WHERE CONCEPTS COME FROM: A THEORY OF CONCEPT ACQUISITION William Dylan Sabo ...

202 Pages·2008·0.74 MB·English

WHERE CONCEPTS COME FROM: A THEORY OF CONCEPT ACQUISITION
William Dylan Sabo
A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree ofDoctor of Philosophy in the
Department of Philosophy.
Chapel Hill
2008
Approved by:
Jesse Prinz
William Lycan
Ram Neta
Dorit Bar-On
John Roberts
© 2008
William Dylan Sabo
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
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ABSTRACT
WILLIAM DYLAN SABO: Where Concepts Come From: A Theory of Concept
Acquisition
(under the direction of Dr. Jesse Prinz)
How do people acquire new concepts? Most theorists (including Quine,
Chomsky, Fodor, and many others) assume that childhood learning is a kind of theory-
building. This picture implies that children acquire new concepts by deploying concepts
they already possess, and that in turn implies what I call the Conceptual Mediation Thesis
(CMT): that, in order to acquire any new concepts, a cognizer must first already have
some concepts.
I argue that CMT is false. While CMT implies that at least some concepts are
innate, it is widely accepted because it is thought to provide the only way to explain how
concepts are acquired. However, I argue that the apparent explanatory virtues of CMT
are in fact illusory. I then show how we can satisfy the explanatory goals that CMT was
supposed to satisfy without postulating any innate concepts – indeed without any innate
mental representations at all.
I distinguish between indicating states and representing states of cognizers.
Indicating states differ from representing states in being stimulus-bound: only those
tokens directly caused by what they indicate count as correct. I argue that perception
produces states that indicate features of the environment. These indicating states serve as
input to mechanisms that record these states. These recording devices, in turn, respond to
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the input of systematically similar indicating states by creating states that represent what
those indicating states merely indicate. I describe some processes whereby these
recording devices can create representational states without any representational input. I
argue that this explanation requires no appeal to mental representations that the agent
already possessed. Finally, I show that this approach to concept acquisition has the
resources to explain a variety of psychological phenomena that traditional views struggle
to accomodate.
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For Mom
1950-2004
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank Jesse Prinz both for his unfailing enouragement and for his
discerning and insightful comments and criticism on version after version of this
dissertation. I would also like to thank Dorit Bar-On, Bill Lycan, Ram Neta, and John
Roberts for comments, questions, suggestions and support for all of the material here, as
well as many previous versions of that material. Finally, I would like to thank Bryce
Huebner, Eric Mandelbaum, Clair Morrissey, Mark Phelan, and David Ripley for many
helpful discussions of the issues involved. Without them this would not be the work that
it is.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
LIST OF FIGURES .......................................................................................................... ix
INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................ 1
CHAPTER
1 CONCEPT ACQUISITION AND CONCEPT NATIVISM ..................... 6
1.1 Introduction ......................................................................................... 6
1.2 What Concepts Are: Preliminary Considerations ............................... 8
1.3 Concept Learning And The Argument For Radical Concept
Nativism ................................................................................................... 18
1.4 The Conceptual Mediation Thesis And The Representational
Necessitation Thesis ................................................................................. 29
1.5 Conclusion ........................................................................................ 34
2 NATIVISM, CONCEPT ACQUISITION, AND PSYCHOLOGY ........ 36
2.1 Introduction ....................................................................................... 36
2.2 Methodological Nativism .................................................................. 38
2.3 Nativism, Computationalism, And Psychological Explanation ........ 45
2.4 Conclusion ........................................................................................ 56
3 NATIVIST VIEWS OF CONCEPTUAL DEVELOPMENT ................. 58
3.1 Introduction ...................................................................................... 58
3.2 The Triggering Conception Of Concept Acquisition ........................ 59
3.3 Problems With Triggering ................................................................ 62
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3.4 Fodor’s Mind-Dependence Proposal ................................................ 81
3.5 Conclusion ........................................................................................ 85
4 RECENT APPROACHES TO EXPLAINING CONCEPT
ACQUISITION ........................................................................................ 87
4.1 Introduction ....................................................................................... 87
4.2 Conceptual-Role Semantics And Concept Acquisition .................... 88
4.3 Sustaining Mechanisms And Concept Acquisition ......................... 125
4.4Conclusion ....................................................................................... 135
5 CONCEPT ACQUISITION WITHOUT REPRESENTATIONAL
MEDIATION ......................................................................................... 117
5.1 Introduction ..................................................................................... 117
5.2 Representation And Indication ....................................................... 118
5.3 Perception And Representation ....................................................... 125
5.4 Concept Acquisition Without Representational Mediation ............ 135
5.5 Explanatory Goals Of Theories Of Concept Acquisition ............... 149
5.6 Empirical Support ........................................................................... 152
5.7 Conclusion ...................................................................................... 162
6 CONCEPTUAL REPRESENTATION AND CONCEPTUAL
MEDIATION ......................................................................................... 164
6.1 Introduction .................................................................................... 164
6.2 Conceptual And Nonconceptual Mental Representations .............. 165
6.3 Concept Acquisition Via Conceptual Mediation ............................ 176
6.4 Conclusion ...................................................................................... 185
REFERENCES .................................................................................................. 187
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LIST OF FIGURES
Figure
1 .......................................................................................................................... 134
2 .......................................................................................................................... 136
3 .......................................................................................................................... 138
4 .......................................................................................................................... 139
5 .......................................................................................................................... 141
6 .......................................................................................................................... 144
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INTRODUCTION
Where do concepts come from? John Locke (1690/1975) answered “in one word,
from experience”. But the contemporary consensus in cognitive science has been less
friendly to the Lockean position. This contemporary consensus is decidedly nativist in its
orientation; according to it, a large amount of conceptual structure is required in order for
us to acquire any of our concepts from experience at all. At a minimum, this consensus is
reflected in a commitment accepted by virtually all extant theories of concept acquisition
to what I call here the Conceptual Mediation Thesis (CMT): that the acquisition of any
concept must be mediated by concepts one already possesses. This requires that we have
concepts that we do not acquire –concepts we have innately. So, according to current
consensus, we need innate concepts before we can acquire any others. Furthermore, the
contemporary consensus holds, the number of innate concepts we need is quite large. So,
contra Locke, a great many of our concepts are not acquired from experience.
I think that Locke was much nearer to being right about the origin of our ideas
than it has been recently popular to suppose. I think it is both coherent and plausible to
think that how we acquire our initial conceptual repertoire can be explained without
supposing that we have any innate concepts at all. On my view, as on Locke’s,
experience is the origin of our ideas, and the possibility of such experience does not
require that we have any ideas innately.