[lit-ideas] Re: Pirots and Squarrels: Grice on Ethology
- From: Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 29 Apr 2013 14:37:20 +0100 (BST)
As to innateness, Popper's position [without checking] is that while a theory
of "innate ideas" is mistaken, there are innate dispositions and these
constitute innate dispositional knowledge: they are prior to experience yet
pertain to reality and so are close to Kant's synthetic a priori knowledge
except this dispositional knowledge is conjectural and fallible rather than
necessarily correct.
Chomsky's theory of innate grammar is mistaken [it is something akin to a
theory of "innate ideas"] and Chomsky is wrong to think that grammar is
essential to language or 'fixed' and wrong in that grammar comes a fairly late
stage in the development of language. Nevertheless, there is an innate human
disposition to grasp and learn language and this disposition must be at the
heart of how we learn language - and much of what Chomsky says by way of
showing the untenability of an empiricist theory of language [a la Locke] is
correct.
There are many reasons why this Darwinian account of knowledge is not more
widely accepted: one is lack of understanding of Darwinism and its
philosophical implications but some derive from the widely held prejudice that
all knowledge is derived from observation. For these 'dispositions' are not
directly observable, only their effects are observable. In terms of what is
observable we might observe that a chemical has certain properties, we might
observe that in a sufficient dose it is poisonous, and we might observe the
reaction the chemical produces in an organism [say nausea, thereafter
aversion]: it is tempting to analyse this so that the observable chemical and
its observable properties cause an observable reaction of nausea and thereafter
an observable aversion, where the "cause" is explained in terms of a
"conditioning" arc - in this way we avoid positing invisible or unobservable
dispositions. Yet aversion is not the only response to nausea: and
nausea may produce errors of aversion [the ice cream dessert made me sick not
the fish main course but, ever since, fish sets my teeth on edge but I still
enjoy ice cream] - this indicates that any explanation cannot be limited to a
"conditioning" arc but must involve a disposition to connect the nausea with
something [say, something eaten]: and that disposition is not a product of
"conditioning" a la the conditioning arc [which is a Lamarckist explanation in
terms of 'instruction from without'] but of 'natural selection'. The
"conditioning" arc fails to explain why creatures, including humans, connect
certain events and not others - in other words, bare 'associationism' cannot
explain why we make the associations we do and not others: it cannot explain
why the mechanisms in making connections here are selective and do not select
equally from any logically possible association. The explanation for such
'selection' lies in prior dispositional knowledge.
Donal
________________________________
From: "Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx" <Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx>
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Monday, 29 April 2013, 13:11
Subject: [lit-ideas] Pirots and Squarrels: Grice on Ethology
Or, Grice's Rats?
.....to explore
McEvoy's "inbuilt programme" references, as Popperian in nature (or other).
Other related posts:
