On the Very Idea of a Science Forming Faculty

On the Very Idea of a Science Forming FacultyJohn COLLINS†

ABSTRACT

It has been speculated, by Chomsky and others, that our capacity for scientific understandingis not only enabled but also limited by a biologically endowed science forming faculty (SFF).I look at two sorts of consideration for the SFF thesis and find both wanting. Firstly, it has beenclaimed that a problem-mystery distinction militates for the SFF thesis. I suggest that the dis-tinction can be coherently drawn for cases, but that the purported ‘evidence’ for even a fairlylose general demarcation of problems and mysteries is not best explained by a SFF. Secondly,I consider in detail a range of cognitive considerations for the SFF thesis and contend that it isat best moot whether science can be so construed as to make it feasible that it is a faculty com-petence.

I feel most deeply that the whole subjectis too profound for the human intellect.

A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton.From a letter of Charles Darwin to Asa Gray

Noam Chomsky (e.g., 1975b, 1980, 1988, 2000a) conjectures that our capac-ity for science is due to a biologically endowed science forming faculty (SFF):what lies within the principles of the faculty are problems, what lies beyondthem are mysteries. The brief of the sequel is to question the very idea of aSFF. It must be said that Chomsky’s conjecture is speculative. Even so, hetakes the idea very seriously, and I shall pay the due respect by doing likewise.Moreover, the notion is employed, by McGinn (1991, 1993) in particular, toargue for the substantive claim that consciousness is mysterious (McGinn, infact, appears to think that more or less everything philosophers think about ismysterious.) If my contentions are anywhere near correct, while conscious-ness (or free-will, or personal identity, or meaning, etc.) might well be mys-terious, it will not be because there is a human SFF that fails to accommodateit.

† 26 Newick Road, London, E5 ORR, United Kingdom, [email protected]

Dialectica Vol. 56, No 2 (2002), pp. 125-151

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Problems and Mysteries: A Preliminary Characterisation

Chomsky’s notion of a SFF is tied to that of a problem-mystery distinction. Ishall describe a strong distinction; there is a weak one, relativised to the hereand now, but it is one that no-one should want to deny.

In a strong sense, ‘problems’ cover questions we could answer, events wecould explain or otherwise understand, properties whose constitution we coulddiscern, and so on. It will be noted that problem has a modal aspect: problemsare not necessarily things we shall solve, they are things we could solve. Forexample, Fermat’s last theorem remained a problem for over 300 years untilAndrew Wiles’s positive proof. Now consider the closest possible world Wjust like the actual world save that Wiles (or a counterpart thereof) gives upon his proof with no-one continuing his research, and that W-humanity meetsits end without ever knowing whether or not ‘xn + yn = zn’ has integral solu-tions for n > 2. Is Fermat’s last theorem only a problem in W, i.e., could W-humanity find a proof? Yes; for, on our assumption that all else is equal, themathematics is available in W for Wiles’s proof, even though no-one getsaround to employing it. The point is this: problems are demarcated relative toour cognitive capacity or reach, where such a capacity is abstracted from thecontingency of what we happen to do or are interested in; it is, though, con-strained by the myriad of contingent factors that have contributed to the devel-opment of our brains and will, presumably, continue to do so. This last pointbears emphasis: it is not that some domains are so simple, while others are sodamned complex; the issue is to do with what our minds are constitutively ableto represent and explain, independently of whether a given domain is simpleor complex in an objective sense – whatever such a sense might be.

Mysteries also have a modal aspect: they are insoluble, inexplicable in prin-ciple. Unlike problems, which may contingently evade resolution, mysterieslie beyond our understanding. Before the discovery of DNA there was noknown mechanism to instantiate the heritable traits upon which selectionworks. Even so, heritable traits were not mysterious before 1953, as the dis-covery and subsequent theory demonstrated, they were merely problematic.Dark matter might be mysterious; then again, it might smoothly be accom-modated within current particle physics. It might be that no reformation of settheory we could formulate will tell us whether or not 2ℵ

0 = ℵ 1, in which casethe continuum hypothesis would constitute a mystery (here I forego any intu-itionistic scruples.) Alternatively, the negation, say, of the hypothesis might beunsatisfiable in a any model for some theory which supersedes ZF(+C). At themoment, as with dark matter, there is no way of knowing. Such is the way withmysteries: at least at the present state of play, we cannot tell if we are dealing

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with a deep problem or a mystery. Furthermore, mysteries outstrip problemsin the sense that, while any problem is formulatable qua soluble, mysteries arenot so minimally accessible: the notion carries no implication that we can somuch as frame the appropriate questions. After all, if the answers are consti-tutively beyond our ken, we should not expect, in every case, to be able topose the right questions in the first place.

My aim will not be to refute this strong distinction; I have no argument thatthere are only problems, and no mysteries. Indeed, I think it far from implau-sible that there are domains, perhaps as yet not thought of, which are such thatour brains are ill-equipped to deal with them. Yet this thought does not pro-vide us with the kind of distinction to which Chomsky and others appeal. Inparticular, while the thought allows us to hypothesise coherently cases of mys-tery, it does not allow us a demarcation of them. Chomsky (2000a, p. 83), forsure, does not think that the distinction can be drawn sharply, but nor is thedistinction meant to be so lose that it does not reflect a real feature of our cog-nition. That is, Chomsky’s point is not merely that we are epistemicallybounded; it is, rather, that such a boundary is endogenously determined tosome specifiable degree. This thought is crucial. Pinker (1997, p. 558-65), whootherwise commends epistemic boundedness, thinks that the thesis is “almostperversely unprovable” (op cit, p. 562). I would go further: if the mysterious-ness of mysteries is itself mysterious, then we shall never be in a positionrationally to conclude that such and such is a mystery. By drawing an endoge-nous boundary, Chomsky may be understood as attempting to remove mys-tery from mysteries and so explain our epistemic boundedness. The deter-mining endogenous factor is a human science forming faculty (SFF).

