Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Let's put all the comments I've posted here on the Fiona Cowie book together, to see if I managed to write a coherent review piecemeal. That'll be fun. I'll keep the transitional changes as slight as possible. --------- FIONA COWIE, WHAT'S WITHIN (1999) So I've bumbled on a discovery. I've discovered that a certain 18 year old book seems to be important to controversies that are in turn important to me. This is a contribution to the old debate between rationalism and empiricism. Cowie says that empiricism, with its blank-slate mind filled by experience (or, as behaviorists came to say, by conditioning) was regnant in the Anglo-American world in the late 1940s. This was the era of Skinner's rise to prominence. It was also an era when a lot of ideas seemed to have been discredited by the recent war, by having a Teutonic sound to them, and innate ideation was a casualty. Later, Chomsky and Fodor turned the tide: Chomsky as to language skills, Fodor...

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 ...

Of late several of my posts have described aspects of Fiona Cowie's arguments about and against innatism, both in the classical rationalists and in contemporary figures, especially Jerry Fodor. Let's return to that subject Fodor calls his view of concept acquisition "brute causal." There is nothing psychological to say about it, it simply is the case that when I see a dog it triggers in me the protoconcept  that then becomes the full-fledged concept DOG. Cowie contends that this is irrational. Any view of concept acquisition of any value must involve "doing psychology," using "intentional" rather than brute-causal mechanisms. A story that she tells about this involves the movement of the mind from a certain medium level of  abstraction both up and down, toward greater and toward lesser generality. A child typically grasps the idea of "dog" fairly early in life. The movement up in generality, toward "mammals" and "ve...

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 thi...