied that the inductive account of concept
acquisition is plausible only assuming a cognitivist account of concept
possession; an account of concept possession according to which having a
concept is knowing something. This assumption is natural enough if you
are thinking of concepts on the model of definitions (/stereotypes/
theories): having a concept is knowing what its definition (/stereotype/
theory) is. By contrast, IA is explicitly non-cognitivist about concept
possession; it says that having a concept is (not knowing something but)
being in a certain nomic mind–world relation; specifically, it’s being in that
mind–world relation in virtue of which the concept has the content that it
does. This changes the geography in ways that may be germane to the
present issues. Because it is non-cognitivist about concept possession, IA
invites a correspondingly non-cognitivist account of how concepts are
acquired. That might be just what you’re looking for if you’re looking for
a way out of SA.
Avoiding nativism by endorsing a non-cognitivist view of concept
possession is, of course, hardly a new idea. At least since Ryle (1949), a lot
of philosophical ink has been invested in the thought that having a concept
is knowing how, not knowing that. Correspondingly, concept acquisition
is arguably learning how, rather than learning that, and it isn’t obvious that
learning how needs to be inductive.Maybe construing concept possession
as know-how is all that avoiding SA requires. I think philosophers quite
generally find this plausible.
But it isn’t. For one thing, if it’s not obvious that learning how requires
hypothesis testing, it’s also not obvious that it doesn’t: in lots of cases, it
The Standard Argument 125
appears that how-learning itself depends on that-learning.4 For example,
my linguist friends tell me that learning how to talk a first language
requires quite a lot of learning that the language has the grammar that it
does. I tell my linguist friends that my philosophy friends tell me that it is
a priori and necessary that this cannot be so. Then my linguist friends
laugh at me. What am I to do?
And, for another thing, whatever the general story about knowing how
and knowing that may be, the particular skills that concept possession is
usually supposed to implicate are perceptual and inferential, and these look
to be just saturated with knowing that. Surely, you can’t identify a dog by
its barking unless you know(/believe) that dogs bark. Surely, you won’t
infer from dog to animal unless you know(/believe) that dogs are animals.
Indeed, in the second case, opposing knowing how to knowing that looks
like insisting on a distinction without a difference.5
Where we’ve got to is: even if it’s supposed that concepts are skills,6
very little follows that helps with avoiding SA. That’s because to avoid SA
you need a non-cognitivist view of concept possession. And supposing
concepts to be skills doesn’t guarantee a non-cognitivist view of concept
possession, because it is perfectly possible to be a cognitivist about the
possession of skills, if not in every case, then at least in the case of the
skills that concept possession requires. The moral: it’s unclear that Ryle
can deny SA the premiss that it centrally requires, viz. that concept acquisition
is mediated by hypothesis formation and testing.
But IA can. Let’s see where this leads.
Following Loewer and Rey (1991a) (who are themselves following the
usage of ethologists) I’ll say that acquiring a concept is getting
nomologically locked to the property that the concept expresses. So, then,
consider a supplemented version of IA (I’ll call it SIA) which says
everything that IA does and also that concept possession is some kind of
locking. The question before us is whether SIA requires radical nativism.
4 That learning how can’t depend on learning that in every case is, I suppose, the moral
of Lewis Carroll’s story about Achilles and the tortoise: Carroll 1895/1995.
5 CogSci footnote: the present issue isn’t whether inferential capacities are ‘declarative’
rather than ‘procedural’; it’s whether they are interestingly analogous to skills. A cognitive
architecture (like SOAR, for example) that is heavily committed to procedural
representations is not thereby required to suppose that drawing inferences has much in
common with playing basketball or the piano. Say, if you like, that someone who accepts
the inference from P to Q has the habit of accepting Q if he accepts P. But this sort of
‘habit’ involves a relation among one’s propositional attitudes and, prima facie, being able
to play the piano doesn’t.
6 Concepts aren’t skills, of course; concepts are mental particulars. In particular, they
are the constituents of beliefs, whereas skills can’t be the constituents of anything except
other skills. But though all this is so, the argument in the text doesn’t presuppose it.