The Limits of Thought

Chomsky conjectures that the broad shape of human scientific accomplish-ment is a function of an innate SSF. As an initial characterisation, we can thinkof our putative SFF as analogous to the language faculty. Here is Chomsky(1975b, pp. 155-6; cf. Chomsky, 1968/72, pp. 90-3; 1971, p.49; 1988, pp. 156-9), making use of Pierce1:

The fact that “admissible hypotheses” are available to [the SFF] accounts for its abilityto construct rich and complex explanatory theories. But the same properties of mind thatprovide admissible hypotheses may well exclude other successful theories as unintelli-gible to humans... though these theories might be accessible to a differently organisedintelligence.

1 Chomsky (e.g., 1988, p. 158) has since dropped the appeal to Peircean abduction (seebelow).

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Thus, where the language faculty realizes a universal grammar (UG) whichallows for the generation of the various grammars that humans may acquire,so the SFF realizes a set of concepts and principles that allow for the forma-tion of all the possible theories humans may understand. UG empiricallydefines the notion of a possible human language (a grammar or I-language),but it does not follow that UG determines every possible ‘language’. Aliens,if such there are, will, we may presume, possess a quite distinct UG (or some-thing else entirely) that determines languages inaccessible to us. Our UG isnot a general purpose device to construct languages, it is severely constrainedby principles which allow only a finite amount of variation: a human languageis one which can in principle be deduced from UG principles given the settingof a finite number of parametric values. Thus, some ‘languages’ are mysteriesfor us, i.e., those not determined by our UG.2 The same thought applies to SFF.SFF is not a general purpose device which can construct a true theory for anydomain. The set of theories it determines is drawn from a fixed conceptualresource with a finite number of principles defined over it. Now consider theset of true theories of the universe and its furniture, and the set of theoriesdetermined by SFF. The intersection of the two sets is the set of (true) theo-ries accessible to humanity; what falls outside the intersection is inherentlymysterious. The intersection there is, is a “chance product of human nature”(Chomsky, 2000a, p. 83). There are a number of quite slippery issues to dowith how close we should understand this analogy to which I shall return atlength in §4; for the moment the sketch above suffices.

In this section I shall look at some considerations that are understood tomilitate for a problem-mystery distinction independently of the notion of aSFF, but which may be taken to buttress the SFF thesis in that a SFF wouldprovide a natural explanation of them. That is, the SFF thesis is supported tothe extent that it provides the best explanation of an independently coherentproblem-mystery distinction. In the following sections I shall look at consid-erations specific to the SFF thesis.

Chomsky (e.g., 1993, 2000a,) is fond of reminding us that we are organ-isms, put together by evolution (not necessarily by natural selection), we arenot angels. We are not designed, by God or anything else, to know all there isto know. Independent of the SFF hypothesis, then, to claim jointly that thetruth about reality is unconstrained by our cogitations and that every truth fallswithin our understanding is to attribute to ourselves strange powers unprece-

2 Chomsky (1965, p. 56) does contend that grammars which are not generated from UGmay still be acquirable through our more general problem solving capacity. Even so, there isno guarantee that any, still less all, ‘alien’ languages will so succumb.


dented in the biota. It would seem, therefore, that once even a modest realismis accepted, mystery follows, lest we think ourselves angelic (cf. Fodor, 1983,§V).3

If we look at the rest of the animal kingdom, we find cognitive closure. Afavoured example is that of the maze-solving abilities of rats (e.g., Chomsky,1991b, p. 41; 1993, p. 45). Over a large range of mazes (e.g., radial ones) ratsperform at levels equal to or greater than humans, but some mazes proveintractable. For instance, a prime maze is one whose solution depends on thesubject making a certain decision (left or right) at each prime choice. Rats’poor performance with such mazes is naturally explained by their lack of num-ber theory. Of course, it does not follow that the average person would per-form much better than a rat, yet the average person has the concepts whichwould enable him or her to easily solve the maze. Even if one lacked theexplicit notion of a prime, one could still work-out the maze by ‘discovering’the concept. This a rat cannot do.

The point of the analogy is that just as a rat will scurry around the primemaze, fated by its cognitive short-comings never to find the solution, sohumans scurry around with their problems, fated in some instances to remainin ignorance, constitutively lacking the concepts which would provide the cor-rect solution. We do not, for sure, appear to ourselves to be rat-like, but wewell might from the perspective of “a differently organised intelligence”. Tothink otherwise would effectively be to hold that humans have no cognitiveclosure. This appears to be a supernatural property, but to accept cognitive clo-sure, it seems, is to accept a form of the SFF thesis: only a certain range ofconcepts are “admissible” to us; we lack the capacity to frame other conceptsnecessary for the understanding of certain domains.

The rat analogy is certainly striking; it has the desired humbling effect. Nei-ther the analogy nor the surrounding argument, however, oblige us to seek aSFF explanation of our apparent cognitive closure.

