A year-ending thought. I've been thinking about an old medieval French term, with Latin roots: "liege". At a King Richard's Fair, one costumed character may bow to another and call him "my liege". It is akin to saying "my lord," but not exactly, and a variation is to say "my liege Lord" -- which makes sense in a feudal system, where there is only one particular Lord to whom I owe allegiance - the rest are more or less a matter of indifference to me, a humble serf or page or whatever -- so you can be a lord without being MY lord, or you can be my liege Lord. And, thinking thus, I experienced a bit of a semantic epiphany. Liege. Allegiance. The second syllable in the second of those words sounds a lot like the first of those words. The gravest of sins, the one that gets you assigned to the frozen lake of Cocytus in the deepest final circle of the Inferno according to Dante, is betrayal. Betrayal, specifically, of one to whom the s...
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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 thi...