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7. THE CASE FOR INNATE
CONCEPTS
In this chapter I shall consider the
arguments for believing in innate concepts, leaving discussion of innate
knowledge to chapter 8. (Recall from
chapter 4, that concepts might be innate even though no knowledge is, and conversely
that some knowledge might be innate even though no concepts are.)
Kinds of Concept-Possession
We can distinguish at least three different
senses in which a creature might be said to possess a given concept. Firstly, this might be said if the organism
has an appropriate discriminatory capacity, being able to act differently
depending upon whether or not instances of that concept are present. For example, pigeons can learn to
distinguish triangles from other shapes (pecking at triangles, but not squares
or circles, to gain a reward). They are
sometimes described in consequence as possessing the concept of a
triangle. Indeed, pigeons are capable
of learning perceptual discriminations which have a remarkable degree of
sophistication. They can be taught to
peck at a photograph for food only if it contains some sort of representation
of a human being, whether in the foreground or background, sitting or standing,
profile or full-face. They can do the
same for photographs of water, or trees, or indeed for photographs of a
particular person.1 Such
pigeons might be said to possess the concept human-appearance, or the
concept water-appearance.
However,
it is doubtful if this notion of a concept takes us very far. In particular, it is doubtful whether
concepts in this sense will figure in any genuine beliefs. There are two points to be made here. The first concerns the notion of
belief-content. It is that beliefs have
contents which are essentially structured out of recombinable elements. The belief that grass is green contains the
concepts grass and green, which can each of them figure in many
other beliefs, such as the belief that grass is inedible or the belief that
emeralds are green. Indeed, these same
concepts can also occur in the content of other propositional attitudes such as
hopes and desires, as when I hope that the grass will grow, or want a green
shirt. The only candidates for the
content of the pigeon's belief, on the other hand, would be 'There is a
human-appearance here' and perhaps 'Human-appearances are a source of
food'. There is no reason to think that
the concept of a human-appearance is indefinitely recombinable into other
contents and other propositional attitudes.
The
second point about beliefs concerns their causal role, which has already been
stressed in previous chapters. It is
essential to beliefs that they should be capable of interacting with desires
and other beliefs in such a way as to cause behaviour, where that behaviour is
then subject to the practical-reasoning-model of explanation. Yet it appears extravagant to try to explain
the pigeon's behaviour by saying that it believes that the photograph it
is pecking contains a human-appearance, wants something to eat, and believes
that pecking human-appearances produces food.
This is because the pigeon's repertoire of action is so extremely
limited. The capacity to discriminate
human-appearances plays no other part in the pigeon's life than in the
production of a pecking-response. There
is insufficient flexibility and variety of behaviour here for us to consider
seriously applying the practical-reasoning-model of explanation.
The
second possible sense in which an organism might be said to possess a concept
arises naturally out of the limitations of the first. We could say that a creature possesses such-and-such a concept
provided that we are prepared to ascribe to it a variety of beliefs or desires
which involve that concept, where we then use the states which we have ascribed
in explanations of the creature's behaviour which fit the
practical-reasoning-model. In this
sense some of the higher mammals, at least, possess concepts, since we take
seriously the attribution of beliefs and desires to them. For example, we may explain the behaviour of
a dog by attributing to it the sequence of thoughts 'I want to get the
ball. The ball is on the table. If I jump on the chair I can reach the
table. So I shall jump on the
chair.' Moreover, the behaviour of a
dog certainly exhibits a wide variety of ways in which it can interact with a
ball - fetching, chewing, chasing, and catching - suggesting that the concept
of a ball (or something like it) does form a component in a number of distinct
canine beliefs and desires.
However,
recall from chapter 6 that beliefs and desires can be nonconscious. I can believe that there is a large
obstacle in the road, and consequently turn the handlebars of my bicycle,
because I want to reach my destination safely and believe that
unless I turn the handlebars I shall crash - all without conscious awareness of
what I am doing or why. This then gives
us our third possible sense of concept-possession, where an organism may be
said to possess a given concept provided that it entertains conscious
thoughts in which that concept figures (or is at least apt to entertain such
thoughts in appropriate circumstances).
