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8. THE CASE FOR INNATE KNOWLEDGE

 

In this chapter I shall consider the most likely candidate for substantive innate knowledge, namely our beliefs about our own psychology.

 

Innateness and Reliability

Recall from chapter 5, that in order for there to be innate knowledge, we must possess some innate beliefs which are not only true, but caused by a reliable process. While classical rationalists held that the process in question was Divine intervention (our innate beliefs having been implanted in us by a veracious God), this idea is no longer taken seriously in scientific cultures. In order for a claim to innate knowledge to be given even cursory consideration today, the proposed belief-causing process must be a natural one. Indeed, the only suggestion which is consistent with current scientific knowledge is that innate beliefs might be determined through evolutionary selection. For science tells us that this is the manner in which all other innate characteristics have been arrived at, whether in ourselves or other organisms.

            What reason is there for thinking that natural selection would be a reliable process, supposing that it resulted in some innate beliefs? Notice first, that true belief has immense survival-value for any organism, such as ourselves, much of whose behaviour is caused by the interaction of beliefs and desires. For in general an organism's projects will only succeed if based upon beliefs which are true. This is not to say, of course, that action undertaken on a true belief is guaranteed to succeed. I may set off walking through the desert, correctly believing that there is water to be found in that direction, but perish of thirst before I reach it. But often (though not always) the failure will result from the falsity of some other belief. Thus in this example, it may be my false belief that the water is close enough for me to reach by walking which is responsible for my death. (On the other hand, I may simply have lacked any alternative course of action, so that I would have perished whatever I did.)

            It is also true that action undertaken on false belief is not guaranteed to fail. One way in which the action may nevertheless succeed, is where the belief, while false, is sufficiently close to the truth. For example, although my belief about the direction of the oasis may be strictly incorrect, it may still lead me to within sighting distance of the water I need. However, if an action based upon a wholly false belief succeeds, it will only succeed by accident. For example, although walking in the wrong direction to find the oasis I am aiming for, I may be lucky enough to stumble across another, and hence survive anyway. In which case wholly false beliefs will not have survival-value in the long run. But in evolutionary selection it is the long run that matters. What seems undeniable is that organisms (of the sort which act on beliefs) will only survive, in general and in the long run, if they base their actions on beliefs which are true, or at least close to the truth. So if any innate beliefs have arisen through natural selection, we should expect them to be at least approximately true.

            An objection to this line of argument, however, is that natural selection can explain features of organisms which do not have survival-value, provided that they are by-products of things which do have it. Then if this were true of innate belief, there would be no particular reason to expect the beliefs in question to be true ones. (Indeed, even if those beliefs did happen to be true they would not count as reliably acquired, and hence would not be known. For their truth would then turn out to be accidental relative to the processes involved in their acquisition.) Yet this objection cannot be sustained, at least in the absence of any concrete proposal. For it is extremely difficult to understand how innate beliefs might be a by-product of some other innate characteristic of human beings, without themselves having a value in survival contingent upon their truth.

            Another point to notice is that natural selection has conferred on us belief-acquisition processes which are generally reliable. Beliefs arising from perception and memory are, on the whole, true. (Those sceptical of this will be answered in chapters 11 and 12.) So even if evolution does not issue directly in any beliefs, it has resulted in innate mechanisms for acquiring beliefs which are fairly reliable. Therefore it is, to that extent, a reliable process in its turn. Moreover part, at least, of the inaccuracy of our perceptual mechanisms can be accounted for in terms of a competing constraint, which would not operate (or not to the same extent) in the case of innate beliefs. This is speed. Perceptual mechanisms need to be fast as well as reliable. So there may be survival-value for an organism in some sacrifice of reliability, if this is more than off-set by a corresponding gain in speed. For example, it will be better to have a perceptual mechanism that informs me extremely quickly that there is a predator running towards me, even if - as a result of the speed with which it operates - the mechanism often informs me that there is a predator approaching when there is not. Better sometimes to flee unnecessarily than never to have time to flee at all! But in connection with innate beliefs, as opposed to perceptual mechanisms, there is presumably no demand for speed (except perhaps speed in accessing and calculating with those beliefs). So evolutionary selection of innate beliefs would, if anything, be even more reliable than perception.

