Abstract
Fodor’s radical concept nativism flowed from his view that hypothesis testing is the only route to concept acquisition. Many have successfully objected to the overly-narrow restriction to learning by hypothesis testing. Existing representations can be connected to a new representational vehicle so as to constitute a sustaining mechanism for the new representation, without the new representation thereby being constituted by or structured out of the old. This paper argues that there is also a deeper objection. Connectionism shows that a more fundamental assumption underpinning the debate can also be rejected: the assumption that the development of a new representation must be explained in content-involving terms if innateness is to be avoided.
Fodor has argued that connectionism offers no new resources to explain concept acquisition: unless it is merely an uninteresting claim about neural implementation, connectionism’s defining commitment to distributed representations reduces to the claim that some representations are structured out of others (which is the old, problematic research programme). Examination of examples of representational development in connectionist networks shows, however, that some such models explain the development of new representational capacities in non-representational terms. They illustrate the possibility of representational development that is not explicable-by-content. Connectionist representations can be distributed in an important sense, which is incompatible with the assumption of explanation-by-content: they can be distributed over non-representational resources that account for their development. Rejecting the assumption of explanation-by-content thereby opens up a more radical way of rejecting Fodor’s argument for radical concept nativism.
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Notes
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This objection to both the versions of connectionism offered here has been raised by Fodor in many places, e.g. in Fodor and Pylyshyn (1988) and Fodor and McLaughlin (1990). The formulation explicitly in terms of a dilemma is found in Fodor (2004), a draft paper posted on the New York University website.
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Fodor and Pylyshyn (1988), pp. 19 & 64–68.
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Fodor and Pylyshyn (1988), pp. 19–21.
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There are many examples in which learning in connectionist systems creates attractors or clusters in state space (Churchland and Sejnowski 1992; Rupert 1998, 2001; Tiffany 1999). If there are reasons to see those attractors as being representations, then this is a process of turning information into representation.
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‘I assume that intentional content reduces (in some way or other, but, please, don’t ask me how) to information; this is, I suppose, the most deniable thesis of my bundle.’ (Fodor 1994, p. 4). ‘If you want an externalist metaphysics of the content of innate concepts that’s not just bona fide but true, I’m afraid there isn’t one “yet”.’ Fodor (2001), p. 137.
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The concept of innateness is notoriously problematic (Mameli 2008). Fodor’s central concern is whether concepts are learnt (Fodor 1975, 1991, 1998, 2008; Cowie 1999; Samuels 2002), so here I will take it that innate representations are not learnt or otherwise acquired by a psychological process and that they admit of a poverty of the stimulus argument (Shea 2012a, b).
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Fodor has softened slightly in more recent work. First he allowed that concepts themselves may not be innate – what is innate is, for each concept, a domain-specific disposition, specific to each such concept, to acquire that concept (Fodor 1998). But this still leaves Fodor postulating an innate domain-specific ability to develop DOORKNOB as a result of interaction with doorknobs. He has since added that the innate endowment might determine the geometry of neural attractor landscapes that realise concepts (Fodor 2008, p. 164). The worry remains that far too much is being taken to be innate. For simplicity, this paper considers only Fodor’s earlier innateness claim.
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Fodor has more recently accepted that these accounts of concept learning do not involve hypothesis testing (Fodor 2008, pp. 163–167), and even that there is a ‘jump’ from the existing representations that are involved in creating the prototype: ‘we jump, by some or other “automatic” process, from our stereotypes to our concepts’ (2008, p. 164). However, he does not draw the moral that there are psychological acquisition processes that are not explicable-by-content. He argues that the way this process works is due to innate constraints (2008, p. 164).
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Carey also observes that the child makes a ‘leap’ when drawing a parallel between the operation of adding one object in the object file system and the process of counting on to the next item in the (initially uninterpreted) sequence of counting words. Shea (2011) argued that this is the step at which Fodor’s argument is circumvented, and that this step is not explicable as a rational transition from the content of pre-existing representational resources.
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Since it is not clear how the relevant counterfactuals are to be assessed, it is hard to reach definitive conclusions about how the asymmetric dependence theory will apply to specific cases.
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Fodor says that interaction with doorknobs is needed to trigger the DOORKNOB concept because being a doorknob is a response-dependent property Fodor (1998). Whether or not that response works for DOORKNOB, it is implausible that being John (a particular person) is a response-dependent property.
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Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank the follow for generous comments: David Braddon-Mitchell, Steve Butterfill, Nick Chater, Martin Davies, Jerry Fodor, Paul Griffiths, Peter Godfrey-Smith, Richard Holton, Matteo Mameli, David Papineau, Gualtiero Piccinini, Kim Plunkett, Paul Smolensky, Mark Sprevak, Scott Sturgeon; the referees and audiences in Melbourne, Oxford and Sydney.
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Shea, N. (2016). Representational Development Need Not Be Explicable-By-Content. In: Müller, V.C. (eds) Fundamental Issues of Artificial Intelligence. Synthese Library, vol 376. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26485-1_14
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