A sufficient condition for possessing a concept in this sense would be
the ability to use correctly the corresponding term of a natural language. If you have the capacity to use appropriately,
and to understand, statements in which the word 'grass' occurs, then this will
be sufficient to show that you possess a conscious concept of grass. We can leave open the question whether
relevant language-mastery is also a necessary condition for conscious
possession of a concept, hence leaving open the question whether any nonhuman
animals possess concepts in our third sense.
The answers to these questions will depend upon the nature of the difference
between conscious and nonconscious thought, and on whether it is true that only
language-users can entertain conscious thoughts.2
Armed
now with the distinction between these three different notions of
concept-possession, we can see immediately that our basic repertoire of
discriminatory-capacity concepts must be innate. If we could not, in the first place, respond differently to
stimuli of different colours or temperatures, or to lines and boundaries within
our visual field, then we could never learn anything else. These elemental capacities for discrimination
must be built into the very structures of our perceptual apparatae. Moreover, even where the discriminations in
question are somewhat less basic (and certainly acquired over time), such as
the ability to tell human faces apart from one another, it may be that these
discriminations are not really learned.
Our face-recognising mechanism may contain much innately determined
information about the forms and limits of expression of the human face. So even these may count as innate (but
locally triggered) concepts.
It
is also very likely that the basic conceptual components of nonconscious belief
are innate. For as we noted towards the
end of chapter 6 in connection with vision in particular, it seems plausible
that much of the representational structure of our perceptual faculties is
innately fixed. That we see individual
(often moveable) objects against a relatively stable three-dimensional
background is probably not something that we learn. In which case many of the various perceptual beliefs which can
govern our actions without becoming conscious will count as employing innate -
though perhaps locally triggered - concepts.
(Are we then to allow, in the light of my previous example, that the
nonconscious concept handlebars is innate? This seems implausible.
But there will surely be some more neutral way of characterising the
belief that governs my actions as I ride - for example, that turning the rigid
bent structure in my hands will alter my direction of motion. Here the constituent concepts may plausibly
be said to be innate.) The beliefs in
question will be those which enable us unreflectively to pick up and turn over
objects in our hands, to step over obstacles in our path when walking, to turn
our heads in the direction of a sound, and so on.
Since
the case for innate discriminatory abilities is a powerful one, as is the case
for innate repertoires of nonconscious perceptual concepts, all interest
devolves on to the question whether conscious concepts are innate. This is the issue on which I shall
concentrate for the remainder of this chapter.
Are Concepts Taught?
It is clear that many linguistic concepts are
universal, being common to all human societies and to all natural
languages. But this in itself cannot
provide sufficient reason for believing those concepts to be innate. Nor do we need to appeal to the hypothesis
of a common historical origin to make the point, as we did in the case of
universal features of grammar in chapter 6.
For the universality of such concepts is better explained by their
utility. Societies which did not have
concepts of time and place, motion and rest, causality and knowledge, would not
survive for very long, let alone prosper.
Our universal concepts can be thought of as prerequisites for successful
social life.
However,
the very fact that many of our concepts have a degree of utility which makes
them unavoidable, does provide some slight reason for believing them to be
innate. For as we argued in chapter 6,
in connection with perceptual concepts of space, the fact that certain
linguistic concepts can be regarded as amongst the standing-conditions of all
human life, means that there would be survival-value to the individual if those
concepts were innate. This would allow
valuable cognitive resources in the developing child to be directed
elsewhere. It would also avoid the risk
of mistakes occurring, which attends all learning. But the most that this argument shows, is that it would not be
entirely surprising if those linguistic concepts which are universal
were innate; it does not in itself provide sufficient reason for believing that
they are.
