Skip to main content

Innatism and Mystery

Noam Chomsky portrait 2017.jpg

Again, I'm looking at Fiona Cowie's book on innatism, past and present.

My last post on this book discussed Descartes in connection with what Cowie calls the "special faculties" hypothesis in innatism, the view that certain features of our mind are modular, so that learning X is an qualitatively different thing from learning Y.

Cowie distinguishes this from what she calls the "mystery" hypothesis in innatism, aka rationalism. Rationalists, like empiricists for that matter, "understand that both experience and our innate endowment play critical roles" in our development, learning, etc. The first issue that divides them, as we have seen, is whether the innate endowment is to be understood in a unitary or in a modular manner.  The second issue that divides them is the idea of mystery, the idea prominent in the writings of the classical rationalists that there is no natural explanation of these special faculties, that they resist empirical investigation.

Descartes' inability to conceive of mind-body interaction is notorious. Obviously, if I (a mind) learn about the physical world by observing it, performing laboratory tests, etc., then there must be mind-body interaction. The bodies that I observe and generalize about must be impinging upon my own body, thus upon my sense, and thus in turn upon ... my mind. But given Cartesian dualism, that is arguably impossible.

Leibniz was explicit about this impossibility. My mind is my "dominant monad" a world apart from all the other monads that may roughly be said to constitute me, and of course worlds apart from all the monads that aren't part of me. There is no real interaction between them, because as Leibniz said, the soul does not have a window.

So how does it end up acting like it has a window? One can only answer by invoking God, and God's mysterious ways.

Much of the book focuses on two 20th and 21st century figures: Jerry Fodor (1935 - 2017) and Noam Chomsky (1928 - ).  Fodor's philosophy revives the impossibility arguments of Descartes and Leibniz: there can be no coherent explanation of human learning, all or almost all ideas must be presumed to be innate.  Chomsky, portrayed above, is more interested in reviving the special faculty argument with regard to language than in stressing the mystery of it, but his arguments too may have a non-naturalist side.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...
9 comments
Read more

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...
17 comments
Read more

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...
4 comments
Read more