Radical concept nativism is the thesis that virtually all lexical concepts are innate. Notoriously endorsed by Jerry Fodor (1975, 1981), radical concept nativism has had few supporters. However, it has proven difficult to say exactly what’s wrong with Fodor’s argument. We show that previous responses are inadequate on a number of grounds. Chief among these is that they typically do not achieve sufficient distance from Fodor’s dialectic, and, as a result, they do not illuminate (...) the central question of how new primitive concepts are acquired. To achieve a fully satisfactory response to Fodor’s argument, one has to juxtapose questions about conceptual content with questions about cognitive development. To this end, we formulate a general schema for thinking about how concepts are acquired and then present a detailed illustration. (shrink)

I argue for an evolutionary solution to Fodor's radical concept nativism puzzle.

This paper programmatically posits, argues for the relevance of, and briefly addresses the question whether innate conceptual repertoires, if admitted as plausible, should matter to transhumanist debates. The latter should turn their attention to analyzing the radically enhanced cognitive capacities with which such future human beings will be endowed. The answers eventually given to this puzzle will inevitably challenge received views on education, especially the kind of education appropriate for such future minds.

Radical Concept Nativism (RCN) is the doctrine that most of our concepts are innate. In this paper I will argue in favour of RCN by developing a speculative account of concept acquisition that has considerable nativist credentials and can be defended against the most familiar anti-nativist objections. The core idea is that we have a whole battery of hard-wired dispositions that determine how we group together objects with which we interact. In having these dispositions we are (...) effectively committed to an implicit conceptual scheme and acquiring concepts is a matter of labelling the elements of that scheme. (shrink)

In his recent book, Concepts: Where Cognitive Science Went Wrong, Jerry Fodor retracts the radical concept-nativism he once defended. Yet that postion stood, virtually unchallenged, for more than twenty years. This neglect is puzzling, as Fodor's arguments against concepts being learnable from experience remain unanswered, and nativism has historically been taken very seriously as a response to empiricism's perceived shortcomings. In this paper, I urge that Fodorean nativism should indeed be rejected. I argue, however, that (...) its deficiencies are not so obvious that they can simply be taken for granted. Fodor can counter extant objections by stressing two distinctions: between historicist and counterfactual semantic theories and between explaining reference and explaining concept-acquisition. But, I argue, this victory is pyrrhic. Reformulated as objections to his account qua theory of concept-acquisition, and not qua theory of reference, analogous difficulties are fatal to the Fodorean position. (shrink)

Quinian bootstrapping is Susan Carey's solution to Fodor’s paradox of concept learning. Carey claims that contrary to Fodor’s view, not all learning amounts to hypothesis testing, and that there are ways in which even primitive concepts can be learned. Recently Georges Rey has argued that Carey’s attempt to refute radical concept nativism is unsuccessful. First it cannot explain how the expressive power of mental representational systems could increase due to learning. Second, both Fodorian circularity charges and (...) Goodmanian problems of indeterminacy apply to Carey’s examples of Quinian bootstrapping. I argue that Carey’s examples of bootstrapping can be amended to escape Fodorian and Goodmanian objections. I suggest some ways to improve on our models of concept learning to this end. I also argue that skill learning is the way for mental representational systems to increase their own expressive power, that is, to enrich their conceptual repertoire beyond what compositionality alone affords. (shrink)

BBS Commentary on: Susan Carey: The Origin of Concepts. -/- Carey’s book describes many cases where children develop new concepts with expressive power that could not be constructed out of their input. How does she side-step Fodor’s paradox of radical concept nativism? I suggest it is by rejecting the tacit assumption that psychology can only explain concept acquisition when it occurs by rational inference or other transitions that are explicable-by-content.

