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Innatism and Fodor

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In discussing Jerry Fodor, Fiona Cowie uses the term "innatism" in a sense that doesn't seem to imply anything about the modularity of special faculties, although in the earlier section she had concluded that this was what the CLASSICAL controversy over innatism was really about. And this is so despite the fact that the title of Fodor's 1983 book was in fact THE MODULARITY OF MIND.

In discussing Fodor, Cowie uses innate simply to mean the opposite of learned. Whatever we mean when we say we have learned a concept, we simply negate that which we mean when we claim that it is innate.

She explains that, in this sense, Fodor believed that most concepts are innate. A very few concepts are compound, and THEY must logically be learned. We must know how to use the word "man" and the word "unmarried" properly, and then we may learn to combine those meanings into that of a new word, "bachelor." But at some point (Fodor and Cowie both take this to be a very common claim) one reaches atomistic, primitive concepts. At that point (Fodor says, Cowie seems to dispute it) one reaches innatism, since primitive concepts can't be learned. Further (Fodor says and Cowie vigorously disputes this) MOST concepts are primitive and as a consequence innate in this sense.

On Fodor's view, every human mind has a concept of a PLATYPUS built in. (Fodor and Cowie both use ALL CAPS as a way of signalling that we are discussing a concept, rather than a word in the vocabulary of a specific historical language on the one hand or a fact in the outer world on the other.) Even if you have never seen a platypus, you have PLATYPUS, and this idea is triggered, it becomes conscious, if you are ever brought to a zoo and have a platypus pointed out to you. The protoconcept becomes a proper concept when it is triggered in this way.

Cowie says that it is an embarrassment for Fodor "that the relations between concepts and their causes typically make a good deal of intentional sense. The fact that we get EMU from emus and PLATYPUS from platypuses and DOORKNOB from doorknobs has an 'intentional integrity' about it of exactly the kind that should not exist, were Fodor right about the arbitrariness of the inputs to the concept-forming mechanism."
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