Notwithstanding the potentially significant differences between rats andourselves (e.g., language, culture, technology, etc.), the analogy certainlylends force to the thought that, for any species, there will be insoluble ‘prob-lems’. So much, however, does not lead us to the SFF thesis as the natural

3 Ironically, while Chomsky understands our biological nature virtually to guarantee ourepistemic boundedness, he also speculates that UG is a perfect solution to the engineering prob-lem of fitting language to the legibility conditions imposed by the other systems of the mind;but perfection is not a property found elsewhere in nature. The moral should perhaps be: Don’tinfer properties of particular organisms from general claims about the biota; one always has tolook at the particular. I shall not, though, press the moral, for the difference between the twocases is what is important. See Chomsky (1995) for the perfection speculation at work; formore informal discussions, see Chomsky (2000a, chp.1; 2000b).

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explanation, and nor, therefore, to a definite sense of mystery for humans. Ofcourse, we are just another species, but such modesty obliges us to concedeno more than our lack of omniscience. The analogy may well convince us thatthere will be some problems or other that we are just not fit to solve, but thisgives no support to an endogenous demarcation between problems and mys-teries. Simply put: the rat analogy militates for our epistemic boundedness, butit does not tell in favour of the SFF thesis. Chomsky and McGinn appear toconflate the two ideas, but they are quite distinct. The SFF thesis would cer-tainly count as an explanation of our cognitive limits, but we can be cogni-tively limited without a SFF; more to the point, a SFF appears to be the ‘bestexplanation’ simply because it is read into the supposedly independentexplanandum.

The source of this illicit conflation, I think, is the contrast between cogni-tive closure and supernaturalism. Chomsky assumes that if there is no cogni-tive closure that allows for a demarcation (to some degree of precision) ofproblems and mysteries, an identification of mysteries as mysteries, thenhumanity is potentially omniscient (especially see Chomsky, 1988, pp. 158-9). By modus tollens, he arrives at the desired result. This inference is neverquestioned, perhaps because there are those, after Pierce, who have thoughtthat evolution has equipped us with a sure way to the truth (cf., Dennett, 1995,chp.13.) Also, Chomsky does at times appear to identify the two notions: theSFF thesis is a mere tag which dignifies our ignorance of the biological basisof our epistemic boundedness. But if this is all that is intended, then it is undulypresumptive to speak of a faculty, still more so, a faculty for science. How-ever Chomsky intends to gloss ‘SFF’, which will be investigated below, toreject epistemic immodesty is not to commend an endogenous demarcation.Chomsky’s inference harbours an exhaustive disjunction – endogenouslydetermined closure or omniscience – that we should not accept. Lack of suchclosure does not entail omniscience or anything remotely supernatural.

For the purpose of questioning the entailment, let us assume that we do nothave fixed conceptual resources. There is no SFF; instead, it is genuinely inde-terminate what we may understand. This may be so if a completed neuro-science and cognitive psychology would not provide us with a list, as it were,of domains we may understand; rather, we find that, cognitively speaking, thebrain contains some relatively autonomous components that follow an onto-genetic pattern as default, while others are much more inter-modal and dif-ferentiated. Our completed theories do not tell us if we can know what darkmatter really is or whether the continuum hypothesis is true or false. Indeed,we cannot even tell what range of concepts, bound or unbound, the brain cansupport: each brain, it turns out, is different in significant respects. For my


present purposes I need not suggest that this scenario is true. My argumentonly requires that it is consistent with what we presently know about thebrain.4 The scenario certainly deserves such modest credit, especially giventhat our concern is with fine grained notions of individual concepts andhypotheses.

Now the above view is not one of cognitive closure in the relevant sense;equally, it patently does not imply omniscience or any other supernatural prop-erty. One’s possessing a SFF is not a necessary condition for one not being agod. There may simply be no answer to what we may or may not understand,at least none from a complete science of the mind/brain. Human nature mayleave undetermined the limit of our cognitive reach. A corollary is that if westill want to ask, ‘In principle, what can humans understand?’, then we shouldacknowledge that the question is no longer to be construed as straightfor-wardly empirical. Rather, we are asking something like, ‘If humans with theircurrent cognitive make-up were to carry on indefinitely, what domains wouldresist explanation?’ With the secure foundation of fixed conceptual resourcesremoved, it is very difficult to begin to assess this question, for any answerwill be sensitive to a myriad of factors: not only our cognitive structure, butalso many exogenous factors: the kind of traditions that develop, the kind ofstuff there in fact is in the universe, the technology we develop, the kind ofassistance, if any, we receive from alien life-forms, and maybe just sheer luck.This is not to say that there are no mysteries, and only problems; the appro-priate conclusion is that the distinction between the two cannot be empiricallygrounded; rather than being an issue in cognitive science, the question is apiece of futurology, interesting enough to speculate on, but not something tobe greatly exercised about. The dialectical moral is this: a rejection of strongclosure is not conceptually or empirically concomitant with our deification;far from the problem-mystery distinction being an independent notion that theSFF thesis naturally explains, it is the thesis that motivates the supposed cog-nitive division. This conclusion should not be surprising: one can hardlyexpect to arrive at specific theses about human cognition from broad inchoateobservations.

I shall shortly look at some arguments which seek to support the SFF the-sis directly; before doing so, I shall look at another consideration – failure –of a more general nature.

