The Standard Argument

The Standard Argument 143
To be sure, RED and DOORKNOB could both be innate for all I’ve
said so far. But the main motivation for saying that they are is either that
one finds inductivist theories of concept acquisition intrinsically attractive,
or that noticing the d/D effect has convinced one that some such theory
must be true whether or not it’s attractive. Well, SA blocks the first
motivation. And, as we’ve been seeing, it may be that the explanation of
the d/D effect is metaphysical rather than psychological. In which case,
unless I’ve missed something, there isn’t any obvious reason why the initial
state for DOORKNOB acquisition needs to be intentionally specified. A
fortiori, there isn’t any obvious reason why DOORKNOB needs to be
innate. NOT EVEN IF IT’S PRIMITIVE. The moral of all this may be
that though there has to be a story to tell about the structural requirements
for acquiring DOORKNOB, intentional vocabulary isn’t required to tell
it. In which case, it isn’t part of cognitive psychology.
Not even of “cognitive neuropsychology”, if there is such a thing
(which I doubt). Suppose we were able to specify, in neurological
vocabulary, the initial state from which DOORKNOB acquisition
proceeds. The question would then arise whether the neurological state so
specified is intentional—whether it has conditions of semantic evaluation
(and, if so, what they are). So far, we haven’t found a reason for supposing
that it does. To be sure, it is an innate, possibly quite complicated, state
from which DOORKNOB may be acquired, given experience of e.g.
doorknobs. But this is all neutral as to whether the initial state is an
intentional state; it’s all true whether or not the initial state is an intentional
state. So it’s all true whether or not the initial state for DOORKNOB
acquisition is in the domain of cognitive neuropsychology (as opposed, as
it were, to neuropsychology tout court).
None of this could be much comfort to a disconsolate Empiricist, since
none of it is supposed to deny, even for a moment, that a lot of stuff that’s
domain specific or species specific or both has to be innate in order that we
should come to have the concept DOORKNOB (or for that matter, the
concept RED). But the issue isn’t whether acquiring DOORKNOB
requires a lot of innate stuff; anybody with any sense can see that it does.
The issue is whether it requires a lot of innate intentional stuff, a lot of
innate stuff that has content. All the arguments I know that say that innate
intentional stuff has to mediate concept acquisition depend on assuming
either that concept acquisition is inductive or that the explanation of the
d/D effect is psychological or both. Well, where a primitive concept
expresses a mind-dependent property, it is very unclear that either of these
kinds of argument will work.
Maybe there aren’t any innate ideas after all.