The Standard Argument 129

The Standard Argument 129
Well, maybe. But, of course, that’s cold comfort if what you want is a
non-nativist version of SIA. You can only trigger a concept that’s there,
genetically specified, waiting to be triggered. So the Darwinian/ethological
story about concept acquisition does no better than the old-fashioned
hypothesis-testing story at making DOORKNOB not be innate. Out of
one frying pan but into another; ethologists are nativists by definition.
And, anyhow, even if the doorknob/DOORKNOB relation is selected
for by evolution, what, if not inductive learning, could be the mechanism
by which it is implemented? If concept acquisition isn’t inductive, then
how does Mother Nature contrive to insure that it is instances of F-ness
(and not of G-ness) that trigger the concept F in the course of ontogeny?
After all, if Mother N wants to select for the doorknob/DOORKNOB
type of relation between concepts and their experiential causes, she has to
do so by selecting a mechanism that produces that relation between one’s
concepts and their causes. This is a special case of the entirely general
truth that whenever Mother N wants to select for any phenotypic property
she has to do so by selecting a proximal mechanism that produces it. The
obvious candidate to select if one wants to ensure that concept acquisition
exhibits the d/D relation is inductive learning. But we have it on
independent grounds that primitive concepts can’t be learned inductively.
There may be a way for a conceptual atomist to get out of this dilemma,
but waving his hands about Darwin certainly isn’t it.
The preliminary moral, anyhow, is that radical nativism is very hard
for a conceptual atomist to avoid. If he starts out thinking about concept
acquisition the way Empiricists do—as a kind of hypothesis testing—
radical concept nativism follows; and if he starts out thinking about
concept acquisition the way that ethologists do—as a kind of triggering—
radical concept nativism still follows. It looks like a conceptual atomist
ends up being a radical concept nativist pretty much however he starts out
thinking about concept acquisition. So maybe conceptual atomism is just
false.
Or maybe radical concept nativism is true, despite its wide unpopularity
in the philosophical community. Speaking just as a private citizen, I’ve
always sort of thought it wouldn’t be all that surprising if radical concept
nativism did turn out to be true. So it didn’t much embarrass me that all
the roads from concept atomism seemed to lead there. It is, after all, God
and not philosophers who gets to decide what creatures have genotypically
built in. That is surely much the best arrangement from the creature’s point
of view.
So, in any case, it seemed to me in 1975 or so. But maybe this relaxed
stance won’t do after all. The problem with the theory that the primitive
concepts are learned inductively was that it’s circular. But now we seem to