This thesis aims to develop a psychologically plausible account of concepts by integrating key insights from philosophy (on the metaphysical basis for concept possession) and psychology (on the mechanisms underlying concept acquisition). I adopt an approach known as informational atomism, developed by Jerry Fodor. Informational atomism is the conjunction of two theses: (i) informational semantics, according to which conceptual content is constituted exhaustively by nomological mind–world relations; and (ii) conceptual atomism, according to which (lexical) concepts have no internal (...) structure. I argue that informational semantics needs to be supplemented by allowing content-constitutive rules of inference (“meaning postulates”). This is because the content of one important class of concepts, the logical terms, is not plausibly informational. And since, it is argued, no principled distinction can be drawn between logical concepts and the rest, the problem that this raises is a general one. An immediate difficulty is that Quine’s classic arguments against the analytic/synthetic distinction suggest that there can be no principled basis for distinguishing content-constitutive rules from the rest. I show that this concern can be overcome by taking a psychological approach: there is a fact of the matter as to whether or not a particular inference is governed by a mentally-represented inference rule, albeit one that analytic philosophy does not have the resources to determine. I then consider the implications of this approach for concept acquisition. One mechanism underlying concept acquisition is the development of perceptual detectors for the objects that we encounter. I investigate how this might work, by drawing on recent ideas in ethology on ‘learning instincts’, and recent insights into the neurological basis for perceptual learning. What emerges is a view of concept acquisition as involving a complex interplay between innate constraints and environmental input. This supports Fodor’s recent move away from radical concept nativism: concept acquisition requires innate mechanisms, but does not require that concepts themselves be innate. (shrink)

Fodor has argued that, because concept acquisition relies on the use of concepts already possessed by the learner, all concepts that cannot be definitionally reduced are innate. Since very few reductive definitions are available, it appears that most concepts are innate. After noting the reasons why we find such radical concept nativism implausible, I explicate Fodor's argument, showing that anyone who is committed to mentalistic explanation should take it seriously. Three attempts at avoiding the conclusion are (...) examined and found to be unsuccessful. I then present an alternative way around Fodor's nativism; I maintain that concepts at a given level of explanation can be semantically primitive, yet at least partially acquired if some of the conditions at a lower level of explanation that are responsible for the concept's presence are themselves acquired. (shrink)

The human mind is capable of entertaining an astounding range of thoughts. These thoughts are composed of concepts or ideas, which are the building blocks of thoughts. This book is about where all of these concepts come from and the psychological structures that ultimately account for their acquisition. We argue that the debate over the origins of concepts, known as the rationalism-empiricism debate, has been widely misunderstood—not just by its critics but also by researchers who have been active participants in (...) the debate. Part I fundamentally rethinks the foundations of the debate. Part II defends a rationalist view of the origins of concepts according to which many concepts across many conceptual domains are either innate or acquired via rationalist learning mechanisms. Our case is built around seven distinct arguments, which together form a large-scale inference to the best explanation argument for our account. Part III then defends this account against the most important empiricist objections and alternatives. Finally, Part IV argues against an extreme but highly influential rationalist view—Jerry Fodor’s infamous view that it is impossible to learn new concepts and his related radical concept nativism, which holds that essentially all lexical concepts are innate. Throughout the book, our discussion blends philosophical and theoretical reflection with consideration of a broad range of empirical work drawn from many different disciplines studying the mind, providing a thorough update to the rationalism-empiricism debate in philosophy and cognitive science and a major new rationalist account of the origins of concepts. [An open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence]. (shrink)

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 a 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. (shrink)

The acquisition of concepts has proven especially difficult for philosophers and psychologists to explain. In this paper, I examine Jerry Fodor’s most recent attempt to explain the acquisition of concepts relative to experiences of their referents. In reevaluating his earlier position, Fodor attempts to co-opt informational semantics into an account of concept acquisition that avoids the radical nativism of his earlier views. I argue that Fodor’s attempts ultimately fail to be persuasive. He must either accept his earlier (...) nativism or adopt a rational causal model of concept acquisition. His animus towards the latter dictates, in my view, a return to the nativism with which he began. (shrink)

I critically explore various forms of the language of thought (LOT) hypothesis. Many considerations, including the complexity of representational content and the systematicity of language understanding, support the view that some, but not all, of our mental representations occur in a language. I examine several arguments concerning sententialism and the propositional attitudes, Fodor's arguments concerning infant and animal thought, and Fodor's argument for radical concept nativism and show that none of these considerations require us to postulate a (...) LOT that is innate or otherwise distinct from spoken languages. Instead, I suggest that we maintain the more conservative hypothesis, supported by introspection, that some of our thoughts occur in the languages that we speak. (shrink)