            It is possible to imagine cases where an innate false belief would be an aid to survival. For example, an innate belief in the magical properties of a particular plant, which in fact contains a powerful medicine, might prove very useful to those who live in the region where that plant flourishes. But such cases are rendered unlikely when one remembers that in order to have been selected through evolution, a belief would have to prove useful over a time-span which is extremely long in comparison to human history, and in a wide variety of differing circumstances. I therefore conclude that if evolution has resulted in any innate beliefs, then those beliefs will very likely constitute innate knowledge.

            Recall that in chapter 6 we discovered some candidates for innate knowledge, in the course of our discussion of innate mental structure. Thus, while we disagreed with Chomsky's claim that the innate structure of the language-faculty should be counted as genuine knowledge, we noted that our conscious beliefs about whether a particular sentence is or is not well-formed will count as innately known. For such beliefs are true, and are caused by a reliable process, provided that they result in a systematic way from the underlying structure of the language-faculty. But if this is the total extent of our innate knowledge, it will be of very marginal significance. For it is not these beliefs themselves which explain our capacity to formulate and to recognise grammatical sentences. They rather arise out of what does explain that capacity, namely the innate structure of the language-faculty, together with the subject's parameter-setting experience of their native language. Indeed, it is arguable that the very idea of a sentence being well-formed or ill-formed only arises in cultures where for political reasons attempts are made to standardise different dialects. For example, I am told that linguists working in the field often have considerable difficulty in explaining to the members of the language-community they are studying, just what it is they are after when they seek the speakers' judgements as to whether or not a given native sentence is well-formed.

            In chapter 6 we also allowed that other faculties, such as vision, are innately structured, embodying information about the world. If this is so, then it seems that perceptual beliefs will (somewhat strangely) count as innate, being triggered by experience rather than learned from it. But perhaps a better way to put the point is this. The innate structure of the visual faculty may give us innate (locally triggered) knowledge that there are, in general, physical objects distributed in three-dimensional space around us. But then our particular perceptual beliefs - for example, that there is a cylindrical object resting on a flat surface in front of me now - are based upon experience. For it is only our general ability to perceive in three-dimensions which is unlearned. On that basis we then learn where particular objects are by seeing. So our detailed perceptual knowledge of the world around us should not be counted as innate.

            If we are to show that we have innate substantive knowledge of detailed truths about the world, we need to consider some other candidates. One example may be provided by our knowledge of our own psychology.

 

Folk-Psychology

We have an immense network of common-sense beliefs about the mind. These beliefs concern the relationships of mental states to one another, to the environment and states of the body, and to behaviour. This collection of beliefs is generally referred to by philosophers today as 'folk-psychology'. It includes such beliefs as these: that pains tend to be caused by injury, and tend to prevent you from concentrating upon other tasks; that perceptions are generally caused by the appropriate state of the environment (e.g. the experience of a tiger being caused by the presence of a tiger), and are often laid down in memory; that if you want something, and believe that performing an action or sequence of actions will enable you to get it, then you will normally (other things being equal) do that thing; that decisions are often the result of prior deliberation, and generally lead you to perform the action decided upon; that when people assert something, they generally believe it, and that when they say they are going to do something, they generally do it; and so on.

            It is important to stress that folk-psychology should only be understood to cover the set of common-sense generalisations about the human mind which hold good independently of context or culture. For it is perfectly obvious that our particular beliefs about someone's psychology - concerning their individual desires, intentions and beliefs - will not be innate, but will rather be learned from observation of their behaviour. Similarly, when we arrive for the first time in a foreign country we may not be able to take much for granted about their customs, or about what they believe or value. So we shall not be able to rely upon such culture-relative generalisations as that a hand-shake will be treated as a sign of greeting. But what we can take for granted is that the general way in which their minds work will be similar to ours - for example, that they will generally believe what they see. And it is this general knowledge which we shall largely rely on in interpreting their behaviour, and in beginning to construct detailed pictures of their psychology.

            There are a number of points to notice about folk-psychology. The first is that it is extremely complex, consisting of perhaps many thousands of distinct generalisations. This complexity can easily pass unnoticed, since we are so at home within folk-psychology that we are barely aware of its existence. But the complexity emerges as soon as we try to articulate everything that common-sense tells us about the mind. (To see this, just try completing the list of generalisations started in the paragraph before last!) We might be tempted to say that folk-psychology is no less complicated than the human mind itself. But this would be an exaggeration. For a great deal of the operation of our minds is, no doubt, nonconscious; whereas folk-psychology is mostly concerned with our conscious mental life. But even this is complicated enough.