Some
of the points which gave rise to Plato's Problem in connection with the
learning of grammatical rules hold in the case of concept-learning as
well. Children acquire a huge number of
concepts in a short span of time.
(Chomsky claims that at certain periods of childhood as many as a dozen
new concepts are acquired each day.)3 Moreover, they acquire these concepts on the basis of fragmentary
and mostly positive data. For just as
in the case of grammar, very little explicit teaching of concepts actually
takes place. In general, adults simply use
concept-words in the presence of children, providing them with a sample of
applications which is necessarily limited, only occasionally correcting the
child's own mistakes. Not only this,
but much of the data is, from the child's point of view, corrupt. For much adult usage consists of irony,
metaphor, jokes and teasing, in none of which are concept-words used literally,
and which can only be understood when the literal meanings of those words are
already known.
However,
we cannot assess how powerful the analogue of Plato's Problem is in connection
with concept-acquisition, until we have a better idea of what concepts
themselves are. For much of the burden
of the argument for the innateness of grammar was taken up by the claim that
the grammatical rules governing natural languages form a hugely subtle and
complex system. If, in contrast,
concepts were to turn out to be relatively simple entities, then the argument
for their innateness would be correspondingly weaker. To this issue I shall shortly return.
Fodor on Concepts
Jerry Fodor has recently provided arguments
for the innateness of at least many of our conscious concepts.4 The first of these arguments arises out of
an objection to empiricist theories of concept acquisition, and is similar to
the one we used against Locke's account of abstraction in chapter 4. Fodor claims that the empiricist view must
be that concepts are learned, rather than merely triggered, and then points out
that the only theory of learning which has ever been seriously developed
involves hypothesis-formation and testing.
In order to learn the meaning of the word 'cat', for example, a
child would have to do something like the following. It might first form the hypothesis that 'cat' means 'animal',
adjusting this as further data becomes available (such as a parent saying 'Look
at that dog' when they pass a dog in the street), until finally it settles on
the hypothesis that 'cat' refers to cats.
Then the obvious point is that in order to go through such a procedure,
the child must already have available to it the concepts of 'cat' and 'animal'. So if this were the only story of
concept-acquisition which an empiricist could tell, it would follow immediately
that a large repertoire of concepts must already be innate before a child could
begin to learn the meanings of the words in its native language.
A
natural objection to this argument is that it assumes that possession of a
linguistic concept is a genuine item of propositional knowledge - a matter of
knowing that a given word means such-and-such. But it would be equally plausible (if not more so) to maintain
that possession of such a concept is a practical capacity - a matter of knowing
how to use a given word. On this
view, to possess a concept is to be capable of classifying presented items
correctly, as well as to have the ability to employ the appropriate word in a
variety of sentence-constructions. If
this is right, then acquiring linguistic concepts will be much more like
acquiring a practical skill, such as the ability to ride a bicycle, than it is
like acquiring a new item of information.
And no one would want to claim that bicycle-riding is an innate ability
(although of course it does make use of our innate capacities, such as those of
balance and leg-movement).
There
are a number of replies to this objection which are available to Fodor. The first is that acquiring linguistic
concepts cannot be a mere matter of habituation, or repetitive practice. (This parallels Chomsky's point about the
acquisition of grammatical rules, discussed in chapter 6.) For our concept-words admit of an indefinite
number of possible uses, and a competent speaker will be able to understand
combinations of concepts which they have had no previous experience of. Someone who understands the word 'cat', for
example, does not merely have the ability to say 'cat' when a cat is present,
but also to ask whether there is a cat present, to assert that there is no
cat present, and generally to connect that word together in an indefinite
number of ways with the other words of the language which they understand. So even if we grant that possession of a
concept consists in a practical capacity, rather than being a matter of genuine
propositional knowledge, still it must be a special sort of capacity, whose
categorical basis in the brain somehow reflects the structure of the concept,
and its connections with other concepts.
