In The Language of Thought (1975), Fodor infamously argued for radical concept nativism by suggesting that all of our primitive lexical concepts are innate. Call this the Radical Concept Nativism Puzzle. I will offer an evolutionary solution to this puzzle as it applies to natural and perceptual kind concepts.

In Radical Concept Nativism, Laurence and Margolis describe Fodor’s acquisition puzzle this way:

1)      Apart from miracles of futuristic super-science all concepts are either learned or innate.         

2)      If they’re learned, they are acquired by hypothesis testing

3)      If they’re acquired by (non-trivial) hypothesis testing, they’re structured.

4)      Lexical concepts are not structured.

5)      So lexical concepts aren’t acquired by hypothesis testing.

6)      So lexical concepts aren’t learned.

7)      Therefore, lexical concepts are innate.

The thought that lies behind the third premise of the argument is that in typical cases of concept learning, the experimenter has a concept in mind and the subject is asked to sort objects in terms of whether they are instances of a novel concept, say, a flurg. The subject subsequently frames inductive hypotheses concerning the objects and might decide that a flurg is a circle and only later discover that flurgs possess the individuating conditions of objects that are green. But if this is the case, Fodor notes, then the subject is not learning what a flurg is, since the subject already possesses the concept green. Hence, concept learning is not possible. An alternative is to conclude that concept learning involves complex concepts, or concepts with internal structure, that are constructed out of primitive concepts. The result is that genuine learning can take place since the complex concept was not represented in the evidential base, but assembled out of primitive constituent concepts. According to Fodor, the sort of structure found in such complex concepts is definitional structure. But the history of lexical concepts is that they are not characterizable in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. Second, non-definitional accounts of internal structure, such as Prototype Theory, fail because their constituents fail to compose. According to Prototype Theory, concepts have statistical structure. Hence, complex concept A has prototype structure if its constituents express properties that things that fall under A tend to have. Take the complex concept “Pet Fish,” e.g., goldfish. Its constituents, Pet and Fish have prototypes, dog and trout, that do not produce the goldfish prototype. Hence, a prototype theory of complex conceptual structure fails to satisfy the compositionality constraint, a constraint that Fodor has repeatedly, and – I think – persuasively, claimed is nonnegotiable for any adequate theory of concepts. It follows that lexical concepts are not learned by virtue of their structure because concepts have no structure, nondefinitional or definitional. If that is so, then concepts are not acquired by hypothesis testing and not learned. If primitive concepts are not learned then they are innate. That is the concept acquisition puzzle. The argument is plausible, yet the conclusion is deeply counterintuitive so few accept it. In his more recent book, Concepts (1998), Fodor has rescinded radical concept nativism.

Fodor wants to avoid an inductivist, cognitivist solution to the concept acquisition puzzle because that would be circular in the sense that hypothesis testing requires that one already have the concept in question if the concept is a primitive one. To avoid that result, Fodor offers a noncognitivist, metaphysical solution. As Fodor says: “My story says that what doorknobs have in common is being the kind of thing that our kind of minds (do or would) lock to from experience with instances of the doorknob stereotype” [Fodor, 1998, 137]. For Fodor, there is nothing cognitive, intentional, or evidential about the locking relation. One simply resonates to the doorknob property by virtue of having the sort of mind that we do. Fodor’s claim is that primitive concepts are acquired due to a metaphysical locking relation that is noninductivist or noncognitive or nonpsychological. Such primitive concepts as DOORKNOB are not innate. What is innate are the nonpsychological mechanisms that cause us to experience things the way we do. Hence, the sensorium is innate. So, there is no reason to think that the acquisition story is “in the domain of cognitive neuropsychology (as opposed, as it were, to neuropsychology tout court)” [Fodor, 1998, 143]. The problem with Fodor’s position, as Laurence and Margolis rightly point out, is that it is entirely unenlightening to cite an unknown neurological mechanism to explain mental phenomena and so Fodor has no adequate concept acquisition story. He rejects an inductivist account and the metaphysical story only provides the logical preconditions for an account of concept acquisition. More recently, Margolis (1999) and Laurence and Margolis (2002) have provided an alternative account.