            The second point to notice about folk-psychology is that, while it may be loosely structured and imprecise, it is also remarkably successful.¹ Because of it, the actions of other people as well as ourselves are often predictable, and almost always intelligible. (We can make sense of one another, in a way that we are able to understand hardly anything else in the natural world.) Indeed, it is only because of folk-psychology that social life is possible at all. We constantly rely upon it in interpreting the utterances of other people; in recovering from their utterances, circumstances, and behaviour a description of their beliefs and intentions; in predicting what may be expected of people with those beliefs and intentions in a given situation; and in predicting the effects on other people of our own utterances and actions. To see how successful we are in all this, reflect upon the complexity and diversity of modern societies, and yet on the extent to which we nevertheless manage to coordinate our behaviour.

            Just as it is easy to overlook the complexity of folk-psychology, so it is easy to underestimate its success. For our occasional muddles and misunderstandings tend to have far greater salience for us. This is because many of the cases which matter to us most are those where understanding is hardest to come by. Thus one person's religious, moral or political beliefs may seem completely mysterious to another. Indeed, by generalising from and romanticising such cases, some people are inclined to picture human beings as wholly opaque to one another, beyond mutual knowledge or comprehension. What they overlook are the myriad cases of mundane success. Even those with widely differing religious beliefs can cooperate successfully in practical projects, such as building a wall together, or coordinating a meeting in a strange city. And many of their every-day actions will be mutually intelligible.

            The third point to notice about folk-psychology, besides its complexity and remarkable success, is that it is also deep. As a first approximation, you might say that this depth consists in the fact that folk-psychology explains and predicts human behaviour through the interaction of unobservables - beliefs, desires, feelings and thoughts. In this respect, at least, it might be compared to highly-developed sciences such as physics and chemistry, which similarly explain the observable behaviour of physical substances in terms of the unobservable interactions of their parts. However, this way of putting the point presupposes a distinction between theory and observation which is highly contentious. Many philosophers would want to insist, on the contrary, that we can literally see someone's pain or desire, against the background of our beliefs about their circumstances and other mental states. Similarly, many philosophers of science would want to say that a physicist in the course of an experiment may - in the light of their background theoretical beliefs - be said to see electrons being discharged from the substance under study. These philosophers would maintain that, since what we see is always to some extent a function of what we believe, there is no motive for denying that entities such as pains and electrons are observable.

            A better way to characterise the depth of folk-psychology is to stress its implicit realism. It commits us to the real existence of mental states and events, and real causal interactions between them. Indeed, it embodies a complex theory about the inner structure of the mind. For example, consider a folk-psychological explanation of someone's decision in terms of the train of reasoning which led up to it. This postulates a causal sequence of real events, which were unobservable in fact, even if not in principle.

            One question left outstanding, is to what extent the generalisations of folk-psychology are consciously believed. It might be suggested that they should rather be assimilated to the sort of nonconscious mental structures which underlie our grasp of grammatical rules. Now it may be that there are such structures here too, but it is surely undeniable that generalisations of the sort mentioned earlier will be consciously endorsed. This need not mean that they often (or in fact ever) surface in consciousness. For being truistic (too obvious to mention), they mostly pass unthought of. But they are certainly available to consciousness, since speakers will immediately assent to them if asked.

            This is not to say, however, that we cannot make mistakes when we try to articulate the principles we are taking for granted. For example, at one point Fodor says that people will (other things being equal) do whatever they believe to be necessary to fulfil their desires.² But this is false if taken quite generally. What really matters is that the act be sufficient, or be part of a sequence of actions which is believed to be sufficient. Thus even if I would like to become a famous concert pianist, and believe that it is necessary that I should first learn to play the piano, it does not follow that I will make the attempt. For I might also believe that even if I learned the piano I should never be good enough to be famous.

 

Is Folk-Psychology Learned?

Folk-psychology is apparently universal to all human communities. So far as I am aware, there are no societies which fail to have notions corresponding to those of pain and anger, and which do not employ the practical-reasoning-model for explaining actions in terms of the interaction of beliefs and desires. This is, if true, a striking fact. There is hardly any other comparable body of belief which is equally universal. Indeed, the only real candidate is folk-physics, which includes such truisms as that it takes more energy to lift a heavy object than a light one. A case can be made for saying that this, too, is innate. But I shall not pursue the matter here.