And then acquiring that concept cannot be merely a matter of practicing
an activity, like learning to ride a bicycle.
Fodor
would also reply that in any case all cognitive processes take place in what he
calls 'a language of thought'. This
would include the process of acquiring the capacities which we are supposing to
constitute grasp of linguistic concepts.
Fodor's view is that all cognitive processes are computational,
in the sense that they involve operations upon sentences or sentence-like
constructions. He holds that this is
so, whether the processes in question are conscious or nonconscious, or whether
they involve the organism as a whole or only sub-personal systems such as
vision or the details of language-comprehension. So even if possession of a concept is best thought of as a kind
of practical capacity, rather than an item of propositional knowledge, still
the process of acquiring that capacity will involve hypothesis formation and
testing in the language of thought.
Then since all processes, including those involved in learning, take
place in the language of thought, this language itself must be innate. It then follows that some concepts - namely
the concepts of the language of thought - must be innate in order that
linguistic concepts may be acquired.
The
idea of a language of thought is controversial. But even granting it, Fodor's argument is less powerful than it
seems. For the most that it does is to
force us to recognise that nonconscious belief-concepts are innate, in
order that conscious (linguistic) concepts may be acquired. But we had already granted that in any
case. And it does not follow that
conscious concepts are themselves innate.
Indeed, the appropriate conclusion may be weaker still. For it would be much more plausible to
assimilate the concepts involved in cognitive processing generally, to the discrimatory-capacity
concepts discussed earlier. For it is
doubtful whether cognitive models of hypothesis-formation and testing within
some sub-personal mental faculty (such as that of language processing) will
genuinely fit the practical-reasoning-model of explanation. So it may only follow (if we accept the idea
of the language of thought) that we are committed to the innateness of
sub-personal discriminatory capacities.
But again, this was something that we had accepted in any case. The interesting question is whether
conscious concepts (or something like them) are innate.
Fodor on Definitions
Fodor does have a different argument for the
innateness of many conscious concepts, which turns on his claim that most
linguistic concepts are in fact indefinable. For he argues that the main point of contention between
empiricists and nativists about concepts, concerns the range of concepts which
are definable in terms of a primitive conceptual basis. According to Fodor, the empiricist maintains
that all other concepts may be defined in terms of a set of innate concepts
which are sensory, which arise directly out of experience (the process
of construction through definition then providing the empiricist with their
theory of learning). The nativist
maintains on the contrary, that most of our concepts are triggered rather than
learned.
There
is one way in which Fodor definitely goes wrong here. This is in his claim that an empiricist must count the basic
sensory concepts as innate (triggered by experience, rather than learned from
it) because they are not acquired via a process of hypothesis formation and
testing. For this account of learning
is too narrow. Empiricists such as
Locke and Hume certainly thought that our basic concepts were learned from
experience, by virtue of their being a record of the initial experience laid
down in memory. What Fodor overlooks,
is that our common-sense concept of learning divides into at least three
distinct kinds. There is learning by
means of an inference to the best explanation, which is what forms Fodor's
paradigm. But there is also learning
how to do something, such as ride a bycyle.
And there is memory-based learning, as would occur when one comes to
know what someone looks like, by meeting them.
In fact the early empiricists proposed that basic sensory concepts were
learned in the third of these modes, on the basis of prior acquaintance. All the same, Fodor is quite right about the
main issue, which is that it will count in favour of the rationalist thesis
that most of our concepts are innate, if it turns out that they cannot be
defined at all, let alone in purely sensory terms.
Fodor's
main argument for indefinability is based upon our failure, historically
speaking, to come up with agreed definitions.