Laurence and Margolis provide a cognitivist, inductivist causal theory of content solution to the concept acquisition puzzle. They believe that Fodor’s original asymmetric dependence version of the causal theory of content can provide the proper starting point, ironically, to develop an account of concept acquisition. The causal theory of content has it that in cases where a predicative expression  (“Deer”) is thought of an object of predication (a deer), the symbol tokenings denote their causes, and the symbol types express the property whose instantiations reliably cause their tokenings [Fodor, 1987, 99]. In successful cases, my uttering “Deer” says of a deer that it is one. The idea was that reliable causation would be counterfactual supporting in the sense that the property deer does, and would, cause the tokening of “deer.” The idea behind the causal theory is that such nomological relations determine the semantic interpretation of mental symbols. The central problem for the causal theory of representation was to give an account of misrepresentation. A problem for many solutions to the misrepresentation problem is the disjunction problem. According to the crude causal theory of representation, Ds reliably cause tokenings of “D.” Hence, the condition governing what it means for D to be represented by “D” is identical to the condition for such a token being true. If so, it is impossible to get falsity into the picture. One might think that D-caused “D” tokenings are veridical and E-caused “D” tokenings are unveridical. But this fails since the existence of E-caused “D” tokenings establishes the fact that the causal dependence of “D” tokenings on D’s is imperfect. It follows that “Ds” are reliably caused by (D or E). But if “D” expresses the property (D or E), then E-caused “D” tokenings are veridical and we have no account of misrepresentation. That is the disjunction problem.

Fodor thinks that the right approach to the disjunction problem involves the counterfactual properties of the causal relations between different mind/world tokenings. He argues that falsehoods are ontologically dependent on truths but not vice-versa. That is, one can only confuse a deer with an elk once one has the concept of a deer. Hence, since “deer” does mean deer, the fact that deer cause one to say “deer” does not depend on any semantic relation between “deer” tokenings and elks. False or wild tokening can now be picked out in terms of the necessary condition: E-caused “D” tokenings are wild only if they are asymmetrically dependent upon non-E-caused “D” tokenings. Fodor’s asymmetric version of the causal theory of content was specifically designed to handle his view that primitive lexical concepts have no internal structure. That is, concepts are not definitions or prototypes but are the result of having a representation that stands in a certain causal dependency mind-world relation. No specific piece of information that people associate with dogs via the concept DOG, say, is actually constitutive of the concept DOG though much information may be associated with our concepts. All that is essential to a concept’s content are the dependency relations that a concept bears to things in the world. Fodor takes it to be a cardinal virtue of his account that people may associate wildly different, false or incomplete, information with a concept and yet possess the same concept. 

According to Laurence and Margolis (2002) the key to concept acquisition is the notion of a sustaining mechanism. As they say: “A sustaining mechanism is a mechanism in virtue of which a concept stands in the mind-world relation that a causal theory of content, like Fodor’s, takes to be constitutive of content [p.37]. For Fodor, the relevant sustaining mechanisms are those that underpin the asymmetric dependence causal relations between concepts and the properties they express in the world. There may be different sustaining mechanisms between one person’s concept and the property that it expresses or between different people’s identical concept and the property that it expresses. Laurence and Margolis illustrate the idea of a sustaining mechanism by focusing on concepts for natural kinds. The key sustaining mechanism for a natural kind concept is one that “implicates a kind syndrome along with a more general disposition to treat paradigmatic exemplars of the syndrome” [p.38]. A kind syndrome is a collection of properties that is “highly indicative of a kind yet is accessible in perceptual encounters” [p.38]. For instance, this may include the shape, motions, markings, sounds, and colors of a kind. Concept learning then becomes a matter of accumulating contingent perceptual information about a kind. This information, once coupled with an essentialist disposition, establishes an inferential mechanism that tokens the natural kind concept. For instance, Laudau et.al. (1994) found that shape is an important cue that children use to determine that two objects are members of the same kind. A new word used in the presence of a cup could refer to a myriad of possible concepts, yet children employ a shape bias to fix on the kind at issue. The shape bias together with other biases and children’s understanding of their relative importance enables children to represent kind syndromes. In order to avoid fakes, children show a tendency to look for essential properties in order to fix a natural kind. Hence, perceptual properties are only a rough kind for them. In addition they have an essentialist predisposition that has them, for instance, responding differently to objects insides as opposed to their outsides as a function of expecting essential properties to be constitutive of the insides of, say, dogs. Gelman and Wellman (1991), for instance, found that four and five year olds displayed an essentialist predisposition. Laurence and Margolis think that this essentialist disposition together with the acquisition of a natural kind syndrome-based mechanism constitutes a learning model and, as such, it is a cognitivist and inductivist (or empiricist) model of the sort that Fodor rejects. This is so despite the fact that they posit innate structure in the form of biases and inferential mechanisms of various sorts. I think Fodor needs an acquisition story. But I think Fodor’s mistake was not that he failed to provide an inductive learning theory for primitive term acquisition but that he failed to provide an evolutionary account of primitive term acquisition. Humans do have an innate predisposition to sort objects into natural kinds due to an essentialist predisposition. The perceptual features of objects are clues to an underlying world of essential properties that we hone in on from a very early age. But Laurence and Margolis need to say how their inductivist learning model avoids Fodor’s objection that inductivist accounts presuppose knowledge of primitive concepts in order to explain the acquisition of primitive concepts, e.g., as in the Flurg example.

