tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post2435866041372205537..comments2024-03-28T04:04:55.806-07:00Comments on Faculty of Language: Fodor on ConceptsNorberthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15701059232144474269noreply@blogger.comBlogger17125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-24888869193977085322013-02-26T06:01:25.169-08:002013-02-26T06:01:25.169-08:00i find intuitively rather implausible that ZEBRA i...i find intuitively rather implausible that ZEBRA is unlearned but that's just a tiny quibble.<br /><br />I real issue i want to raise concerns the innate hypothesis space. For someone like Descartes that's fine; he assumes a BENEVOLENT god designed that space and as a bonus gave us the means to explore it [our rational minds]. If one accepts Descartes' premises this is a very simple and elegant solution. <br /><br />Given that most of us reject the God-premise something else must 'be responsible' that we have the hypothesis space we do and not some other that would be logically possible. So saying it's innate might be true but is not terribly informative. If the contraints are innate they are determined by biology [and 3rd factors as Chomsky likes to point out]. If we assume that evolution had anything to do with 'designing' the hypothesis space we ended up with, we have to ask which factors evolution can and cannot 'work' with. The value I see in Fodor's anti-Darwinism publications is that he points out that evolution could not have acted on some of the factors some proponents of evolutionary psychology focus on. [I just disagree with the far reaching conclusions Fodor draws from this]<br />I know i sound like a broken record but the only way to get past the obvious [there are some innate constraints] we need to do empirical work [most notably of the biological kind because we cannot end up with a hypothesis space that is not biologically realizable...]Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03443435257902276459noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-56003755264509797002013-02-26T05:14:37.732-08:002013-02-26T05:14:37.732-08:00@ Alex Drummond
I do believe in an innate hypothes...@ Alex Drummond<br />I do believe in an innate hypothesis space in some sense. I was only saying that the nature of the hypothesis space does not follow from Fodor's argument. For some further remarks on this, see my reply to Norbert above.<br /><br />Delete<br />Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13780460212414690121noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-26644712101287177302013-02-26T04:59:28.690-08:002013-02-26T04:59:28.690-08:00This comment has been removed by the author.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13780460212414690121noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-9505961039804952232013-02-26T04:34:09.544-08:002013-02-26T04:34:09.544-08:00As for Fodor's argument in its simple form, we...As for Fodor's argument in its simple form, we do not disagree. Inductive learning presupposes a hypothesis space, fine. What we disagree about is the nature of the hypothesis space. Implicitly, we only consider two options: 1) a weakly constrained, open hypothesis space (Quine, Skinner), 2) a heavily constrained, closed hypothesis space (Fodor, Chomsky). Insofar as we all reject 1) (and I certainly do), we might conclude that 2) is the only game in town. Wrongly so! There is an obvious third option: 3) a heavily constrained, open hypothesis space. What opens up the (heavily constrained) hypothesis space? Its contextuality, in my view. Think of the logic of *application*: even with one operating system you can have an unlimited set of apps compatible with the operating system. In other words, even with a finite (possibly small) number of basic brain structures, the set of their applications is not so limited. Actual hypothesis spaces do not only involve the (possibly small) set of innate structures (whatever that means), but also a record of their applications in ever changing contexts.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13780460212414690121noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-56620259166846246902013-02-26T03:22:51.373-08:002013-02-26T03:22:51.373-08:00As philosopher I want to make a point about your c...As philosopher I want to make a point about your comment. You say:<br /><br />""To "bootstrap" means, literally, to pull oneself up by one's own bootstraps---something that is clearly impossible." Well, if it's impossible, then, it's impossible. If it's meant 'not literally', then, the account is metaphorical, but if it's metaphorical, the explanatory challenge has not been met (non-metaphorically)"<br /><br />The implication seems to be we should reject her account because of this flaw? If we reject Carye's account [on which i can't comment since I did not read her book] because the explanatory challenge has not been met (non-metaphorically) then, by parity of reasoning we also should reject Chomsky's 'Merge' account because he explicitly claims the metaphors of his account [of how biological brains can generate sets etc.] have not been spelled out [Chomsky 2012] and Postal [2009, 2012] has claimed it is impossible they literally do [a challenge not refuted to date]. So the situation is the same as what you describe for Carey.