            Stephen Stich has raised doubts about the universality of folk-psychology,³ citing the work of the anthropologist Rodney Needham.⁴ But in reality the anthropological evidence presented by Needham supports the universality of folk-psychology. What seems to count against it, is only a faulty (Wittgensteinian) analysis of folk-psychological notions.⁵ On such an account, these notions are conceptually tied to specific types of behavioural criteria, and are necessarily embedded in particular linguistic and cultural practices. In which case, since in many societies these practices are absent, the notion of belief, for example, may be held to be without application. But in fact, as we have seen, folk-psychology postulates a network of causally related real internal states and events, where such states will only issue in a given type of behaviour if other things are equal - that is, if the surrounding states in the network remain the same. From this perspective, it is only to be expected that people in different cultures, while enjoying the same types of mental states (beliefs, desires, and so on), might engage in very different behaviours, depending upon the particular beliefs and values which are current amongst their members.

            However, the universality of folk-psychology is not in itself sufficient to show that folk-psychological beliefs are innate. For supposing that those beliefs are largely true, then it is clear that no human society would last very long without them. Since a shared common-sense psychology is the basis on which all social cooperation and communication rests, groups of humans who did not possess it would be hard put to survive, let alone flourish. But for all that, it may be that the beliefs in question are empirically acquired. It may be that they were gradually discovered by emergingly successful social groups in the past, and are now passed on between generations by teaching. Or it may be that they are rediscovered by each individual in the course of normal psychological development.

            In fact, however, (as in the cases of grammatical rules and of concepts) very little, if any, explicit teaching of folk-psychology takes place. Adults simply use psychological notions in the presence of children, leaving the latter to acquire by themselves the generalisations within which those notions are embedded. Indeed, Plato's Problem arises here in particularly stark form. For the body of knowledge which the child has to acquire is not only large, but structured in a very complex way. Since almost every mental state can interact with any other, folk-psychology must consist of literally thousands of generalisations. Yet recent evidence suggests that children have an adequate mastery of a great deal of it, at least, by the end of their fourth year.⁶ (Indeed, since much of the evidence relates to the child's verbal ability, the actual time of acquisition may be earlier still. For it is often the case that understanding precedes the ability to articulate.)

            Moreover, while the data available to the child may not actually be corrupt, it is certainly fragmentary and incomplete. Since much of folk-psychology is truistic (to adults), it will hardly ever be explicitly cited in explanations. No adult ever says things like 'Daddy has gone to the shops because he wants food to eat tonight, believes that there is nothing suitable in the house, believes that the shops are the best place to get food, believes that now is a suitable time to go to the shops' and so on. One simply says 'Daddy has gone shopping to get supper'. Not even the endless 'Why?' questions of a two-year-old will lead one to articulate a generalisation like 'When people want something, and believe that they can do something to get it, they tend (other things being equal) to do that thing'. So how are we supposed to imagine that the child can gather, purely by inference from its own observations, the full repertoire of psychological generalisations? Moreover, much of what is needed to formulate these generalisations is in any case hidden from the child. For being inner, it is not available to pre-theoretical observation.

            It might be suggested that the child can learn folk-psychological generalisations from its own case, by introspection. But this is highly implausible, for at least two reasons. The first is that even if we suppose that all mental states are transparently available to consciousness, as Cartesian models of the mind maintain, the relevant causal connections are not. So we would have to suppose that the young child has the ability to construct (albeit nonconsciously) an explanatory theory of remarkable sophistication and complexity. It would also be very surprising that all children should happen to hit upon the same theory. But the second reason why introspection cannot be the source of the child's knowledge of folk-psychology is simple and devastating. It is that many mental states are not in any case immediately available to introspection. While it is true that many mental states characteristically give rise to a belief in their own existence, that they do so is itself one of the generalisations of folk-psychology that the child needs to learn. For example, introspection cannot show you that you went to the shops because you wanted to buy food and believed that it was a suitable time to go, if your belief in the suitability of the time did not surface in a conscious thought prior to your action. You may now, looking back, say that of course you had such a belief underlying what you did; but then it cannot be introspection which tells you that such retrospective explanation is reliable.