One of the most important recent developments in the study of concepts has been the resurgence of interest in nativist accounts of the human conceptual system. However, many theorists suppose that a key feature of neural organization—the brain’s plasticity—undermines the nativist approach to concept acquisition. We argue that, on the contrary, not only does the brain’s plasticity fail to undermine concept nativism, but a detailed examination of the neurological evidence actually provides powerful support for concept (...) class='Hi'>nativism. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that the most prominent and familiar features of Wittgenstein’s rule following considerations generate a powerful argument for the thesis that most of our concepts are innate, an argument that echoes a Chomskyan poverty of the stimulus argument. This argument has a significance over and above what it tells us about Wittgenstein’s implicit commitments. For, it puts considerable pressure on widely held contemporary views of concept learning, such as the view that we learn concepts by (...) constructing prototypes. This should lead us to abandon our general default hostility to concept nativism and be much more sceptical of claims made on behalf of learning theories. (shrink)

The innate knowledge problem is a classical problem in philosophy, which has been known since the classical antiquity. Plato in his dialogues Meno and Phaedo formulated the doctrine of innate ideas and proposed an early version of the poverty of the stimulus argument, which is the most frequently used argument in innate knowledge debates. In the history of philosophy there was also an opposite view. This approach is often associated with J. Locke’s philosophy. Locke thought that all our knowledge about (...) the world is a product of the universal learning mechanisms whose functioning is based on perception. The question about the presence of innate ideas in the human mind still remains relevant. New findings in cognitive science and neurosciences and also some recent arguments from philosophers contribute to the contemporary discussion between the spokesmen of the rival approaches to this problem. The paper presents the investigation of one of the approaches to solving the problem of innate concepts, which is called a “concept nativism.” It highlights the outstanding characteristics of the concept nativism: (a) domain specificity position, (b) belief that domain-specific mechanisms of learning are innate and (c) belief that at least some concepts are innate. The article also proposes an analysis of notions “innateness” and “idea” which is important for understanding nativists’ approach to innate ideas theory. And finally, it describes the most popular nativists’ arguments: (a) references to empirical studies using the preferential looking technique, (b) the poverty of the stimulus argument and (c) the argument from animals. (shrink)

A radical concept of power identifies social processes which (whether as ?ideology?, ?false consciousness?, or ?the spectacle') influence people's actions by moulding their beliefs or desires. However, seeing people as deluded is to risk treating them as less than fully autonomous beings. Despite his libertarian intentions, Lukes fails to guard against this paternalistic implication. His view still implies that it is the social critic who is in the best position to identify the real interests of an oppressed group. (...) Here it is argued that power should be conceived as an intrusion on the ?formative practices? of people. It is possible to identify power as an unwanted influence on the processes in which people ?form and discover? interests, while maintaining that interests can only be self?ascribed. This solution requires a concept of formation as both irreducibly social and yet potentially free. Neither Foucault nor Habermas can provide such a solution, despite some valuable insights. In the end, we must look at the influences of power on formative practices which are actual rather than idealized, productive rather than reflective, and which involve the whole person rather than merely the intellect. (shrink)

Filial piety is a foundational concept in the thought of Confucius. Rooted in religious rituals from the Western Zhou Dynasty, filial piety in the Analects functions primarily a form of ritual, but based as much in the emotions of the performer as the formal behavior itself, especially in mourning rituals. This ritual foundation is critical for understanding not only the general form of filial piety in the text, but also famous problematic passages in which Confucius favors concealing the misdeeds (...) of one's father and promotes a relatively weak stance on remonstration. However, it is also important to understand these passages in a wider textual context, which provides a clearer picture of both the general significance of filial piety in early Chinese thought and the diversity within the early Confucian tradition. (shrink)

Kant describes logic as “the science that exhaustively presents and strictly proves nothing but the formal rules of all thinking”. (Bviii-ix) But what is the source of our cognition of such rules (“logical cognition” for short)? He makes no concerted effort to address this question. It will nonetheless become clear that the question is a philosophically significant one for him, to which he can see three possible answers: those representations are innate, derived from experience, or originally acquired a priori. Although (...) he gives no explicit argument for the third answer, he seems committed to it—especially given his views on the source of pure concepts of the understanding and on the nature of logic. It takes careful preparatory work to gather all the essential materials for motivating and reconstructing Kant’s “original acquisition” account of logical cognition. I shall proceed in two sections. In section 1, I analyze Kant’s argument that pure concepts of the understanding (or intellectual concepts)—as one kind of pure cognition—must be acquired originally and a priori. My analysis partly concerns his varied attitudes toward Crusius’s and Leibniz’s versions of the nativist account of such concepts. I give special attention to how Kant characterizes the nativist account and his own “original acquisition” account in terms of “preformation” and “epigenesis”. My goal is, firstly, to tease out the sense in which Kant grants that there must be an innate ground (or preformation) for the derivation of pure concepts and, secondly, to introduce—and pave the way for answering—the question about the source of logical cognition. In section 2, in light of Kant’s reference to Locke and Leibniz as the greatest reformers of philosophy (including logic) in their times (Log, AA 9: 32), I examine the Lockean and Leibnizian approaches to logic, respectively. Both approaches are “physiological” by Kant’s standard and are directly opposed to his own strictly critical method. I explain how this methodological move shapes Kant’s view that representations of logical rules must be originally acquired a priori. This acquisition involves a kind of radical epigenesis of pure reason: unlike the acquisition of pure concepts, it presupposes no further innate ground (or preformation). This view will have important consequences for issues such as the ground of the normativity of logical rules and the boundaries of their rightful use. (shrink)

