The Standard Argument 127

The Standard Argument 127
hypothesis-testing) model of concept learning ® (3) primitive
concepts can’t be learned.
SIA denies (1), thereby promising to block the standard argument. If,
however, there’s some other source for (2)—some plausible premiss to
derive it from that doesn’t assume a cognitivist metaphysics of concept
possession—then the standard argument is back in business.
And there is. Here’s a narrowly based argument for the hypothesistesting
model of concept acquisition; one that presupposes neither a
cognitivist account of concept possession nor even any general inductivist
thesis about the role of hypothesis testing in the acquisition of empirical
beliefs.
Nobody, radical nativists included, doubts that what leads to acquiring
a concept is typically having the right kinds of experiences. That experience
is somehow essentially implicated in concept acquisition is common
ground to both Nativists and Empiricists; their argument is over whether
concepts are abstracted from, or merely occasioned by, the experiences
that acquiring them requires. That this is indeed the polemical situation
has been clear to everybody concerned (except the Empiricists) at least
since Descartes. In short, SIA, like everybody else, has to live with the fact
that it’s typically acquaintance with doorknobs that leads to getting locked
to doorknobhood. So, like everybody else, SIA has to explain why it’s those
experiences, and not others, that eventuate in locking to that property. But
that’s enough, all by itself, to make the search for a non-inductivist account
of concept acquisition look pretty hopeless. For, even if a cognitivist model
of concept possession is not assumed, the hypothesis-testing story has the
virtue of solving what I’ll call the doorknob/DOORKNOB problem:7 why
is it so often experiences of doorknobs, and so rarely experience with
whipped cream or giraffes, that leads one to lock to doorknobhood?
According to the hypothesis-testing model, the relation between the
content of the concepts one acquires and the content of the experiences
that eventuate in one’s acquiring them is evidential; in particular, it’s
mediated by content relations between a hypothesis and the experiences
that serve to confirm it. You acquire DOORKNOB from experience with
doorknobs because you use the experiences to confirm a hypothesis about
the nature of doorknobhood; and doorknobs, unlike giraffes or whipped
cream, are ceteris paribus a good source of evidence about the nature of
doorknobs. Come to think of it, one typically gets DOORKNOB from
7 I had thought at first that I would call this the fire hydrant/FIRE HYDRANT
problem, as a sort of hommage to the Fido/Fido fallacy. But perhaps the joke isn’t worth the
extra syllables.