4 Such a view is perhaps close to that of Dennett (1995), Churchland (1989), and Clark(1996). More generally, an empiricist theory of cognition would tend towards indeterminacyabout what can be known, whereas a rationalist or Kantian one would tend towards determi-nacy. My point, though, is orthogonal to this traditional divide. Cognitive design space is vastand we know very little about the area humans occupy; therefore, any inference from non-omniscience to architecturally specifiable epistemic limits is quite unsafe.

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Unlike McGinn (1991) on consciousness, Chomsky does not affect toknow whether this or that domain is mysterious, even so he appeals to poten-tial mysteries such as linguistic creativity.5 No-one is yet in a position to saythat consciousness or linguistic creativity are definitely not mysteries; thatwould require coherent theories of the phenomena, something none of us pos-sess. I do not think, though, that our historical failure to explain these phe-nomena or any others intimates that there is a SFF that lacks the appropriateconceptual resources. I shall argue for this negative thesis by suggesting thata history of failure may be properly explained in more modest terms.

Chomsky, of course, does not take the failure of previous accounts of cre-ativity to demonstrate mystery; ditto for McGinn (1991) and Nagel (1986,1995) vis-à-vis consciousness. Nevertheless, an inductive comfort is felt inpast failings; they are taken to be “suggestive” or indicative that the time hascome to give up.6 We should, however, not be moved to pass from failure tomystery.

Patently, no amount of failure allows us to infer mystery. But in what way,then, is failure suggestive? Charitably, the history of science is one of equalproportion of failure and success; and where there is success, failure alwaysthreatens as research programs wax and wane and data accumulate. If we areto be moved by simple failure, we might as well declare the universe and allthat’s in it a complete mystery. After all, science is not in the proof business.For failure to intimate mystery, the lack of success must be peculiar.

A mark of potential mystery to which some have appealed is that we, as itwere, ‘stare blankly’ at a problem, nothing is forthcoming. This characterisa-tion, however, is hardly descriptive, it is a judgement on the efforts made, orworse, an assessment of the authors’ own efforts. No problem induces blankstares, whether literally or metaphorically, in everyone. Consciousness cer-tainly does not as the groaning book shelves and increasing number of ‘cen-tres’ and conferences testify. Of course, one is free to think that such output

5 Chomsky (1986, 1991a) dubs the question of creativity Descartes’s problem: How arewe able to use language for the free expression of our thoughts? Ironically, precisely becausewe have some very good ideas about the structure of language, a better case can be made, Ithink, for the mystery of language use than can be for consciousness. Thanks to the greatadvances made in linguistics, we have a quite precise working notion of linguistic competence,and much corroborating data. Against such a background we might reasonably hope for at leasta working explanation of creativity. But this we do not have.

6 McGinn (1991, p. 7): “longstanding historical failure is suggestive, but scarcely con-clusive”. Nagel (1995, p. 97): “The various attempts to carry out this apparently impossibletask [i.e., explaining consciousness] and the arguments to show that they have failed, make upthe history of the philosophy of mind during the past fifty years”. Pinker (1997, p. 562): “thespecies’ best minds have flung themselves at the puzzles for millennia but have made noprogress”.


does not amount to much more than a blank stare, but one would thereby beoffering a slanted evaluation, not a neutral criterion of mystery. Alternatively,failure might take the form of an absence of science: a domain is identified,but neither a methodology nor predictive/explanatory theories are produced.Failure on such a scale would certainly intimate that something is grievouslyamiss, but, again, we are far from a suggestion of mystery.

Prior to Darwin, it is fair to say that while there were theories of evolution(witness Lamarck and Geoffrey), they did not provide sound mechanicalexplanations of the origins and inheritance of traits which lead to speciesdiversity and similarity. Indeed, the very idea of species evolution was ten-dentious; perhaps the then dominant view in biology was the neoclassical onethat dismissed the very idea that one species may ‘change’ into another.7 A rea-sonable person might well have declared, and many did, that life was a mys-tery, the province of divine ordinance. With the re-discovery of genes and thediscovery of DNA, Darwin’s theory is now the background for modern biol-ogy. Such has been this success that the very idea of an élan vital is now asegregious as that of a res cogitans. This transformation, from not even a recog-nition of evolution to advances favourably comparable to those of post-Galileophysics, took just over a hundred years. Thus, there is a precedent for ‘blankstares’ to metamorphose quickly into paradigmatic science. It is always toosoon, it seems, to gainsay intellectual advance.

More tendentiously, the human sciences, in contrast to the physical sci-ences, exhibit a failure to progress and in many cases predictive or explana-tory hypotheses are not even sought. An assessment of the human sciences bythe present criterion might lead one to think mystery endemic in the humandomain. Would this be a reasonable conclusion?

Well, is homo more complex, mysterious even, than DNA, quantummechanics, analysis, relativity theory, etc.? We are encouraged to think somerely on the basis of the lack of scientific success. We have, however, noclear, neutral sense of what conceptual complexity amounts to, still less adomain-independent metric of it. The relevant variables for any interestingsocial problem might be too astronomical to control for, but this would notconstitute a mystery in the present sense. Friendly aliens might lend us theirsuper computers. Consider: a four-colour-like theorem might be unprovable

7 The now standard view is that, before Darwin, a dogmatic and degeneratingAristotelian essentialism prevailed (see, e.g., Mayr, 1982; for a dissenting voice, see Depewand Weber, 1995). What is certainly true is that after Darwin (ultimately, the New Synthesis)evolution is not a phenomenon to be seriously disputed and, furthermore, natural selection isrecognised as the principal mechanism of change, if not the whole story.