But how do we acquire primitive concepts? We must be careful here to avoid the circularity error of presupposing a concept while providing a learning model of concepts. It is also important to focus on primitive concepts and not complex concepts. In the past I argued that the gap between the domain in which a module was selected for (its Environment of Evolutionary Adaptation, EEA) and the actual domain (or Actual Environment, AE) can lead to misrepresentation. Now suppose that misrepresentation is part of the process that leads to the malfunction of a certain proper function of a module. It follows that certain accurate representations historically have been important for the execution of the proper function of particular modules. This will not be universally true nor necessarily true but it will, often enough, be a contingent fact about the history of our species that true beliefs were important for our survival and reproduction. Suppose that Laurence and Margolis, Landau et.al., and others,  are correct to suppose that humans from an early age possess an essentialist bias, and a shape bias, among other perceptual biases. Also, we know that humans display prototypical, statistical response patterns to the phenomena that they confront. Humans will acquire the concept of a dog and a name, ‘Dog,’ for it. This, as opposed to the more abstract term ‘animal’ or the more specific term ‘Labrador Retriever.’ That is, we tend to acquire terms for objects categorized in ways that are convenient for our purposes. On the savannah, presumably, those purposes would include hunting prey and avoiding one’s own predators, among other activities. The acquisition of perceptual terms eventually leads to the acquisition of kind syndromes. One wants ‘Adam’s Ale’ because it quenches one’s thirst and we identify it as that liquid that is tasteless, colourless, odorless, and so forth. But so far we have no object identified as having any essential properties. Of course, that does not mean that we will not have a primitive essentialist predisposition to go along with our primitive concept of Adam’s Ale. We know that Adam’s Ale tastes better than that horrid stuff in the Ocean that is exceedingly salty. We eventually get very good indeed at picking out the stuff we like and that truly quenches our thirst. In fact, the better we get at picking it out, the more we acquire a low-level theory about Adam’s Ale. At any rate, mass terms, such as ‘water’ and count nouns, such as ‘wildebeest’1, are added to our primitive lexicon as they are called for in the execution of the proper function of one’s modules. Wildebeests are identified with the benefit of our shape bias, as they are for the prey of wildebeests.

