Innatism and Mystery

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.