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in the absence of computer assistance, but it would not therefore be mysteri-ous. Perhaps the problem with homo is more mundane.

Chomsky (1979, p. 57) himself has likened the methodology of sociologyto butterfly collection: lots of interesting data, if one likes that kind of thing,but nothing approaching explanation. Chomsky (1968/72, pp. 24-6) also sug-gests that a deep problem with the scientific investigation of that we are mostfamiliar with is that we think we already know the facts, and so waste ourefforts trying to systematise and explain what are in reality chimera. Chom-sky’s assault on behaviourism is a paradigm of the required process of defa-miliarisation. Perhaps we are awaiting a similar development vis-à-vis con-sciousness. In short, a more modest judgement is that there is nothinginherently mysterious about homo, the problem is that we continuously adoptthe wrong approach. It is an interesting historical question why this should beso, but there need be no portent of mystery. Indeed, what is probably mostinimical to the progress of the human sciences is the unfortunate, though per-haps unavoidable, usurpation of method by political agendas, both left andright. Again, this is something Chomsky has taught us.

I should not suggest that the retrieval of a criterion of mystery from a his-tory of failure is impossible, but I fail to see how it could be reasonably madein the face of historical precedent and more modest explanations. Let us, how-ever, move to Chomsky’s particular considerations for the existence of ahuman SFF rather than mysteries in general.

Faculties and Science

Let us assume that cognition is not served by a general purpose device; instead,the mind is divided into a number of dedicated devices that support a range ofcompetencies and capacities. Think of the nomenclature ‘faculty’ as (inten-tionally) picking out such devices in terms of the domain-specific principlesand concepts particular to them. This somewhat fuzzy characterisation is fora reason.

Fodor (1983, 2000) reads Chomsky’s notion of a faculty epistemologicallyrather than functionally, i.e., a Chomskyan faculty is a body of information asubject knows, not an architectural component. I think Fodor is right in asmuch as Chomsky’s theories are not processing stories, as many assume. Onecould, therefore, accept that Θ−theory, binding theory, et al. are innate whileholding that the mind is a general purpose device. Fodor, however, is not quiteright. Chomsky uses ‘faculty’ (and ‘organ’ and ‘module’) ambiguously (some-what like his use of ‘grammar’): it sometimes denotes a body of information,that which we cognize, at other times it denotes the cognitive mechanism that


supports that information and interfaces with performance systems (informa-tion cannot interface with anything.) This is not sloppiness: for Chomsky, thereis no question about the ‘psychological reality’ of a grammar apart from itsexplanatory worth; if it proves so worthy, then the grammar is an accurate,albeit abstract, intentional description of a yet unknown physical mechanism.Chomsky is assuming (contra the generalist) that there are dedicated devices(brain areas) without speculating upon their operational specification; and sothe devices do not individuate the faculties (see Chomsky, 1988, pp. 7-8). Con-sequently, a ‘Chomskyan’ faculty is a loser notion (qua intentional) thanFodor’s (1983) modules (effectively, input systems). In particular, facultiesneed not be automatic, inaccessible, or encapsulated. They do, though, followa biologically fixed maturation process: given a uniform initial state and expe-riential input, they determine a final state that supports a mature competence.This final state may also be uniform, as it appears to be with, say, the theoryof mind faculty; or it might be non-uniform, as it clearly is with the languagefaculty, i.e., different input determines different I-languages. As indicated, thebare idea of modules or faculties admits great variation (more of which below),though let us stay with the sketch at hand.

Now, if we conjecture that the human mind has a faculty architecture, somediagnostics have to be in play so that we may identify the faculty based com-petencies, for not all competencies are so supported. For example, line danc-ing, car repair, origami, chicken sexing, etc. are all competencies, but we arenot moved to posit, say, a line dancing faculty. But we do posit faculties forlanguage, theory of mind et al. This difference provides an angle on the diag-nostics appropriate for a faculty competence.

Faculties are fixed as part of our biological endowment; the principlestherein specified are thus innate, unlearnt. This gives us some ready diagnos-tics. First, a candidate faculty based competence must be uniform across thespecies within intelligible bounds of difference; it cannot be a culturally spe-cific capacity. In short, the competence must be a trait of the species. Second,the competence must follow a fairly strict ontogenic course; for since the blue-print of the development of the competence is genetically coded for, the com-petence should be invariant across a wide variety of experiences. Explicitteaching, for example, should not make a significant difference to the speedof the development or the final competence arrived at. Third, the competenceand its development should, to some degree, be invariant over various patholo-gies, injuries and differences in intelligence. A faculty F is a device dedicatedto a specific domain; disturbance to another faculty, therefore, should not nec-essarily lead to disturbance to F. Pace Fodor (1983, 2000) and his modules, itis perfectly coherent to view some faculties as enjoying proprietary interfaces

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with one another, while others may work in isolation (Collins, 2000).8 Fourthly,the competence should reach normal maturity in the face of a poverty of stimu-lus. This diagnostic is essentially just another way of saying that the competenceacquired is underdetermined by the data available to the child. After all, if a com-petence were determined by some learning regime or a certain set of stimuli (nomatter how complex), it would be redundant to claim that it is supported by afaculty, for the competence could apparently be acquired independent of anyprior principles or concepts specific to the competence’s domain (here I excludegeneral principles of, say, association, if such there are).