Despite generations of cooperative labour by analytic philosophers,
there is hardly a single concept whose analysis is generally accepted. The best explanation of this phenomenon,
Fodor thinks, is simply that there do not exist any definitions to be
found. But in fact an alternative
explanation is suggested by Chomksy.5 This is that most of our concepts are extremely complex, being
related to one another in all sorts of subtle ways. This seems on the face of it to be equally acceptable. However, an interesting possibility opens up
here. For it may be that in either case
we shall have an argument for nativism.
For Chomsky, in effect, turns this alternative explanation of failures
of definition into the analogue, in the case of concepts, of Plato's Problem
for grammar-acquisition. Supposing that
the system of concepts of a mature speaker is very subtle and complex, then the
problem of how a child manages to acquire this system on such a slender basis
really does become pressing.
But
in fact, even supposing that Fodor is right that most concepts are indefinable,
this need not commit us to nativism.
For as he himself notes, 'indefinable' does not necessarily imply
'unstructured'. It may be that complex
concepts are built up out of simpler ones, without being definable in terms of
them (at least if the definitions are required to take the form of statements
of necessary and sufficient conditions of application). Just such a possibility will be realised if
concepts are represented in the mind by prototypes, which is a thesis
for which much psychological evidence has recently begun to emerge.
Concepts as Prototypes
A prototype is a specification of a set of
prototypical properties, taken together with a weighted
similarity-measure. The prototype for
the concept dog, for example, would include such features as barks
when angry, wags its tail when happy, is a mammal, has
dogs as parents, eats bones, and so on. But there is no suggestion that all dogs must necessarily have
each of these features. Rather,
deciding whether something is a dog is a matter of judging whether it is
sufficiently similar to the prototypical dog.
Fodor
considers this theory, but thinks he has a swift dismissal of it. He claims that it cannot provide an account
of compositionality - of how we can combine together linguistic concepts to
form new ones.6 For example,
he asks how the meaning of 'brown cow' is supposed to be determined from the
prototypes of 'brown' and of 'cow'. But
the reply is surely straightforward. It
is that the meaning of 'brown cow' may be given by 'is sufficiently similar to
this (the prototype of brown) and is sufficiently similar to this (the
prototype of cow)'. The point is, the
meanings of complex concepts formed by putting together individual words need
not themselves be prototypes. The false
assumption in Fodor's argument is that if prototype-theory is correct, then the
concepts expressed by lexically-complex items such as 'brown cow' must
themselves be prototypes. Rather, such
concepts may be logical constructions out of prototypes - building them up
using notions like and and or.
However,
if concepts like brown cow are logical constructions out of prototypes,
where do these logical notions come from in their turn? I think that they could very plausibly be
allowed by an empiricist to be innate.
They can be regarded as belonging to the given (innate) logical
structure of the mind. For these
notions do not in themselves constrain what the world may be like. Empiricists should only object to the
innateness of concepts which seem to carry information about the world. Whereas the logical concepts will be equally
applicable, no matter what our experience of the world may be like. So Fodor's argument against the empiricist
fails, even given the way in which he sets up the debate. It may be that most of our complex concepts
are either prototypes or logical constructions out of prototypes, where these
in turn are constructed out of simple ideas derived from experience (but
without being definable in terms of those ideas).
I
shall not now review the psychological evidence supporting the thesis that many
of our concepts have prototype-structure.7 Rather, supposing that such a thesis is correct, let us ask
whether it is sufficient to defend empiricist theories of
concept-acquisition. One point can be
made straight away, in the light of what was said in chapter 4. For it would be just as implausible to
maintain that all complex concepts can be constructed out of a basic set
of purely-sensory ones, as it would be to claim that they can all be defined
in such terms. (For example, try giving
a prototypical set of sensory concepts which would even begin to be adequate to
express the concept of causation.) So
if empiricism were committed to reducing all concepts to those which describe
our private sensations, then the introduction of prototypes would bring it no
particular advantage.
However,
recall from our earlier discussion that we are allowing there to be an innate
set of perceptual belief-concepts which, so far from being purely sensory,
involve representations of physical objects in three-dimensional space. This might provide a sufficient basis on
which to construct complex prototypes.
