Abstract
Jerry Fodor’s arguments against the possibility of concept learning, and the responses that have been offered in defense of the coherence of concept learning, have both by and large assumed that concept learning is a descriptive process. I offer an alternative, ostensive approach to concept learning and explain how descriptive concept learning can be explained as a version of ostensive concept learning. I argue that an ostensive view of concept learning offers an empirically plausible and philosophically adequate account of concept learning that is explanatorily superior to traditional descriptive views.
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Notes
This corresponds to one common philosophical tradition of talking about concepts. An alternative tradition identifies concepts with abstract objects (for some discussion of the relation between the two traditions, see Margolis and Laurence 2007). I think the issues with which I am concerned remain substantially the same across these two traditions, even if the vocabulary does not; in the latter case, the issues might better be put in terms of how we acquire the abilities to grasp concepts and thoughts.
In keeping with standard conventions, I write the names of concepts in capital letters.
Here and throughout, I take no stand on what is required for two concepts to have the same content or to have distinct contents; I take it that the requirement holds on any reasonable understanding of “content”.
The requirement here is the same as that which Fodor (1998) discusses under the heading of the “doorknob/DOORKNOB problem”, and that Weiskopf (2008) discusses under the heading of “epistemic sensitivity”. What, precisely, the requirement comes to is itself open for debate, mainly due to the lack of any general theory of what distinguishes learning from other processes. Fodor (1981) glosses it as the requirement that there be a “rational-causal” as opposed to a “brute-causal” connection between the stimulus that leads to the formation of the concept and the content of the concept thus formed, and it is definitely intended to exclude views according to which an innate concept is merely triggered by experience. How the different theories discussed here understand the requirement, and how they propose to meet it, will become clearer in what follows.
What kind of information, and how it is represented, will depend on the particular kind of nondefinitional view under consideration. Prototype theories hold that concepts are summary representations of typical and salient properties that members of the category tend to have; exemplar theories hold that concepts are collections of representations of particular concrete instances of members of the category; “theory” theories hold that concepts are collections of theoretical knowledge about categories. For a general review of such theories, see Murphy (2004). The differences between these views are significant, but will not matter for the issues at hand. I return to these differences, and to what I regard as the proper role for such theories in an account of concepts and concept learning, in Sect. 6.
See, e.g., Fodor and LePore (2002). There is a vast literature on the nature, scope, and force of the compositionality requirement. Since the view I will offer does not depend on the details of the compositionality requirement, I omit further discussion of it here.
Fodor originally took this as an argument for radical concept nativism. More recently, Fodor (1998, 2010) has tentatively withdrawn the claim that the innateness of concepts should be inferred from the failure of learning theories, holding instead that concept acquisition may simply have no cognitive explanation. I believe that his underlying position on the development of concepts remains substantially unchanged from his earlier work, but will not argue that here. Regardless of one's attitude toward innateness, the question of the coherence of learning theories ought to be of interest.
This is not to say that we cannot introduce concepts by means of sense-fixing descriptions; if our conceptual system is compositional, then there are an indefinite number of concepts we could potentially form by such means. But such new concepts are not novel concepts, in the sense above.
Two potential sources of disanalogy should be noted. (1) Kripke's view is about linguistic items, not concepts. (2) Kripke's apparatus is primarily directed toward the semantics of proper names, while concepts are primarily general terms. I think that neither disanalogy affects the main point. Re: (1) Many views of concepts (including Fodor's own) treat concepts on the model of language. Re: (2) Kripke extends his own view to at least some general terms, specifically natural kind terms. Furthermore, recent proponents of direct reference theory such as Soames (2002) and Salmon (2005) have offered detailed extensions of Kripke's picture to general terms. While the details may be disputable, there appears to be no principled reason why the essential details of the picture cannot be extended in some such way. For the moment, in keeping with Kripke's focus on proper names, I will concentrate on those cases of introducing mental names for particular objects. In Sect. 6 I will argue that parallel considerations hold for general terms.