It should be transparent that the diagnostics delineated do not fit line danc-ing, etc. The diagnostics do fit linguistic competence and face recognition, anda good although still highly controversial case can be made for them fittingtheory of mind.9 Let us hypothesize, then, that these diagnostics are indeed cri-terial of a faculty competence. Do the diagnostics identify our scientificendeavours as faculty based? This is a difficult question because Chomsky is,I think, somewhat unclear on how the notion of a SFF is to be understood.

The problem is this: we can give ‘science’ a strict construal under which itprimarily covers our paradigms of successful scientific theories. Under thisreading, a SFF is a kind of theory selector, determining those domains in whichwe can achieve some success. Alternatively, we may construe science in a lib-eral way as covering any thinking (practise) that is guided by certain meta-principles (supra-empirical virtues). So read, a SFF is simply the seat, as itwere, of the set of principles which enter into our construction and evaluationof theories. Now while a case can be made, I think, for the view that somesuch principles are innate and uniform throughout the species, it also seemsobvious that such principles are domain general, not specific, and that theysupport neither the problem-mystery distinction, nor the associated modelfavoured by Chomsky whereby our SFF is supposed to determine a subset ofthe set of true theories. If, faced with such difficulties, we revert to the first,strict construal of science, so that the putative SFF meets these demands, thenwe lose the positive readings on the diagnostics. Either way, therefore, the SFFthesis appears to be in some disrepair.

Let us first look at the strict construal, which is, I think, highly implausi-ble; it does, though, have its interest. Science, we might say, is paradigmati-cally represented by the theories found in text books of say Newtonian

8 Fodor (2000, p. 62-3) does entertain what might be called distributional encapsulation,where modules enjoy (architecturally constrained) access to other modules’ databases, but suchorganisation is clearly exceptional for Fodor.

9 See Segal (1996) for, to my mind, a sound defence of the modularity of theory of mind.


mechanics, statistical thermodynamics, general relativity, Bohr’s atom theory,etc., where generalisations are sought that are explanatory and predictive offuture cases on the basis of postulated unobservables that unify otherwise dis-parate phenomena. Under this construal, a SFF may be understood as a devicethat gives us access to those concepts and principles required for fecund gen-eralisations over the domains in question (e.g., atoms or the structure of space),while other domains remain closed to us, for our SFF simply lacks the appro-priate conceptual resources. When Chomsky and McGinn claim that our SFFdetermines but a subset of the set of possible scientific theories, and that wemay determine what domains are mysterious to us, it is difficult not to havesuch a construal in mind. My initial analogy between the SFF and the languagefaculty (and the attendant quotation from Chomsky) followed such a line, forit is one that makes perfect sense of the problem-mystery distinction. This con-ception, however, appears to tell us that the kind of science typical of the Westfor the past 400 or so years is as cognitively determined as language is. If thisis the conception, then it is surely mistaken.

Science, as exemplified by, say, general relativity theory, is a fairly recentproduct of Western culture and there is no evidence whatsoever for its being aspecies trait. Nor, of course, does it have an ontogeny: normal human matura-tion does not produce scientists; it requires a great amount of explicit instruc-tion for one to grasp the theories characteristic of the last few centuries. Equally,being a scientist, so to speak, is not invariant under differences or changes ofintelligence or cognitive capacity: no-one expects scientific competence to beselectively spared or impaired and there is, of course, no evidence for any suchpathological profile. The reason for this is that grasping and working with a the-ory appears to require a battery of competencies and capacities: distinct kindsof reasoning (e.g., deductive and analogical), good long- and short-term mem-ory, mathematical and linguistic knowledge, experimental design, etc. So muchI take to be indisputable. Finally, the poverty of stimulus diagnostic does notapply either (I shall look at this diagnostic separately in § 5 with reference tothe more plausible liberal construal.) We learn scientific theories, we do notacquire them from partial and degraded data. Indeed, to acquire a theory, wetypically need to be inundated with stimulus (lectures, text books, conversations,experiments, etc.), and even then we consistently make all kinds of errors. Per-haps, then, Chomsky has something different in mind.

Consider: “The basic elements of rational inquiry may have some of the properties of such cognitivesystems as the language faculty, though the ways they are employed are surely quite differ-ent: scientific knowledge does not grow in the mind of someone placed in an environment”(Chomsky, 1980, p. 140).

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Quite! Notwithstanding the apparent support the strict construal receives fromChomsky, here he seems to be advancing what I earlier called the liberal con-strual under which science is simply a kind of thinking marked by our pre-disposition to judge according to certain principles. By this reading, our SFF,in some sense, leads us one way rather than another through the space of the-ories, but it does not code for any such route, we cannot, as it were, read offthe theory of natural selection, say, from the neonatal brain. Where we are ata given period will be a function of a background of past theories, especiallythe successful ones, but this history and future progress is shaped or canaledby the kind of answers our SFF permits according to its principles. This is themodel Chomsky appears to present in his 1988, chp. 5. Chomsky (2000a, pp.82-3; also 1980, p. 140) offers empirical test, elegance, and criteria of intelli-gibility, as potential candidates for such principles; we may add simplicity,exhibition of causal structure (‘Mill’s methods’, perhaps) and other such meta-empirical notions.

