Empiricism Reconsidered

In his book, Furnishing the Mind, Jesse Prinz attempts to defend a version of empiricism which attempts to incorporate certain aspects of Fodor’s atomistic theory. The aspect of conceptual atomism which he wants to incorporate into a modern empiricism is that of informational semantics which he considers to be the most (perhaps the only) promising account available for meeting the desideratum of intentional content. Prinz equates Fodor’s ‘detector’ mechanisms with our perceptual senses which are regarded as “systems that respond to particular classes of inputs” or “dedicated input systems.” (Prinz, 115)

His empirical theory does, however, differ from Fodor’s atomism in some aspects, primarily in his dispensing with ‘indicators’ altogether. While Fodor posits that concepts are the unstructured indicators that the detector mechanisms have detected something. Prinz identifies concepts with the detector mechanisms themselves and does away with indicators altogether. This I find to be a parsimonious move on his part, for indicators in Fodor’s theory do seem somewhat superfluous. While the unstructured nature of these indicators does offer a working account of conceptual publicity, it is unclear why detectors would require indicators while the indicators themselves would not need other indicators to indicate that something has been indicated. This version of atomism which Prinz adopts, if it can even be called that anymore, supposedly allows for more “satisfying accounts of acquisition, cognitive content, cognitive compositionality, cognitive publicity and categorization,” (Prinz, 123) although at this time in the book, these claims have yet to be justified.

Also central to Prinz’s empirical theory of concepts is the “Modal-Specific Hypothesis” which states that each perceptual system has its own unique code of representation without there being any central, amodal code into which all systems feed. Contrary to Locke, however, Prinz does not deny the possibility of intermodal transfer of representations. “We are born with a set of rules that directly map modality-specific representations in one sense onto modality-specific representations in another.” (Prinz, 135) Thus, perceptual systems are detectors which are reliably caused by external objects whose conceptual representations can be mapped onto the representations which are modally specific to another perceptual system.

I’m not sure what to make of this claim of Prinz’s regarding the modal specificity of neural codes. While it would seem a little too much like a Cartesian theatre to have a master code into which all other codes are translated, I’m not sure that evolution would find it economical to develop the ability to translated codes from each modality to every other. Strictly speaking, I’m not entirely convinced that “code” talk is entirely appropriate, for a code seems to imply a reader of sorts. In this matter, however, I must confess almost total ignorance.

In order to strengthen the empiricist position, Prinz attempts to provide numerous examples of various psychological studies which are either consistent, or which seem to favor it. These arguments are, to me, unconvincing in and of themselves for they simply are not as specific and indicative as one would hope for. While the results of these experiments can be interpreted as suggesting or simply being consistent with empiricism, it would seem to require little imagination to put some other spin upon these findings and make them either support or at least be consistent with other theories.

The arguments in favor of Prinz’s empiricist theory which I find most compelling are the issues of parsimony and intentionality. As to the first, I completely agree with Prinz in that “once we have postulated a certain class of representations for a theory of perception, it is cost-effective to see whether those same representations can be used in a theory of cognition.” (Prinz, 122) That our conceptual abilities evolved later than and out of our perceptual abilities seems to me to be undeniable. It simply seems all too natural for evolution to have simply exapted the later in order to develop the later, if they could serve the purpose to a significant degree.

Additionally, it seems far more plausible that various mechanisms which are able to manipulate conceptual primitives in some manner might be more likely to be innate rather than actual conceptual primitives themselves being so. Actual representations vary too much according to context in order for evolution to be able to build them into the genome, whereas the manipulative mechanisms could be used profitably over many contexts. One also must consider the intensely frugal nature of evolution in that it is doubtful that the benefits accrued by innate representations could actually outweigh the significant cost of building such representations into the genome. This reason would seem to argue against most forms of innatism and in favor of some form of empiricism in my mind.

As to intentionality, I agree with Prinz in that none of the other theories which we have considered (all similarity accounts) seem to be able to offer a suitable basis for it. While this is merely an argument from the exclusion of alternatives, it also seems quite plausible that various perceptual systems could have evolved out of more primitive informational relations. Informational semantics seems to provide the most harmonious relationship between conceptual intentionality, strict materialism and evolution.

I’m not terribly impressed, however, with Prinz’s attempt at addressing the scope desideratum as it applies to emotions. I’m not at all convinced that “emotions are (merely) perceptions of various bodily states.” (Prinz, 120) While it may be possible that “we do not tremble because we are afraid [but rather] we are afraid because we tremble,” it seems that it is equally possible that both of these things happen somewhat independently of one another and that we epiphenomenally mistake association for causation. Damasio’s theory of convergence zones might eventually have something significant to contribute in this matter. I’m also not convinced by his attempts to demonstrate a perceptual account of mathematical operations such as negation and other abstract concepts.

Bibliography
Jesse Prinz: Furnishing the Mind: Concepts and Their Perceptual Basis