The Standard Argument 141

The Standard Argument 141
thing is a doorknob. That’s because what intentional history a thing has is
metaphysically independent of what intentional history it strikes anyone
as having.17 Being married is a matter of intentional history; one has to
have said certain things, under certain conditions, with certain
intentions, . . . etc. But whether Napoleon was married isn’t up to us; nor,
for that matter, is whether you are married up to you. Whether you are
married is metaphysically independent of whether you wish or take
yourself to be. It’s too late to change your mind, and ‘I forgot’ does not
defend against a charge of bigamy.
And, anyhow, I think the metaphysics of lots of concepts that do not
subsume artefacts, and are patently not constituted by their intentional
histories, works in much the same way that the metaphysics of
DOORKNOB does. In fact, I rather think that is true of all concepts that
aren’t logico-mathematical and don’t express natural kinds. More of this
in Chapter 7.
I’ve been suggesting that whether a thing is a doorknob is maybe
constituted by facts about whether we (do or would) take it to be a
doorknob; just as whether something is red is maybe constituted by facts
about whether it looks red to us. The metaphysical camel I’m trying to get
you to swallow is, to repeat, an analogy between DOORKNOB and
appearance concepts: with doorknob as with red, all there is to being it is
how things tend to strike us. This account of the metaphysics of
doorknobs would seem to explain why DOORKNOB exhibits the d/D
effect without having to assume that DOORKNOB is learned inductively.
So far, then, the present picture is compatible with the idea that
DOORKNOB is primitive. So it’s compatible with Semantic Atomism.
Suppose, if only for the sake of the discussion, that you’re prepared to
consider the ontology I’ve been trying to sell you. Then: what’s the bottom
line about Innate Ideas?
Innateness and Ontology
The natural, appalled, reaction to radical concept nativism is: ‘But how
could you have a concept like DOORKNOB innately?’ To which the
proper answer is: ‘That depends a lot on what the concept DOORKNOB
is and it depends a lot on what it is to have a concept.’ According to the
present proposal, to have a concept is to be locked to the corresponding
property. But also, according to the present proposal, DOORKNOB is
17 If you were an “interpretivist” about the ontology of the mental, you would, of
course, have to deny this. So much the worse for interpretivists, as usual.