As I indicated above, while this latter construal does not suffer from thesame impairments as its restrictive counterpart, it does have its own problems.The first thing to note about the proposed principles is that they are not domainspecific: simplicity, elegance, testability, etc. are applicable to any field. Thus,if a SFF has no domain specificity, then it really makes no difference whetherone says that the history of science has been shaped by our SFF or, vacuously,by our thought. Put only slightly otherwise, a SFF would simply be for think-ing as such. Indeed, Fodor (1983, 2000) takes cognition which is governed bysuch global principles to be precisely that kind of thinking which is not domainspecific, in contrast to the cognition that is served by modules with their pro-prietary databases. Of course, the operative notion of a domain is somewhatvague; still, one reason why language and face recognition, say, appear to befaculty competencies is that their domains are so idiosyncratic: our proficiencyin the domains calls for specific information about verb structure, vertical sym-metry of eyes, mouth, et al. In contrast, the principles under considerationappear to have no idiosyncratic domain. From finding one’s way home or find-ing a lost sock to arranging a wedding or building a kennel for the dog, eachrequires principles of reason and testing, even if, perhaps, only in the imagi-nation. Any rational belief fixation requires some constraining, otherwise, wewould be afflicted with the frame problem, which, in point of fact, we neverare. Consider, specifically, the notion of causal structure, which appears tohave a strong innate basis (Sperber, et al., 1995): we like theories to give uscausal mechanisms; such is why, inter alia, Einstein gives us a better theoryof gravitation than Newton and why no-one but cranks take morphic reso-


nance to be a serious hypothesis. Equally, however, we impose causal struc-ture on everything we come across: if we cannot discern a causal pattern, wetend to retire in bemusement, but not always. Sometimes we forego causalstructure (see below).

It might be that we can delineate science-specific notions of simplicity, ele-gance, etc., but we cannot assume that there are such principles without beg-ging the question at issue, for such an assumption amounts to a presumptivespecification of a SFF. Moreover, we have no independent good reason tothink that there are any science-specific abductive principles. As it stands,therefore, ‘SFF’ is a misnomer; for why speak of a faculty for science whenprecious little is excluded? The whole point of faculty-theorising is to divideand conquer, to isolate specific competencies and attempt to see what kinds ofpeculiar information and principles best explain the observed proficiency.There is no theoretical gain in hypothesising a faculty which appears to serve(more or less) the whole of thought.

How, then, are we to understand the faculty-ness of the SFF? Perhaps weare employing ‘faculty’ too precisely; Chomsky (1975b, pp.155-6; 1988, pp.156-9) does explicitly draw the analogy between language and science, but itis clearly not meant to be a tight one. The issue here is the extent to which aSFF can be domain neutral (unlike language) without becoming indistin-guishable from a vacuous notion of general intelligence or rationality. Let uslook at some potentially pertinent proposals.

On Fodor’s (1983, 2000) view, the mind/brain broadly divides into somecomponents that are domain-specific (for Fodor, these are modules that serveinput cognition: vision, olfaction, parsing, etc.) and others that are domaingeneral (or perhaps just one), these serving central cognition, i.e., rationalbelief fixation. Although it is rarely, if ever, noted, the theory theory view (e.g.,Gopnik and Wellman, 1994, and Gopnik and Meltzoff, 1997) is close toFodor’s position to the extent that both resist the view that central, rationalthought is modular, i.e., rational belief fixation is not served by an ensembleof dedicated, domain specific, encapsulated components; still less do Fodorand the theory theorists commend a module dedicated to science.10 Instead,both posit innate domain general principles of theory formation and confir-mation which, we may presume, have shaped the history of science. So, is this

10 The closeness is not even noted by Gopnik and Meltzoff (1997), who run Fodor togeth-er with the central module crowd in evolutionary psychology (Ibid, p. 58), while also suggest-ing the theory theory view can tell a story about Fodor’s central system! They alsofallaciously conflate Fodor’s parser module with Chomsky’s language faculty (Ibid, Chp. 2,passim) (see below, especially n.15).

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not a tale of a SFF?11 Fodor himself is non-committal as to the organisation ofcentral cognition: organisation there surely is, but without new concepts, wehaven’t a clue how to account for it (for Fodor, 1983, p. 107, “the more global[i.e., less modular] a cognitive process is, the less anybody understands it.”.)Even so, the principles of belief fixation captured by our putative principlesare, for Fodor, innate and can be selectively impaired (e.g., it follows fromFodor’s account that rational belief fixation could be impaired while linguis-tic competence remains intact.) Where Fodor demurs on principle, the theorytheory view can be understood as offering a story about belief fixation (seeGopnik and Meltzoff, 1997, pp. 63-7). Peripheral modules output the datawhich forms the evidence for theory construction on the basis of an initialinnate structure, guided by meta-empirical principles.12 A proper assessmentof Fodor’s account and the theory theory view is beyond my present scope;fortunately though, at least for my dialectic, neither approach is flush with theSFF notion Chomsky appears to favour.

Chomsky clearly does not view faculties as theories that are developedaccording to domain general principles; on the contrary, he eschews the veryidea of anything approaching a general intelligence in favour of common-sense faculties, a mathematics faculty, a musical one, etc. Chomsky (1988, p.47-8) avers: “in any domain…, specific… capacities enter into the acquisitionand use of belief and knowledge”; general mechanisms, “if they exist”, enjoy,at best, a “doubtful” role. Chomsky (e.g., 1980, p. 135) certainly rejects theapplication of domain general theorising with respect to linguistic deve-lopment, which, for Chomsky, has nothing whatsoever to do with findingsimple and elegant hypotheses or analogical reasoning or any hypothesistesting at all.