The analysis of cognitive-ontological and especially ethical concepts in Nietzscheʼs philosophy shows deprivation as an important component that compromises their status. The emptiness, in the form of purity, inevitably appears during the decomposition of Nietzsche’s thought. Under the influence of perspectivism, epistemology, along with the question of truth, have undergone radical deconstruction. The results significantly affect the existence of morality, values and the notion of good in general. Deprivation appears in values, which leads to pessimism. Pessimistic values move away (...) from the intensity of life instinct. As a reflection of life, man strives and destroys the aspirations for life. The whole reality, on the other hand, is in opposition and thus, necessarily, in dialectic and conflict. Nietzsche, however, does not strive for reconciliation opposites, but requires their enduring, which is, at the same time, overcoming. Conflict between pessimistic and life valuesinevitably arises. Pessimism precedes nihilism, which alternates the notion of truth, meaning, and foundation. In the concluding analysis, it becomes clear how the value creator is placed in relation to the concept of eternal return and overcoming nihilism. Emptiness and lack of sense are replaced by a dynamic and conflicting conception of life, i.e. existence, where the dynamics of life must not be understood in an organic or other bio-morphological sense, but in relation to the individual and his creative potential only in the form of change and reestablishment of reality. This, in turn, means that, ultimately, the focus is on the subject, man as will and his existential acts. (shrink)

A theory of conceptual development must provide an account of the innate representational repertoire, must characterize how these initial representations differ from the adult state, and must provide an account of the processes that transform the initial into mature representations. In Carey, 2009 (The Origin of Concepts), I defend three theses: 1) the initial state includes rich conceptual representations, 2) nonetheless, there are radical discontinuities between early and later developing conceptual systems, 3) Quinean bootstrapping is one learning mechanism that (...) underlies the creation of new representational resources, enabling such discontinuity. I also claim that the theory of conceptual development developed in The Origin of Concepts addresses two of Fodor's challenges to cognitive science; namely, to show how learning could possibly lead to an increase in expressive power and to defeat Mad Dog Nativism, the thesis that all concepts lexicalized as mono-morphemic words are innate. A recent article by Georges Rey (Mind & Language, 29.2, 2014) argues that my responses to Fodor's challenges fail, because, he says, I fail to distinguish concept possession from manifestation and I do not confront Goodman's new riddle of induction. My response is to show that, and how, new primitives in a language of thought can be learned, that there are easy routes and hard ones to doing so, and that characterizing the learning mechanisms involved is the key to understanding both concept possession and constraints on induction. (shrink)

This article tried to show the Tolerance like virtue, i.e. ability in sense of specific habit that enables one person to connect with other persons in right relationship. However, before tolerance was shown like virtue, it was first explained concept of virtue in the sense of Aristotle, especially in the sight of Aristotle friendship virtue. This explanation led to conclusion that virtue is inner state which makes possible for a person to harmonize his native abilities and emotions. This is (...) the reason why virtues are assumptions for person’s right action towards himself and also towards other people. Thereby, tolerance will be shown as virtue that helps people to go beyond vices such as prejudice, hostile attitude and hate toward other people. Exactly these vices represent danger not only for individuals, but also for the whole society, because they endanger democracy and human rights, and moreover, they can block them. Overcoming these vices through the virtues of dialog and tolerance enables the creation of basis for democracy and human rights overall. In the end of article it was elaborated relation between law and moral – moral in the sense of virtue – and it was concluded that in the society they have to supplement, and not exclude each other. (shrink)