            I conclude that Plato's Problem concerning the child's acquisition of psychological generalisations cannot be solved, unless we suppose that much of folk-psychology is already innate, triggered locally by the child's experience of itself and others, rather than learned.

            Supposing that folk-psychology is largely true (or at least close enough to the truth to be successful), we can construct an additional argument for supposing it to be innate. For its innateness would confer considerable advantages in survival. Recall that it is our shared belief in folk-psychology which makes cooperation and communication possible. So if folk-psychology had to be learned, it would have to be learned first. No cooperation could take place between parents and children, and no other information could be acquired by children from their parents, until the relevant generalisations had been learned, and learned correctly. This would waste time and cognitive resources, at a stage in development when every additional fact which a child can learn from adults can save its life. ('Don't play with snakes; if you see a tiger, then run; don't try to climb into the cooking pot;' and so on.) On the other hand, if the relevant generalisations are innate, only needing to be triggered into existence by the child's early experience, then the child can immediately embark on the important task of learning the accumulated wisdom of its society. So the innateness of folk-psychology is just what one might have expected evolutionary selection to deliver. Creatures, such as ourselves, whose survival depends crucially upon mutual knowledge of one another's psychology, will survive best if that knowledge is innate.

            Indeed, recent evidence suggests that it was the evolution of a distinctively social intelligence which gave the primary impetus to the evolution of human intelligence in general.⁷ Studies of the behaviour of our closest animal cousins in the wild - chimpanzees - show convincingly that they, too, have at least a primitive model of their fellows' psychology. The suggestion then made, is that once this model is innately given, new modes of social interaction (cooperation as well as competition) become possible. The advantages in survival of such interaction would be so decisive, that one would expect the model to become rapidly more sophisticated, proliferating in the end into full-blown human intelligence. This story is certainly plausible enough to further support the suggestion that human folk-psychology is innate.

 

Is Folk-Psychology True?

Recall that in order to qualify as knowledge, a belief must at least be true. So if folk-psychology is to be not only innate, but innately known, it must constitute a correct theory of the mind. So far we have been assuming that it is indeed true, but many have denied this.⁸ They have maintained that there is no more reason to believe folk-psychology to be true, than there is to believe in the truth of folk-medicine or folk-religion. But in that case it is hard to see why folk-psychology should be so staggeringly successful. Of course it is not complete, since there are many puzzling facts about our psychology which it cannot explain (for example, various forms of mental illness). But its degree of success within its domain (namely, normal conscious mental life) can be measured by the success of the species as a whole. For it is folk-psychology, as we have said, which underlies both our ability to cooperate and to communicate information, which in turn are the very foundations of human society and human progress.

            It might be said in reply that human communities have flourished and prospered despite their members having had many false beliefs - for example, beliefs in magic and witchcraft. But the difference between such beliefs and those of folk-psychology is that the latter are implicated in almost every aspect of our practical lives. Beliefs in magic, in contrast, while perhaps being highly valued by those who possess them, are relatively peripheral. It is not surprising that societies should flourish despite their members having false beliefs. What would be surprising is that those beliefs should be ones on which the whole fabric of cooperation and communication depends.

            Additionally, if we regard some of the arguments given earlier as successful in establishing nativism, then the innateness of folk-psychology provides us with good reason for believing it to be true. For why should the beliefs in question be innate unless they are true? It might be replied that many innate features of organisms involve misrepresentations of the environment. For example, ducklings seem to have an innate belief that the first moving thing they see is their mother. Since this will lead them mistakenly to attach themselves to a human being, if a human is the first moving thing they see, it might be argued that there is no general reason for thinking that innate beliefs will be true. But one difference between the two cases lies in the relative stability of the duckling environment. (Another is that the mechanism in the duckling is probably not properly characterised as a belief. Are we really prepared to apply the practical-reasoning-model here?) Since the mother duck is almost always the first thing which a duckling will see, it is easy to understand why the mechanism of imprinting should have been selected in evolution.

            Human folk-psychology, in contrast, has to serve in a very wide and unpredictable range of circumstances. Much of the success of human beings as a species lies in their ability to adapt to almost any environment, as well as in their ability to accumulate knowledge about the world around them and hence adapt it, in turn, to human needs. So the innate basis of these abilities (namely our mutual beliefs about human psychology) has to be workable whatever the circumstances, and whatever other beliefs and practices are current in the community. It is hard to see how anything could serve this purpose except the truth.

