Rebuttal and Surrebuttal

I will continue here the trend of thought of my recent posts about Fiona Cowie's 1999 book, What's Within. It criticizes both Fodor and Chomsky in some detail and I've already paraphrased/summarized her take on Fodor.

But in a sense the continuation is a pause. Instead of going further, into the part of the book that discusses Chomsky's linguistics views, I'll look a bit further at the differences between Fodor and Cowie as they have played themselves out SINCE the publication of this book.

Fodor himself replied at length to Cowie, in an essay called Doing Without What's Within.

It is a lengthy essay and difficult to summarize. Here is a link to the whole thing, for this who want to pursue this jousting. Fodor Strikes Back.

Quite early on in this essay, Fodor suggests that the relationship between empiricism and rationalism, or innatism, as classically understood, was symmetrical -- and that Cowie wrongly re-imagined it as asymmetrical so that she could claim that the empiricists had won it. In Fodor's symmetrical rendering, the problem with the old debate was that "nativism is merely the denial of empiricism insofar as we lack a way of saying what `innate’ comes to other than not learned. Likewise, empiricism is merely the denial of nativism insofar as we lack a way of saying what `learned’ comes to other than not innate."

Cowie puts the burden on nativists "to say exactly what doctrine they're endorsing," keeping the empiricists off that hook. Neither when discussing classical philosophers nor when expressing her own views, Fodor charges, does Cowie ever say what she means by learning. She makes, he says, "occasional references to connectionism as possibly an alternative to Chomsky's rationalism," but even so connectionism doesn't come up in relation to Fodor himself, and her occasional references to it fall far short of endorsement.

Connectionism in the relevant sense is the view expounded by Rumelhart and McClelland that looks at learning neurologically, working from the way that (quoting R & M here) artificial simulated neurons can be "linked to each other through weighted connections representing synapses or groups thereof." Cowie cites it briefly in her book as one of the developments in computer science that "promises us machines that can more naturally implement the 'softer' constraints of probabilistic learning processes."

Fodor had had previous runs-ins with connectionists -- he believed it was a trend that was undoing progress that had been made in AI research. So he was clearly unhappy about Cowie's references, however slanting.

Anyway: let us pause there and turn to Cowie's surrebuttal.

She actually concedes something to the point I just cited Fodor as making. She writes,

"I admit that the position I called Enlightened empiricism – the potential alternative to nativism that What’s Within argues had been unfairly ignored by nativists and empiricists alike – was not adequately discussed in the book. This was a mistake, and if I had it to do over again, I'd do it differently. In any case, I now have a chance to say a little more about how Enlightened empiricism is supposed to work, and I trust that by doing so, I can make clear why Fodor's objections to the position in his §2.3.3 are premature."

Here's the link for the whole discussion:

http://host.uniroma3.it/progetti/kant/field/cowiesymp_replytofodor.htm

Her idea of "enlightened empiricism" is the view that growing children learn language through hypothesis testing, that there are constraints at any given time on the range of possible hypothesis, but that these constraints are determined NOT by innate equipment but by the state of her opinion at an earlier time, t-1.

A three year old child inherits preconceptions, then, not from an immortal reborn soul or from the genetically determined wiring of the brain, but from the two year old child. The connectionist model may have something to do with this. It is not the neural equipment we are born with, but how it grows during the years that we're learning language, that is of momentous importance here.

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