140 Innateness and Ontology, Part I

140 Innateness and Ontology, Part I
DOORKNOB by seeing that they are similar to stereotypic doorknobs,
why is it that you generally see a doorknob as a doorknob, and not as
something that satisfies the doorknob stereotype?) If our minds are, in
effect, functions from stereotypes to concepts, that is a fact about us.
Indeed, it is a very deep fact about us. My point in going on about this is
to emphasize the untriviality of the consideration that we typically get a
concept from instances that exemplify its stereotype.
That a concept has the stereotype that it does is never truistic; and that
a stereotype belongs to the concept that it does is never truistic either. In
particular, since the relation between a concept and its stereotype is always
contingent, no circularity arises from defining ‘the concept X’ by reference
to ‘the stereotype of the concept X’. But, according to the present
proposal, the relation between being a doorknob and instantiating the
doorknob stereotype is, as it were, almost constitutive. Instantiating
doorknobhood and instantiating the corresponding stereotype are logically,
conceptually, and metaphysically independent in both directions.16 But
the following is metaphysically necessary, according to the line I’m selling:
being a doorknob is having the property to which minds like ours
generalize from experiences (as of) the properties by which the doorknob
stereotype is constituted. That’s what the mind-dependence of doorknobhood
consists in.
By way of a sort of summary, I want to rub in something that I said
before: there is a sense, quite different from the one I’ve been discussing,
in which it’s pretty untendentious that being a doorknob is a minddependent
property. Perhaps it’s in the nature of doorknobs that they are
artefacts. Perhaps, for example, nothing that just grew on a door could be
a doorknob. Since it’s in the nature of artefacts that have a certain kind of
intentional history, it follows that there would be no doorknobs but that
there are intentions with respect to doorknobs. A fortiori, there would be
no doorknobs if there were no minds. Have this however you will; I raise
the issue only to distinguish it from the one that I care about.
My line is that whether a thing is a doorknob is a matter of how it
strikes us. By contrast, if being a doorknob is having the right sort of
intentional history, then it’s straightforwardly a matter of fact whether a
16 In principle, they are also epistemically independent in both directions. As things are
now, we find out about the stereotype by doing tests on subjects who are independently
identified as having the corresponding concept. But I assume that if we knew enough about
the mind/brain, we could predict a concept from its stereotype and vice versa. In effect,
given the infinite set of actual and possible doorknobs, we could predict the stereotype from
which our sorts of minds would generalize to it; and given the doorknob stereotype, we
could predict the set of actual and possible objects which our kinds of minds would take
to instantiate doorknobhood.