            I conclude that we have good reason to think that folk-psychology is both innately believed and true. Then since it appears that the evolutionary selection of beliefs and belief-acquisition mechanisms (at least in creatures as complex and adaptable as ourselves) is a reliable process, folk-psychology will count as innately known. So we do have substantial innate knowledge of an aspect of the world, namely the psychology of members of our own species.

 

Folk-Psychological Concepts

What of the constituent concepts of our common-sense beliefs about the mind? Are they, too, innate? Or are they rather acquired from experience prior to the triggering of our innate beliefs? (Recall from chapter 4, that our possession of innate knowledge need not entail that we also possess innate concepts.) One account of mental concepts which might allow them to be derived from experience would be the Cartesian model. This holds that all mental states are transparently available to consciousness, our concepts of them being simple recognitional capacities. Then perhaps introspection of our own mental states might be sufficient for us to acquire our conceptions of them, even if it is not sufficient for us to learn of the causal relations between them, as we noted above.

            The Cartesian conception of mental concepts is now almost universally rejected, for at least two reasons. The first is that it makes it very difficult to explain how we can have knowledge of the mental states of other people. If our conception of each type of mental state is given purely by its inner subjective quality, which we can of necessity know only from our own case, then it is problematic, to say the least, how we can know that other people have similar subjective feelings in similar circumstances.⁹

            The second objection to the Cartesian account, is that there are many types of mental state for which it does not even begin to look plausible. Consciousness of my own beliefs and desires, in particular, surely cannot be a matter of immediate recognition. For in virtue of what would they be recognised? These states do not have distinctive feels to them, in the way that pains and other sensations arguably do. Indeed, since there are potentially infinitely many distinct beliefs and desires, of which I have concepts before I come to have them, there is a real problem here as to how I might be supposed to have acquired these conceptions from introspection.

            There is no unanimity as to what account of our mental concepts should replace the Cartesian one. But functionalism is now the most popular.¹⁰ This holds that mental states are individuated by their normal causal role, or function. Indeed, the functionalist view is that mental concepts gain their sense from their position within the generalisations of folk-psychology. Knowing what a belief is, for example, is a matter of knowing how it tends to interact with other mental states such as desires and decisions.

            There are problems with functionalism which need not detain us here.¹¹ Suffice it to say that if functionalism is true, then mental concepts, in being acquired along with folk-psychological beliefs, will be innate if the latter are. Indeed, it looks as if the same will be true on any viable alternative to Cartesianism. For as Chomsky points out, our mental concepts appear to be connected to one another in very many complex and subtle ways.¹² This then means that it will be hard to explain how those concepts are acquired so fast, on such slender exposure, unless they may be supposed to be innate.

            There is one issue which we do need to pursue further, since it bears on the likely truth of folk-psychology. This is the question whether, in gaining their sense from being embedded within folk-psychological beliefs, mental concepts are employed as natural-kind terms. (A natural-kind term is one which is used with the intention of 'dividing nature at the joints', in Plato's phrase - that is, of picking out a class of things which would be recognised as such in a completed science.) To take this view, is to think of folk-psychology as a primitive form of scientific theory of the mind, as its very name suggests. Then if, as is possible, a completed scientific psychology would not employ such notions as 'belief', 'desire' or 'pain', it will turn out that these terms fail to refer (just as 'phlogiston' fails to refer), and that the whole of folk-psychology should be rejected as false.

            However, whether or not a body of belief constitutes a scientific theory is at least partly a matter of the intentions with which it is held. In particular, we have to be prepared to abandon the theory if a better one emerges. But we do not have this attitude towards our common-sense psychology. If a future scientific psychology finds that it can operate best without such notions as 'pain' or 'belief', we will not accept that there are no such things as pains and beliefs, any more than we accept that tables are not really solid objects in the light of the discoveries of modern physics. Rather, we will continue to operate with our folk-psychological notions and generalisations alongside scientific psychology. While I have argued that folk-psychology is a largely true theory of the mind, it does not follow that it is a scientific theory of the mind. (Compare folk-physics, which includes such truths as 'The chair broke because David was too heavy for it'. We retain this as true, despite the fact that 'chair' does not designate a natural kind.)

            My conclusion is that we do indeed possess a body of reliably caused true beliefs which are innate, namely our beliefs about our own psychology.

 

On to chapter 9.