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    Carmelics

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    Home/Original/inverse
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that Primitive concepts are in principle unlearnable.

    ?Set your confidence on the premises below to see your aggregate.

    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 1 of 2
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    • 1.Perceptual learning can attune the cognitive system to detect new property distinctions without requiring prior possession of the target concept.
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    • 2.Fodor's bootstrapping objection conflates logical circularity with the causal-historical process by which sensory systems become tuned to environmental regularities.
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    • 3.Primitive concepts can be acquired through causal locking to worldly properties, as Millikan and Dretske argue, without requiring conceptual constituents.
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    Reason for 2 of 2
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    • 1.Carey's Quinean bootstrapping account demonstrates that new primitive-level representations can emerge from analogical mappings between existing placeholder structures.
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    • 2.If conceptual change in science allows genuinely novel primitives to arise through theoretical reconceptualization, unlearnability cannot be a general feature of primitive concepts.
      ?

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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
    ?
    • 1.Learning a concept via hypothesis testing requires the concept to already be available to the learner.
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    • 2.Primitive concepts lack the constituent structure needed for assembly-based learning.
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    • 3.Therefore, no learning mechanism can account for the acquisition of primitive concepts.
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    Strongest counterpoint
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