My suggestion is that the terms used to identify such animals, such as ‘brown’ and ‘four-legged,’ were acquired (not learned) during the Pleistocene period of our development. Later, those that were able to pick out the relevant properties in the perceptual space, hunt, survive, and reproduce were selected for. Such individuals acquired what I will call PERCEPTUAL KINDS in the Proper Domain or the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptation (EEA). Such PERCEPTUAL KINDS included color terms like ‘brown,’ and shape terms like ‘four-legged.’ Of course, it is the concept ‘brown’ that constitutes such a PERCEPTUAL KIND, not the actual term ‘brown.’ Such PERCEPTUAL KINDS became our perceptually primitive lexical concepts. In the Actual Domain or Actual Environment (AE) in which we now exist, we acquire, but do not learn, what ‘brown’ is. We use our innate perceptual ability to isolate brown amid the flux of the passing show. Misidentifying a black bear as a wildebeest for our ancestors could spell disaster. The utilization of appropriate perceptual terms that helped to fix the meaning of natural kind terms was no accident. For instance, determining that it is a good thing to hunt in the south valley because there is a statistically good chance that lots of prey will be there is a statistical fact that evolution, but not learning, will provide for a species. Nevertheless, we acquire PERCEPTUAL KINDS in order that they will work alongside an evolutionarily selected for hunting instinct or module. We possess an innate predisposition to avoid snakes and the PERCEPTUAL KINDS, e.g., ‘long,’ ‘thin,’ ‘round,’ ’object,’ that help us to identify snakes are made possible by the shape bias. The prototypical snake, then, emerges as a generalization of the statistical data that our ancestors faced. Prototypes represent the results of categorization strategies developed to aid our ancestors in flight and fight. As such, such perceptual cues acquired as perceptually primitive concepts are acquired in the fulfillment of the proper function of our innate modules. But this story will not work. Prototypes do not compose as Fodor taught us using the Pet Fish example. As such prototypes cannot be a part of the primitive concepts that constitute our informational atomist foundation. Something else is needed here, but what? To answer this question, consider another question.

Why do humans possess an essentialist predisposition? It’s a fact that young children expect objects to have insides that are constitutive of what that object is. My suggestion is that such a disposition is an evolutionary adaptation. As such, it has a function just as all modules that are selected for have functions. Acquiring good clean water and the natural kind term ‘water’ is, in this sense, not just an abstract, theoretical exercise. Rather, it becomes a biological imperative where reproduction, the goal of natural selection, and its necessary precondition, survival, are at issue. Hence, while prototypes do not compose and so fail to provide the primitives necessary for a compositional semantics, natural kind terms succeed. On my view, Natural kind terms and Perceptual Kind Terms are acquired as the result of innate mechanisms. If that is true, we do not learn natural kind terms or Perceptual Kind Terms and so there is no inductivist circularity objection to face from Fodor. But such natural kind and perceptual kind terms are not “strictly speaking” innate either; rather, the concepts that such terms token are acquired as a contingent consequence of innate predispositions, such as the essentialist and space bias. Secondly, there is no problem about natural kind terms or perceptual kind terms being compositional as there is with prototype theory, connectionist theory, and so forth. Moreover, as Fodor (1998) has emphasized, we do not acquire natural kind terms or perceptual kind terms as such, i.e., only in a rich theoretical context, but only natural kind terms and perceptual kind terms. We do not require a sophisticated theoretical picture in order to grasp natural or perceptual kind terms, though we may acquire such a theory in the fullness of time. The view I am defending might be called Place-Holder Essentialism because my view is that natural kind terms have no structure, they are informationally atomic terms.2 That is why it is possible to track such kinds without benefit of theory; we lock to natural kinds by virtue of innate mechanisms that hook us up to perceptual kinds. And, those perceptual kinds are themselves informationally atomic. Natural kind terms and perceptual kind terms are not innate, nor are they learned. If I am right, one can have one’s natural kinds ala Laurence and Margolis without learning (and its attendant Fodorian learning problem) and still retain informationally atomic natural kinds.

To conclude:

1)      Fodor lacks an acquisition story for concepts but is correct to think that concepts are unstructured symbols or indicators.

2)      Fodor is correct to think that we cannot learn primitive terms inductively on pain of circularity.

3)      Laurence and Margolis are correct to think that Fodor has offered no concept acquisition story but they are wrong to think that primitive lexical terms can be learned given Fodor’s circularity objection.

Conclusion: We need to provide an evolutionary account for the primitive terms of conceptual atomism.

It should be noted that the sketch of concept acquisition that I have provided only deals with natural kind and perceptual kind terms. It remains an open question as to whether the account generalizes to other sorts of lexical concepts. Clearly, much work needs to be done to articulate a complete account of evolutionary informational atomism.

Murray Clarke

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