Many see the mithnagdim as total rationalists. Therefore it has been assumed that R. Hayyim of Volozhin’s approach to Torah study was the same. Although rationalism may be a correct characterization of the method he used in talmudic study, it does not capture how R. Hayyim understood the essence of Torah study. Some have described Nefesh ha-Hayyim as demystifying Kabbalah. I agree that R. Hayyim opposes ecstatic Kabbalah. However, already in 1972 Norman Lamm noticed that R. Hayyim saw Torah study (...) as a form of clinging to God. In my article, I go further and demonstrate how torah lishmah for R. Hayyim is a radical idea that includes a legitimate path to unio mystica, and even a way to divine inspiration. (shrink)

Chapter 9 analyzes the political discourse and performance of the Greek populist radical left party SYRIZA in government since 2015. To this purpose, it examines its leader Alexis Tsipras’ discursive construction of antagonisms, his articulation of social demands and political style, as well as SYRIZA’s policies while in government. The analysis shows that in office Tsipras continued to use people-centred populist appeals to create and maintain a political antagonism between the Greek people on the one hand and the traditional (...) political establishment and neoliberalism on the other, while at the same time the government enacted the austerity measures prescribed by the EU, ECB, and IMF “troika” Memorandum that SYRIZA had rejected while in opposition. The chapter also examines how SYRIZA set up an alliance with the radical right party ANEL based on a shared national-popular antagonism against the Memorandum and how this alliance unravelled regarding the issue of Macedonia that evidenced two different conceptions of “the people”: a nationalist-nativist one by ANEL and an inclusionary and heterogeneous one by SYRIZA. (shrink)

In the art of radical Informel, we encounter works with emphasised non-pictoriality, non-semantics and non-referentiality, as well as a tendency towards entropy, layering and the disintegration of form through destructive processes such as deformation, perforation, incision, scratching, the accumulation of structures and masses, fragmentation, stripping and burning. In this paper, theoretical models of interpretation for the art of radical Informel are pointed out through the concepts of the aesthetics of ugliness, i.e. brutal aesthetics, such as (1) deformation, (2) (...) disfiguration, (3) formlessness and (4) entropy – using the example of the informal works of Croatian authors Ivo Gattin, Eugen Feller and Marijan Jevšovar, which result from their attitude towards art and painting. The artists have deliberately created paintings that are not “beautiful” by opposing the classical values of art and beauty through oppositional and negative approaches, nihilism, destruction, deformation and the abolition of the surface of the painting as forms of anti-aesthetics. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 25.2 (2001) 251-277 [Access article in PDF] Hans Christian Andersen's Fish Out of Water Nancy Easterlin I Now that Darwinian literary criticism is on the horizon, the natural human tendency to codify manifests itself in calls to summarize succinctly what such an approach entails. Though clarity is always to be praised, bioevolutionary critics need to guard against the reductiveness that has beleaguered attempts at a scientifically (...) grounded literary criticism since the early twentieth century; most especially, we should think twice about limiting the interpretation of complex and varied works to selected sociobiological themes divorced from other biocultural considerations. David Sloan Wilson makes much the same point to students of evolution when he quotes Celia Heyes in a recent review of Evolutionary Psychology, David Buss's new textbook: "When I first encountered the term 'evolutionary psychology,' I thought it referred to the study of how mind and behavior evolved. But I was mistaken. In current usage, 'evolutionary psychology' refers exclusively to research on human mentality and behavior, motivated by a very specific, nativist-adaptationist interpretation of how evolution operates." 1If, as D. S. Wilson suggests, evolutionary psychology thus narrowly defined threatens to produce a limited understanding of human mind and behavior and, in the process, fragment the discipline of psychology further, how much less potentially productive is such an approach for those of us whose central objects of study, cultural artifacts, are as the products of behavior even further removed from the study of mind? Leda Cosmides and John Tooby are most explicit about the falsity of assuming that psychological adaptations determine behavior. This being so, it seems impossible that such adaptations could determine the [End Page 251] meaning of artworks, which are themselves the products of complex human behaviors. As I hope this discussion of Hans Christian Andersen's "Little Mermaid" will demonstrate, an approach to aesthetics strictly following the lead of evolutionary psychology as currently defined, while supplying valuable general insights about the motives for artistic behaviors and the cognitive processes engaged in them, cannot by itself inform us about the meaning of individual artworks. This is a crucial issue, since interpretation is the fundamental pursuit of scholars in fields like mine, literary studies.Putting the question of interpretive frutifulness aside for the moment, it can be said unequivocally that criticism that fails to be sensitive to mutation and change is not properly Darwinian. Evolutionary psychology and sociobiology themselves maintain that our psychic architecture is comprised of domain-specific competences; the result, as E. O. Wilson points out, is that the human mind is not designed to understand reality but is instead an instrument for survival and reproduction. 2 "Natural selection," says Michael Ruse, "works in a gerry-building fashion, making do with what it has at hand." 3 Though our various evolved competences cannot be radically dissonant if the organism is to survive, neither are they logically integrated, neatly interlocking "modules." Under some environmental conditions, specific adaptations or epigenetic rules are not likely to produce a competitive advantage while other very different adaptations certainly will, and hence the flexibility of the organism ensures its survival. If, for instance, I place my coffee mug down on my desk and at that exact moment two cars collide on the street outside, familiarity with my environment militates against invocation of the causal rule, even though such a rule is incontrovertibly part of our adapted psychology. 4 Knowing, then, that we share an evolved psychic architecture whose patient excavation, so to speak, will result in a progressively better defined concept of human nature, and knowing too that the behavior of human beings as writers as well as other kinds of agents varies under divergent environmental conditions, Darwinian criticism should be sensitive to the complex relationship between individual adaptations, the total array of adaptations, subjective cognitive processes, and environmental circumstances that give literary works enduring significance. In contemplating literary meaning, as with aesthetics, we should be mindful that epigenesis is not simply the instantiation of epigenetic rules. 5 Ideally, literary interpretation should be informed by the evolution of mind, behavior, and... (shrink)

