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Innate Mind Need Not Be Within

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Abstract

It is a widely accepted thesis in the cognitive sciences and in naturalistic philosophy of mind that the contents of at least some mental representations are innate. A question that has popped up in discussions concerning innate mental representations is this. Are externalist theories of mental content applicable to the content of innate representations? Views on the matter vary and sometimes conflict. To date, there has been no comprehensive assessment of the relationship between content externalism and content innateness. The aim of this paper is to provide such an assessment. I focus on the notions of innateness that are employed in innateness hypotheses within the cognitive sciences and adjacent fields of philosophy, and on causal externalist theories of content. I distinguish between three accounts of what being innate might amount to in innateness hypotheses within the cognitive sciences, and between three types of causal externalism. I explain what the possibility of innate externalistically individuated representations depends upon given all nine combinations. I explain why causal externalism can be true of innate mental representations, given but one of these combinations.

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Notes

  1. Following the tradition, I use capital letters to denote representations.

  2. Pitt also argues that if externalism cannot be true of innate representations, then it cannot be true of any representations. He thus sees well-evidenced empirical nativist hypotheses about representational content as evidence against content externalism tout court.

  3. Existing discussions that have touched upon the relationship between representational nativism and content externalism have also focused on causal externalist theories. In addition, Rupert (2009) discusses the relationship between psychological nativism and extended, embedded, and enactivist accounts of representational states.

  4. My discussion is indifferent to what constitutes these symbols, i.e., the vehicles of representational content.

  5. There is some ambiguity in philosophical and psychological discussions regarding what precisely would have to be possessed in order to possess a representation (see Rey 2014). The discussion at hand is compatible with different ways of disambiguating this.

  6. According to one popular approach, R is acquired psychologically if, in the current psychological sciences, there is no correct theory that can explain how R is acquired (e.g., Samuels 2002). On this epistemic reading, the predicate “is innate” merely marks the explanatory limits of the current psychological science. As such, it would have no direct metaphysical implications. Therefore, in this paper, P-innateness interests us only given that there is some motivated substantive interpretation of “psychological”.

  7. Sometimes psychological acquisition and learning qua hypothesis testing are treated as synonyms and, consequently, being innate and not being learned by hypothesis testing are treated as synonyms. For example, Fodor’s (1975, 1981) paradigm-shaping thesis that most lexical concepts are innate boils down to the thesis that most lexical concepts cannot be acquired through learning qua hypothesis testing.

  8. Susan Carey, a leading figure in nativist debates, vacillates between P-innateness and D-innateness. Sometimes she says that a representation is innate if it is not learned (e.g., Carey (2009), p.11), and in other places, that a representation is innate if it is not acquired by a domain-general learning mechanism (e.g., Carey (2011), p.115, footnote 7).

  9. For instance, conceding to considerations like these, Fodor (2008) is willing to backlau away from his earlier identification of innateness with not being learned (2008, e.g., p. 147).

  10. I use “environmental stimulus” to denote any such feature of an environment that has causally impact on an organism.

  11. What “extrinsic” amounts to in the context of content externalism is a point of disagreement (see e.g., Farkas 2003; Gertler 2012). Here I will assume that the border between what is intrinsic and what is extrinsic coincides with the skin of the organism.

  12. Sustaining mechanisms could also be embedded in an organism’s physical or social environment (e.g., Rupert 2001, p. 29, footnote 7). On different sustaining mechanisms: (Cowie 1999, pp. 132–135; Fodor 2008, pp. 142–143; Margolis 1998, pp. 256–259; Sarnecki 2006).

  13. Sterelny (1989) thinks that these considerations show that Fodor’s view that all concepts are innate is not compatible with his causal externalism about conceptual content. However, so reasoning, Sterelny wrongly assumes that Fodor is committed to AE, the view that the content of a concept is individuated by what causes its acquisition. Fodor does not support AE but, instead, NCE (Fodor 1987, 1990). And according to NCE, what causes an organism to acquire a concept is not what individuates its content. Thus, whether a brute-causal mechanism of concept acquisition is capable of fixing the content of a concept is beside the point regarding whether Fodor’s commitment to externalism is compatible with his commitment to radical concept nativism. Cowie (1999, pp. 116-120) discusses Sterelny’s equivocation between AE and NCE in more detail.

  14. Cowie overlooks this distinction, and thus the distinction between HCE and AE, when she argues that representational nativism is incompatible with all historical theories of content, i.e., theories according to which the content of representations depends upon actual past causal interaction with the environment (Cowie 1999, p. 120).

  15. Usher’s (2001) statistical account of reference and the historical asymmetric dependence theory discussed by Fodor (1990) would also serve as examples.

  16. Indeed, Dretske reserves a different account of content for innate qua unlearned representations.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the Estonian Ministry of Education and Research (Funder ID: https://doi.org/10.13039/501100003510, Projects PRG462 “Philosophical analysis of interdisciplinary research practices”, IUT20-5 “Disagreements: Philosophical Analysis“), and the Estonian Research Competency Council (Funder ID: https://doi.org/10.13039/501100005189, Grant Number: SHVHV16145T (TK145) “Centre of Excellence in Estonia”).

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  1. Department of Philosophy, Institute of Philosophy and Semiotics, University of Tartu, Jakobi 2-323, 51005, Tartu, Estonia

    Riin Kõiv

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Kõiv, R. Innate Mind Need Not Be Within. Acta Anal 36, 101–121 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-020-00441-1

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