<br /><br />Now if we accept [as most people here do] that in Chomsky's case the metaphor is actually helpful and think it would be a mistake to complain that the explanatory challenge has not been met (non-metaphorically), then consistency would require to accept the same for Carey's account. [There may of course still be OTHER reasons to reject Carey's account [again i have not read it]] Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03443435257902276459noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-77163301232994954902013-02-26T03:07:16.289-08:002013-02-26T03:07:16.289-08:00Avery asks whether Fodor is saying anything that Q...Avery asks whether Fodor is saying anything that Quine didn't. Interestingly, Fodor explicitly addresses this in Appendix 6A of <i>Concepts</i>. Conclusion:<br /><br /><i>So I'm not saying what Quine said: though it may well be what he should have said, and would have said but for his Empiricism. I often have the feeling that I'm just saying what Quine would have said but for his Empiricism.</i><br /><br />Fodor's point here is that Quine thought the hypothesis space was defined by an essentially sensory similarity metric ("he assumes the Empiricist principle that the innate dimensions of similarity, along which experience generalizes, are sensory"). Fodor, of course, doesn't.<br /><br />As to why Fodor bothers to point out that the hypothesis space is innate, I assume that he does so because it's a necessary precursor to an argument for the incoherence/impossibility of concept learning. To belabor a point that I took Norbert to be making: Fodor has an <i>argument</i> that concept learning via hypothesis testing is impossible given the definitionist view of concepts. He's not pointing out that the hypothesis space is innately determined because this is supposed to be a surprising or controversial point in and of itself, <i>but because it underwrites his argument</i>. (After all, not everyone readily acknowledges the innate determination of the hypothesis space. See e.g. Jan above.) As someone who finds Fodor's argument quite persuasive, I'd like to see it explained how the bug examples etc. figure in a refutation of it.<br /><br />No-one finds it intuitively plausible that concepts like ZEBRA or LASER are unlearned, and no-one can blame Fodor's opponents for giving our intuitions a good tease with CARBURETOR, TARMAC, ALUMINUM, and all the rest. But the unlearnability of these concepts is the conclusion of the argument. With respect to our own private hunches, we're no doubt all entitled to reject apparently sound arguments on the grounds that their conclusions are nuts. But it sure would be nice to know where the argument goes wrong.Alex Drummondhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04676457657606185543noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-69563092411451917762013-02-26T02:45:21.740-08:002013-02-26T02:45:21.740-08:00I think the bugs are a better kind of example to t...I think the bugs are a better kind of example to think about that the carburetors because we already have some ideas about how to represent the shapes and colors that seem to constitute the distinguishing features between the types, infinite dimensional (Marr's) for the shapes.<br /><br />Doing carburetors properly would involve a lot of thinking about how people think about technological artifacts, & they're not part of a classification system for roughly the same kind of stuff that exists in variant forms in all cultures, frequently with independent origins. AveryAndrewshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17701162517596420514noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-6581822320790300732013-02-26T02:13:55.342-08:002013-02-26T02:13:55.342-08:00I was nodding in agreement with Norbert about the ...I was nodding in agreement with Norbert about the first half but there are some cases I thought of which seem to be where the hypothesis space changes. <br />So say you are working with an infinite dimensional feature space -- you can't represent the set of features (obviously) so you do it all dually, using the 'kernel trick' -- tyou take the examples and work with a similarity measure between them (which reduces to the dot product in the feature space). So at any given point the set of hypotheses that you are considering is, say the set of (hyper-)planes definable using the examples you have seen so far. And that increases with time.<br /><br />So I don't find that completely convincing -- I think Norbert would point out, and he would be right -- that the hypothesis space is the set of all planes in the feature space, and this doesn't change -- and yet this shows that there is maybe an ambiguity in what we mean by an innate hypothesis space. Is it just what can be represented? Or is it more restricted?