Number Nativism is the view that humans innately represent precise natural numbers. Despite a long and venerable history, it is often considered hopelessly out of touch with the empirical record. I argue that this is a mistake. After clarifying Number Nativism and distancing it from related conjectures, I distinguish three arguments which have been seen to refute the view. I argue that, while popular, two of these arguments miss the mark, and fail to place pressure on Number (...) class='Hi'>Nativism. Meanwhile, a third argument is best construed as a challenge: rather than refuting Number Nativism, it challenges its proponents to provide positive evidence for their thesis and show that this can be squared with apparent counterevidence. In response, I introduce psycholinguistic work on The Tolerance Principle (not yet considered in this context), propose that it is hard to make sense of without positing precise and innate representations of natural numbers, and argue that there is no obvious reason why these innate representations couldn’t serve as a basis for mature numeric conception. (shrink)

This paper asks whether or not normative political philosophy can face the challenge of the critique of the political. This question is addressed to theories of justice in general, but this paper considers Habermas' position in particular. It advances the thesis that the main theoretical and political problem of theories of justice is that they have not really taken the abolitionist dimension of the concept of justice into account. As a consequence, they run the risk of reproducing in themselves (...) the political abstraction that they should criticise. (shrink)

The article explores examples of theoretical endeavor to think the political in “accordance with the Real” that can be found in the works of François Laruelle, Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek. The task this article sets for itself is to establish an insight into – or rather, arrive to a certain vision and knowledge of – the possibilities of interrogating the modes of participation of the Real in the production of a Political Truth. I will claim the latter is not (...) the product of Discourse exclusively, but of the inter-action between the Discursive and the Real. In the deployment of this argument I resort to the epistemic posture of thought proposed by François Laruelle’s non-philosophy as "thinking in correlation with the Real." It is a stance of theorizing which is unilateral, non-thetic and does not attempt to reflect or mirror the Real. It merely correlates with it by way of acknowledging it to be the decisive instance of legitimization of the produced truth. (shrink)

One 1120 pages volume, with 4000 entries covering - Western philosophy: authors, schools, concepts and terminology; - religions, cultural anthropology, eastern philosophies; - Psychology and psychoanalysis; - linguistics and semiotics; - sociology and political theory.

While Spelke provides powerful support for concept nativism, her focus on understanding concept nativism through six innate core knowledge systems is too confining. There is also no reason to suppose that thecurse of a compositional mindconstitutes a principled reason for positing less innate structure in explaining the origins of concepts. Any solution to such problems must take into account poverty of the stimulus considerations, which argue for postulating more innate structure, not less.