Weiskopf does suggest that demonstrations can play a role in the introduction of new concepts. However, he seems to regard the role of demonstrations as an extension of the role of descriptions. In contrast, the view I will offer is closer to the reverse: on my view, demonstration is the fundamental mode of concept learning, and descriptions play a role in concept learning analogous to demonstration.
In fact, the description in Donnellan's example is incomplete as well; the description is implicitly restricted to the people at the particular party in question, though this restriction is not part of the description itself.
There is a further attendant difference in mechanism as well. What public language demonstrations are demonstrations of is determined by public conventions (such as (very roughly) that a finger pointing gesture demonstrates the object intersected by an invisible line drawn from the extended finger parallel to the extension of the finger and away from the rest of the hand). But what mental demonstrations are demonstrations of is not determined by public conventions. I return to the question of how it is determined in more detail in Sect. 6.
For multiple-object tracking studies and interpretations of the results, see Pylyshyn and Storm (1988); for discussion of the neural architecture of attention, see Ungerleider and Mishkin (1982), Milner and Goodale (1995); for theories that draw comparisons between attentional mechanisms and demonstration, see Pylyshyn (1989, 1994, 2009), Ballard et al. (1997), Scholl and Leslie (1999).
FINST is short for “fingers of instantiation”, in an overt nod to the analogy between such mechanisms and pointing. Pylyshyn also likens these indices to “demonstrative terms in the language of thought”, while Ballard notes that “the attentional system can be thought of as a neural way of pointing.”
In fact, Fodor and Pylyshyn (2014, chapter 4) currently take an essentially similar view of the role of mechanisms of perceptual attention in fixing reference to currently perceivable objects: on their view, perceptual reference does not essentially depend on prior descriptive resources, and provides the foundation for one's ability to represent everything else one has the ability to represent.
This is a limitation not shared by demonstrative thoughts, since one can keep track of an object despite its change in properties. When the child watches the squirrel, it constantly changes its shape and relative size, but this does not prevent the child from keeping track of it. Similarly, when Descartes melted the wax, he was able to keep track of it despite the change in all of its perceptible qualities.
One difference between the interpersonal and the intrapersonal case, for both demonstratives and descriptions, is that the former case involves an intention on the part of one party to convey the attention of another to something, and the second person's behavior may be evaluated as correct or incorrect relative to this intention. But this is inessential; even if the object of your attention is not the one that I intended, you can still introduce a mental term for that object. What matters is that your attention is fixed on something, not whether your attention is fixed on the same thing as someone else's.
Because of this, it is possible that, when current demonstrative links are not present, the rigidified descriptions view and the descriptive ostension view will give the same results as far as when descriptive information successfully allows the learning of a new concept. Even if this is true, there is still a difference between the two views, in that the mechanisms by which these results are achieved are different. However, there may be further, nondescriptive resources available to the ostensive view. In particular, the child may be able to rely on a past ostensive link with the object to overcome incomplete or incorrect descriptive information. Suppose that the child saw a bird in the tree earlier in the day; that fact, when combined with the descriptive information in terms of which she now thinks of the object, may allow her to identify that bird uniquely (e.g., as “that red bird I saw”), even though she is not currently perceiving it, and even though the descriptive information she possesses does not uniquely identify it. However, exploring this possibility further is beyond the scope of the present paper.
In Sabo, D. (ms). Starting from scratch: How experience furnishes the mind, I argue that the ostensive framework can account for the learning of general concepts without appealing to conceptual resources the learner already possesses. I argue there, further, that the ostensive framework provides resources to defend John Locke's thesis that experience is capable of furnishing a human mind with all the concepts it possesses.
For more detail on this point, see Fodor and Pylysyhn (2014).
I would like to thank Jerry Fodor for pressing me to be explicit about the issues discussed in these last four paragraphs.
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Acknowledgments
Thanks to Dorit Bar-On, John Dilworth, Bill Lycan, Ram Neta, Jesse Prinz, John Roberts, and audiences at Auburn University and Occidental College for discussions of prior incarnations of this material, and to Jerry Fodor for very helpful comments on a previous draft of this paper.
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Sabo, D. Where Concepts Come from: Learning Concepts by Description and by Demonstration. Erkenn 79, 531–549 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-013-9522-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-013-9522-8