For example, a child might first acquire, through experience, a
perceptual paradigm for a given concept. On hearing an object described as a cat for the first time, it
lays down a representation of that particular cat in memory. (It is this stage which presupposes innate
perceptual belief-concepts.) Then
through further experience it begins to acquire a similarity-measure, for
judging whether a given object is sufficiently close to the paradigm to be a
cat. For example, the child might start
by over-extending the concept, judging that a dog is sufficiently close to the
paradigm, until it is corrected by its parents. As it begins to acquire perceptual paradigms and
similarity-measures for other concepts, the child also starts to cross-classify,
building up the full prototype for 'cat'.
For example, having acquired a paradigm for 'tail', it learns that cats
have tails, and having acquired a paradigm for 'mammal' it learns that cats are
mammals, and so on.8
If
this picture, or something like it, proved to be correct, then the empiricist
view of the acquisition of conscious concepts would be largely vindicated. The initial perceptual paradigms would be
given in experience (although requiring an innate perceptual basis), and the
later cross-classifications could also be learned through experience. The similarity-measures, too, might be
learned from experience, if it were to turn out that parental teaching is
crucially necessary to prevent children from over-extending or under-extending
their concepts. Indeed, it would be a
virtue of this sort of account that it could overcome the problem of an
historical regress, outlined in chapter 4.
We need only suppose that the similarity-measures were first settled
upon causally, rather than arrived at by prior teaching or conscious
choice. This could either have happened
by chance, or as a result of some similarities being more salient, or more
relevant to human concerns than others.
No
doubt it is a mistake to treat all concepts as if they are alike. It may be that some are prototypes, and are
acquired from experience, and that some are not. One class of concepts for which the prototype-theory looks
particularly implausible are psychological ones such as 'belief', 'desire' and
'intention'.9 (In fact, it
is in connection with such concepts that Chomsky urges his alternative response
to the lack of agreed definitions, opting for an explanation in terms of
complexity, and arguing for innateness as the only solution to Plato's
Problem.) These will come into focus in
the next chapter, where we consider the arguments for saying that our knowledge
of our own psychology is innate, together with its constituent psychological
concepts. For the moment our conclusion
must be that the case for the innateness of conscious concepts is largely
unproven.
The Concept of Best
Explanation
There is, however, one cluster of concepts
which are very likely to be innate.
These are the concepts involved in the appraisal of non-deductive modes
of argument, particularly the concept of the best available explanation of a
given phenomenon. This concept is
undoubtedly a conscious (because linguistic) one, but is notoriously difficult
to define. Yet there is a remarkable
degree of agreement amongst speakers in particular cases, as to whether one
explanation is or is not better than another.
Moreover, while the concept does to some extent display
prototype-structure (a good explanation tends to be simple, consistent, cohere
well with surrounding beliefs, have broad scope, be fruitful in generating new
predictions, and so on), the constituent notions are no easier to define in
their turn; nor is it easy to see how they might be derived from
experience. Then since children receive
no explicit training in the use of this concept, we cannot explain how we
nevertheless manage to acquire it, unless we suppose that the concept is innate
- triggered by the course of our experience, rather than learned from it.
It
is worth stressing that while the concept of best explanation does figure
prominently in science, it is by no means an exclusively scientific idea. On the contrary, we each of us constantly
make at least tacit use of it in the course of our daily lives. For example, when I enter a lecture-hall
full of students, and consequently form the belief that they have come to
listen to me speak, this is because this belief provides, in the circumstances,
overwhelmingly the best available explanation for their presence. Scientists probably make use of the very
same concept, differing only in that their search is for the general laws or
principles underlying the observable phenomena to be explained.