Nativism as a theory that interprets certain abilities and ideas as innate [The contexts we will consider prefer to speak precisely of innateness in the sense of New European philosophical discussions and avoid the notion of “a priori”/“a posteriori”, respectively, and we will stick to this terminological pair.], is considered by some contemporary philosophers as an echo of outdated philosophical approaches. Critics for the most part reproach it for being unscientific and metaphysical. In one of its most extreme forms, (...) nativism is accused of mysticism and lack of evidence. At the same time, a number of very authoritative thinkers openly call themselves nativists and defend this trend in philosophy, cognitive sciences, linguistics and other fields of knowledge (Chomsky, McGinn, Lawrence and Margolis). The main aim of this paper is to analyse the contemporary polemic between empiricists and nativists. It will be shown that the main polemical knot around which the debate unfolds can be easily untied through a transcendentalist interpretation of nativism. In particular, an appeal to phenomenology can help to notice the importance of the idea of the non-essentiality of the source of experience to experience. Phenomenology, which preserves the idea of this non-essentiality, has in mind a radical break with the ontology of natural objects, and will not, in particular, deduce innate knowledge from evolutionary mechanisms, nor will it place it within the biological structure of organisms (e.g., the brain or the neural processes in it). It remains to be shown that most of the positions and refutations of modern nativism are based on a misunderstanding of the classical “overcoming” of the dispute between empiricism and rationalism by transcendentalism and transcendental phenomenology, as well as the requirement of transcendentalism and transcendental phenomenology not to place the source of experience in the same world in which we locate experience itself. The study is to consider what the modern nativist view must look like in its transcendentalist interpretation in order to be a worthy opponent to modern empiricism. (shrink)

This paper examines the response offered by Robert Gordon to the question how an interpreter can reach the correct content of others'psychological states. It exposes the main problems raised by Gordon's proposal, and provides a tentative solution that emphasizes the structuring role of counterfactual reasoning in embedding simulations and deriving facts that are holding across them.

Margaret Jacob and Jonathan Israel have offered somewhat different accounts of what they call the ‘Radical Enlightenment’, that is those elements of enlightenment thought which resulted in the radical political upheavals of the late eighteenth century and the rise of democratic republicanism. Jonathan Israel, in particular, insists that the radical enlightenment was radical both in its secular rejection of all providentialist and teleological metaphysics, as well as radical in its democratic tendencies. This paper looks at (...) the way in which Catharine Macaulay’s very influential defence of the equal rights of men, during the lead up to the American and French revolutions, poses problems for Israel’s account of the radical enlightenment and argues that the religious foundation of her political radicalism was characteristic of many of her contemporaries and fits in better with Jacob’s more ecumenical account of the radical enlightenment than with Israel’s purely secular characterisation. (shrink)

Either genetically specified modular cognitive architecture for syntactic processing does not exist (neuroconstructivism), or there is a module but its development is so abnormal in Williams syndrome (WS) that no conclusion can be drawn about its normal architecture (moderate nativism). Radical nativism, which holds that WS is a case of intact syntax, is untenable. Specific Language Impairment and WS create a dilemma that radical nativism cannot accommodate.

The study of biological invasions raises troubling scientific, political and moral issues that merit discussion and debate on a broad scale. Nativist trends in Conservation Biology have made environmentalists biased against alien species. This bias is scientifically questionable, and may have roots in xenophobic and racist attitudes. Rethinking conservationists' conceptions of biological invasion is essential to the development of a progressive environmental science, politics, and philosophy.

In this paper, I develop a comparison between the philosophies of Husserl and James in relation to their concepts of experience. Whereas various authors have acknowledged the affinity between James’ early psychology and Husserl’s phenomenology, the late development of James’ philosophy is often considered in opposition to Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology. This is because James’ radical empiricism achieves a non-dual dimension of experience that precedes the functional division into subject and object, thus contrasting with the phenomenological analysis of the dual (...) structure of intentionality. However, I argue that the later “genetic” development of phenomenology converges with some central aspects of James’ radical empiricism. This is because genetic phenomenology leads us to conceive of the flow of primal impressions as a fundamental dimension of experience that precedes the subject-object duality and is at the base of the process of co-constitution of the subject and the object in reciprocal dependence. At the same time, Husserl conceives of the impressional core of experience as structured by formal conditions that depend on the concrete constitution of an embodied subject. For this reason, I argue that Husserl’s genetic phenomenology can complement James’ radical empiricism, thus leading to the development of the doctrine of pure experience as a form of empirical and not metaphysical realism. (shrink)

