The Standard Argument 131

The Standard Argument 131
a sensory concept and the character of its cause is not arbitrary when the
cause is intentionally described. The thing to keep your eye on is that we
typically get the concept RED from (or, anyhow, on the occasion of)
experiencing things as red.
There is, I think, more than a hint of a muddle about this in Fodor
1981a, where the following is a favourite line of argument: ‘Look,
everybody—Empiricists and Rationalists—agrees that there is at least one
psychological mechanism which effects a non-rational, arbitrary relation
between at least some primitive concepts and their distal causes. In
particular, everybody agrees that the sensorium works that way.’ “[E]ven
the Empiricists hold that primitive concepts are merely triggered by [rather
than learned from] experience . . . It is . . . just a fact about the way that
we are put together than the sensory concepts we have are dependent in the
ways they are upon the particular stimulations which occasion them”
(ibid.: 275). On this account, Rationalism is simply the generalization of
the Empiricist picture of the sensorium to cover whatever primitive
concepts there turn out to be, sensory or otherwise: some kinds of
arbitrary stimuli trigger (sensory) concepts like RED; other kinds of
arbitrary stimuli trigger (non-sensory) concepts like DOORKNOB.
What’s the big sweat?
That I still like using the sensorium as a model of concept innateness at
large will presently become clear. But, to repeat, prima facie it has a
problem that needs to be taken seriously. The problem is that the triggering
stimuli for RED aren’t arbitrary when you take them under intentional
(rather than psychophysical) description. If you take them under
intentional description, the doorknob/DOORKNOB problem instantly
emerges for sensory concepts too. It is encounters with doorknobs that
typically occasion the acquisition of what Empiricists (and practically
everybody else) have taken to be a complex concept like DOORKNOB;
likewise it is typically encounters with red things (and not with green
things, and not with square things, and not with elephants (unless they
are red squares or red elephants)) that typically occasion the acquisition
of what practically everybody takes to be a primitive concept like RED.
Surely that’s no accident in either case? And if it’s not an accident, what
else but an inductive model of concept acquisition could explain it?
This begins to seem a little worrying. It is perhaps tolerable that
representational theories of mind should lead by plausible arguments to
quite a radical nativism. But it is surely not tolerable that they should lead
by plausible arguments to a contradiction. If the d/D effect shows that
primitive concepts must be learned inductively, and SA shows that
primitive concepts can’t be learned inductively, then the conclusion has to
be that there aren’t any primitive concepts. But if there aren’t any primitive