One
cannot mention non-deductive modes of argument without discussing Hume. For Hume is famous for his discovery of the
problem of justifying induction, and for his naturalistic explanation of our
use of it. His view is that induction
has no rational basis, either in reason or experience. Its reliability cannot be demonstrated a
priori. But then neither can it be
shown to be reliable by past experience without circularity.10 Our reliance upon induction is rather to be
explained by appeal to the basic principles of human psychology, particularly
the laws of association amongst ideas.
Hume's theory is that having seen a phenomenon repeated, we are
habituated to expect it to continue in the future. But this is not to ascribe to us an innate concept. For the psychological principles which give
rise to induction are supposed to be general ones. To say that our psychology is such that we do, as a matter of
fact, go in for induction, is not to say that our minds contain an innate
concept of a good inductive argument.
Quite
apart from the crudity of his psychological theory, there are two things wrong
with Hume's account. The first is that
it ignors the normativity involved in our idea of best explanation. The fact is that we do not (as a mere matter
of fact) reason in certain ways, as a result of our nature. We also apply standards of appraisal to such
reasonings, counting some non-deductive arguments as better than others, and
counting people as right or wrong in their assessments of the merits of such
arguments. Yet this is one of the
distinctive marks of possession of a conscious concept. For as we noted in chapter 3, concepts are
best construed by empiricists as rules of classification. This seems to be just what we have in the
present instance - we have a rule for classifying some non-deductive arguments
as better than others.
Hume's
second mistake is that induction is by no means exhaustive of non-deductive
modes of argument. Induction is a
matter of generalising or projecting from observed regularities. Yet we also frequently reason from such
regularities to the presence of some underlying phenomenon (sometimes involving
unobservables, such as sub-atomic particles) which would explain it. Indeed, induction itself is best seen as a
particular instance of the more general practice of inferring to the best
explanation. The reason why we infer
from 'All ravens so far observed have been black' to 'All ravens are black', is
that the fact that all ravens are black is the best available
explanation for why all observed ravens should have been black. Yet there is no question of exhibiting
inference to the best explanation as flowing from the general principles of
association amongst ideas. Nor is it
easy to see how it might be explained in terms of general features of any more
sophisticated psychological theory. Yet
all of Hume's reasons for thinking that induction is cognitively basic and
indispensable for us, now transfer to the case of inference to the best
explanation. It is therefore plausible
to suppose that we have an innate grasp of the concept of best explanation,
which we then employ in appraising particular arguments.
It
may be objected that there are wide variations across cultures, concerning what
explanations will be counted as better than others. How, then, can the concept of best explanation be innate to the
human species? In our culture, for
example, we explain illnesses in terms of such things as the activity of
viruses on the body, whereas in other cultures the same illness may be
explained in terms of the malignant action of a witch. But this is to miss the point that what
counts as the best explanation of some phenomenon is always relative to your
background beliefs. It is these beliefs
which vary across cultures. The reason
why the hypothesis that an illness was caused by the action of a witch is not a
good explanation for us, is because we do not believe in witchcraft. But, plausibly, all cultures employ the same
general standards for selecting between competing explanations, given their
background beliefs.
Note
that if inference to the best explanation is a generally reliable method of
forming beliefs, then it is easy to explain how our concept of it could come to
be innate. For individuals will be
better able to survive if they are able to attain true beliefs about the
underlying processes at work in nature, which can then be harnessed and
exploited, or if they can acquire knowledge of the unseen causes of observable
phenomena. (Conversely, if our concept
of best explanation has already been shown to be innate, then this gives us good
reason to believe that such inferences are generally reliable. For a concept could not have been selected
through evolution unless it conferred survival-value on the individuals who
possess it. Yet it is hard to see in
what other way inference to the best explanation could have survival-value,
unless it is indeed reliable. We shall
return to this issue in chapter 12.)
I conclude that, while the case for innate concepts is largely unproven, there is at least one concept which is probably innate, namely our concept of best explanation. This result will prove to be of some importance in chapters 11 and 12, when we come to discuss the problem of scepticism.