Prinz (Perceptual the Mind: Concepts and Their Perceptual Basis, MIT Press, 2002) presents a new species of concept empiricism, under which concepts are off-line long-term memory networks of representations that are ‘copies’ of perceptual representations – proxytypes. An apparent obstacle to any such empiricism is the prevailing nativism of generative linguistics. The paper critically assesses Prinz’s attempt to overcome this obstacle. The paper argues that, prima facie, proxytypes are as incapable of accounting for the structure of the linguistic (...) mind as are the more traditional species of empiricism. This position is then confirmed by looking in detail at two suggestions (one derived from recent connectionist research) from Prinz of how certain aspects of syntactic structure might be accommodated by the proxytype theory. It is shown that the suggestions fail to come to terms with both the data and theory of contemporary linguistics. (shrink)

There must be innate conceptual machinery, but perhaps not as much as Carey proposes. A single mechanism of Perceptual Meaning Analysis that simplifies spatiotemporal information into a small number of conceptual primitives may suffice. This approach avoids the complexities and ambiguities of interactions between separate dedicated analyzers and central concepts that Carey posits, giving learning a somewhat larger role in early concept formation.

While we realize that the empiricist interpretation of nativism may in fact be able to explain some of the central cases of both belief and concept acquisition, arguments from the poverty of the stimulus still assert how some acquisitions may not be obtained through merely making use of the general-purpose learning mechanisms brought on by empiricist thinking, and that we have to realize that the mind should contain other task-specific faculties for learning. This chapter looks into another form (...) of argument, what the author refers to as the “impossibility arguments,” to further establish the falsity of the empiricist approach. Such arguments rely greatly on the notion of self-undermining or disjointed mind–world interactions that would only support the notion of how everything in our minds is indeed innate. (shrink)

This powerfully iconoclastic book reconsiders the influential nativist position toward the mind. Nativists assert that some concepts, beliefs, or capacities are innate or inborn: "native" to the mind rather than acquired. Fiona Cowie argues that this view is mistaken, demonstrating that nativism is an unstable amalgam of two quite different--and probably inconsistent--theses about the mind. Unlike empiricists, who postulate domain-neutral learning strategies, nativists insist that some learning tasks require special kinds of skills, and that these skills are hard-wired into (...) our brains at birth. This "faculties hypothesis" finds its modern expression in the views of Noam Chomsky. Cowie, marshaling recent empirical evidence from developmental psychology, psycholinguistics, computer science, and linguistics, provides a crisp and timely critique of Chomsky's nativism and defends in its place a moderately nativist approach to language acquisition. Also in contrast to empiricists, who view the mind as simply another natural phenomenon susceptible of scientific explanation, nativists suspect that the mental is inelectably mysterious. Cowie addresses this second strand in nativist thought, taking on the view articulated by Jerry Fodor and other nativists that learning, particularly concept acquisition, is a fundamentally inexplicable process. Cowie challenges this explanatory pessimism, and argues convincingly that concept acquisition is psychologically explicable. What's Within? is a clear and provocative achievement in the study of the human mind. (shrink)

This chapter sketches the outlines of what a reasonable form of nativism might look like. The neuroconstructivists' challenge indicates that some misunderstanding continues to exist among certain self-titled nonnativists over what it is that practicing nativists actually claim, together with a mistaken belief that current neurodevelopmental data is not or cannot be compatible with the nativist program. Both these issues are addressed by first providing further explication of the claims of practicing nativists, and then showing how these claims provide (...) the basis for a reasonable nativism that is fully cognizant of and consistent with empirical data from all the developmental sciences, neuroconstructivism included. (shrink)

It can be observed that the doctrine of innate ideas may be as old as philosophy itself, as it may be one of the most basic conceptions. The notion that the character of our mental faculties is determined internally or innately is evident in works as early as that of Plato, which was revived between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by significant rationalist philosophers, and which underwent further examination in the twentieth century by mentalists such as Jerry Fodor and Noam (...) Chomsky. There is, however, no definite statement about what exactly nativism is all about. While some may believe that what is in our minds was already innate, such a hypothesis is enough to raise several different problems, as such innateness may be of various types of cognitive equipment: ideas, beliefs and faculties. This chapter attempts to clarify certain misconceptions about the notion of nativism. (shrink)