<br /><br />Because if it is the former, then the claim that the concept 'carburetor' or CARBURETOR is innate is just the claim that it can be represented by a human brain and not by a cat brain which doesn't seem very controversial.<br /><br />It's also worth noting that there are substantial differences between Carey's and Fodor's use of the term 'concept'. Fodor uses it IIRC in the philosophers sense, so it has to be public and shared (between individuals and cultures), whereas Carey is using it in the psychologist's sense to mean some purely internal token. <br />Alex Clarkhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04634767958690153584noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-47529319570272817372013-02-26T00:07:39.447-08:002013-02-26T00:07:39.447-08:00It seems to me that Sue (Carey) has phrased the i...It seems to me that Sue (Carey) has phrased the issue best in her own (excellent) book "Origins of concepts": On page 20, she writes that "this book's ... thesis is that the explanatory challenge is met ... by bootstrapping processes." A few lines below on the same page, she wites, "To "bootstrap" means, literally, to pull oneself up by one's own bootstraps---something that is clearly impossible." Well, if it's impossible, then, it's impossible. If it's meant 'not literally', then, the account is metaphorical, but if it's metaphorical, the explanatory challenge has not been met (non-metaphorically)Cedric Boeckxhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10127112411609144386noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-70854348841498183332013-02-25T22:46:10.209-08:002013-02-25T22:46:10.209-08:00Another possible source of confusion is the analog...Another possible source of confusion is the analogy of lexical acquisition with the immune system pursued by Fodor & Piatelli-Palmerini, misleading because afaik the immune system doesn't display the semi-lattice type structure of NL concept systems, and doesn't seem able to zero in on specific antigens or classes of antigens with anywhere near the precision that lexical acquisition can zero in on species or higher-level classifications (if the critter has any combination of features that your perceptual can pick up on, you can learn a word for it, including attributes of parts such as the shape of the spines on the front legs). & there is no lexical acquisition analog of autoimmune generalizations, where the system gets stuck on a wrong generalization that can't be fixed.<br /><br />A lot of people would have been unimpressed by the paper, then failed to pay much attention to the book, since it didn't start out with a retraction of the claims in the paper iirc.<br /><br />The immune system responds in a rigid and sometimes catastrophic way, the plant and animal classification is flexible and always acquires the correct category given a suitable collection of exemplars, and the disposition to attend to them.AveryAndrewshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17701162517596420514noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-55419210662707120032013-02-25T21:49:48.005-08:002013-02-25T21:49:48.005-08:00If Fodor's point is that the hypothesis space ...If Fodor's point is that the hypothesis space is innate, why is he bothering to state it at all, since that fails to distinguish him from Quine and most other people, including the generative semanticists who were the original targets of his attack on lexical decomposition. Part 1) in your lucid summary is not something that many people disagree with Fodor about, Part 2) seems empirically undersupported and not regarded as remotely plausible by people who actually work on lexical semantics.<br /><br />If everybody is misinterpreting Fodor, I suppose that the reason is that they assume he's proposing something fundamentally different from Ray Jackendoff, James Pustejovsky and Anna Wierzbicka, and that it is some kind of outgrowth or extension of his early critique of lexical decomposition, and we all appear to be struggling to perceive what that might be.AveryAndrewshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17701162517596420514noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-48687302095809647362013-02-25T21:27:59.146-08:002013-02-25T21:27:59.146-08:00You say: "Fodor is asking what it means to be...You say: "Fodor is asking what it means to be "given." It sure looks like this means that the options are innately specified"<br />The problem with this answer is that unless you believe the innately specified is god-given you have not really answered the question, just postponed it. As naturalist you still need to ask "why and equally importantly how is whatever you term as 'the given' innately specified. As we have discussed a few times now, we are currently in no position to answer these questions in biological terms. The only people who have an answer are those who assume 'God did it' - that's one reason Fodor is so popular with the religious ID people [especially after his 'Against Darwinism/What Darwin got wrong' [no matter how loudly he stresses his view is not religiously motivated]. Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03443435257902276459noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-3841918409589290712013-02-25T17:58:08.032-08:002013-02-25T17:58:08.032-08:00Sorry Avery, but I don't see your point. Fodor...Sorry Avery, but I don't see your point. Fodor's point is about the nature of induction. It requires a set of admissible hypotheses. Where do these come from? And given standard wisdom, all you can do is investigate the presupposed/given set of options. Fodor is asking what it means to be "given." It sure looks like this means that the options are innately specified and what you do with the data is select the best one. But selection theories, this is one of those, presuppose that the answer is given in the options. You cannot learn what is unlearnable. A necessary condition of learnability is being in the hypotheses space. What can this mean other than you "know" all the possible options. Norberthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15701059232144474269noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-55513725142967960392013-02-25T17:53:06.662-08:002013-02-25T17:53:06.662-08:00It doesn't presuppose what needs to be establi...It doesn't presuppose what needs to be established. It simply notes that if learning is inductive then there needs to be a space of options given. There is no inductive theory that does not begin with a specification of the hypothesis space. You cannot count what you don't have units for. Susan does not like this conclusion, but frankly have never understood how bootstrapping was supposed to allow you enlarge your hypothesis space. Induction cannot do this. Period. If the right target is not in the space of options there is nothing you can do inductively to put it there. This is not a deep point, but its consequences coupled with atomism can be significant. Treat this like Zeno's paradoxes if you don't like the conclusion: find a way around the conclusions, don't pretend the argument is not good.Norberthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15701059232144474269noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-12872630418924829752013-02-25T14:30:43.494-08:002013-02-25T14:30:43.494-08:00Plants are another issue for Fodor's view, sin...Plants are another issue for Fodor's view, since indigeneous Aussies really do distinguish all the plant species, and so do all other cultures that live off the land, I suspect. It is amazingly implausible that the putatively innate, non-decomposable inventory of plant types, presumably evolved in a small part of Africa, should turn out to be able to match almost perfectly to the plant species found in any part of the world.<br /><br />Whereas, of course, a combination of Marr and/or Wierzbicka, with neural net training for colors has no in-principle difficulty here; with attention, there's always something you can notice, eg the putatively identical long skinny leaves turn out to be flat at the base for one species of an 'indistinguisable' pair, round for the other.AveryAndrewshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17701162517596420514noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-82186942116093996222013-02-25T14:19:16.152-08:002013-02-25T14:19:16.152-08:00The other problem is that is it really clear that ...The other problem is that is it really clear that definitions/lexical decompositions fail any worse than generative grammars do, especially relative to the size of the communities that work on them, & has Fodor ever thought seriously about the diversity of classifications for plants, animals and artifacts that appear to exist (the point of my Central Australian Bug Story in the thread that launched this). Anglo-European furniture terms might also be worth a close look - stools, chairs, sofas, benches etc and their non-equivalents in other languages.<br /><br />AveryAndrewshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17701162517596420514noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5275657281509261156.post-88484563358773261142013-02-25T12:22:28.383-08:002013-02-25T12:22:28.383-08:00Although I am also impressed by Jerry's formid...Although I am also impressed by Jerry's formidable intellect, his massive innateness hypothesis is generally considered ridiculous (a qualification used by Susan Carey and many others). The argument is circular because it assumes what it is supposed to establish: that the hypothesis space presupposed by inductive learning is innate. The false, somewhat hidden, premise (but explicitly stated by you yourself) is that concepts are the denotata of words. However, concepts are not denotata of words but of INTERPRETATIONS (interpreted words if we limit ourselves to words). Interpretations of words crucially involve both the information associated with the word itself and with the context. So, to the extent that hypothesis spaces consist of concepts, they are co-determined by context. Concepts, in other words, are not immutable, because of their partial contextual nature. This is in tune with our everyday experience that hypothesis spaces change over time, both for the individual and history at large.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13780460212414690121noreply@blogger.com