Might a SFF be understood as an abstraction from, or construction out of,a collection of domain-specific faculties or theories? A SFF, by such a sug-gestion, would be constituted from our endowed folk understanding of biol-ogy, physics, etc. This suggestion might be finessed by appeal to Carey andSpelke (1994). They rightly acknowledge that explicit science is quite differ-ent from our developmental theorising (if such is what we do) precisely

11 One striking correspondence is that Gopnik and Meltzoff (1997, pp. 26-7/53) claimthat the innate principles (prediction, explanation, etc.) which govern theory formation alsoexplain scientific convergence. This is one of Chomsky’s key claims (see §5).

12 Gopnik and Wellman (1994) and Gopnik and Meltzoff (1997) follow Karmiloff-Smith(1992) in assuming that modularity (the faculty approach) has trouble explaining development.The thought is wholly confused. Of course modules develop, the point is that the crucial deter-minant of development is the normal maturation of the brain under normal stimulus conditions.Chomsky makes this point every time he puts pen to paper. It is the theory theory approach, Ishould say, that is in trouble (see n.14).


because it is not restricted to, nor directly constrained by, the domain-specific‘core’ knowledge which may reasonably be thought of as innate. But they alsopicture science proper as enabled (and so limited?) by analogical mappingsacross the innate domains which constitute ‘constructed’ knowledge.13 Well,what makes Carey and Spelke’s hypothesis, and perhaps other such boot-strapping models, provisionally sound is that the notion of analogical map-pings allows scientific thinking to come under the purview of developmentalcognitive science without egregiously restricting science to what the child nat-urally arrives at. The notion, however, is also so loose as to be of scant helpin constructing a workable notion of a SFF. After all, anything is analogous toanything else. I cannot imagine what the evidence would look like for theclaim that the admissible theories are restricted by innate analogical possibil-ities. For example, we tend to analogise on the basis of our most complexmachines (water pumps, clocks, computers, etc.), but none of this is innatelyspecified in the relevant respect. Indeed, if we consider the extent to whichexplicit theorising in any given domain has departed from our intuitive out-look, then it seems that the restriction our ‘natural’ view places on science isapproximately zero. The data there are to support the existence of ‘science’faculties indicates that they are of a distinctively Aristotelian stripe, an out-look long since rejected in every area of our understanding of the natural world(see, e.g., Keil, 1989).14

It bears noting that if Chomsky were commending the SFF thesis as a storyabout the principles of central cognition, then he would be quite inconsistent.Chomsky’s language faculty is not a Fodorian peripheral module; rather, it isa system that is for thinking (if anything), it is not a mere parser.15 Chomsky,then, cannot consistently hold to the claim that central cognition (the seat ofthinking) is governed by domain general principles. There is, however, a more

13 Pinker (1997, Chp. 5) appears to share this view insofar as he explicitly rejects a fac-ulty for science, but (Chp. 8) argues that we are epistemically bound due to our core endowedknowledge. Pinker’s reasoning here, however, unlike that of Chomsky, is that natural selectionhas constrained what we might understand to being less than the whole truth.

14 There is a serious question as to whether the theory theory approach is distinctiveenough to give us the required domain general principles. The problem is this. The child isunderstood to fixate on certain evidentially constrained theories; the child’s brain is built toarrive at them. This is evidenced by the fact that the theories are more or less uniform acrossthe species. But thesis and evidence are here unstable: to account for the uniformity, the theo-ry theorist must enrich the principles the child employs, but the more rich they become, the lessevidence the child requires and the less theory-like the ‘theories’ become. It is therefore moot,I think, whether the theory theory view offers a coherent alternative to the faculty approach. Inshort, the child just isn’t like the scientist, and vice versa. (see Leslie, 2000 for other deep wor-ries.)

15 For Chomsky’s explicit rejection of the Fodor view, at least regarding language, seeChomsky (1986, p.14, n.10; 1991a, pp.19-21; 2000a, pp.117-8).

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fundamental problem with the idea of a SFF answering to either the Fodor orto the theory theory view.

Chomsky’s discussions of the feasibility of a SFF are always presented inthe context of the problem-mystery distinction. The two ideas appear to bemutually supporting: the SFF hypothesis offers a cognitive explanation of thedistinction; without it we would have no independent ground to say of anydomain that it is mysterious. Concomitantly, the supposed intuitive coherencyof the distinction (as discussed in § 3) gives credence to the view that scienceis not the play of a general, unbounded intelligence. Neither the Fodor nor thetheory-theory view support such a position on the problem-mystery distinc-tion.

Fodor (1983, §V) certainly thinks that there are mysteries; he reasons thatsince cognition is innately structured, there are endogenously determined lim-its on the kind of hypotheses we can entertain. Crucially, however, this has lit-tle to do with Fodor’s particular architecture of modules and central systems:any view that gives cognition a fixed architecture of information control andaccess is bound to admit the possibility that the world might throw up a prob-lem which cannot be answered by our minds.16 This reasoning, though, is inline with my happy concession in § 3. There I suggested that human thinking,like that of any other organism, is most certainly epistemically bound. But thisis just to admit that we are not potentially omniscient; it is not to concede thatthe structure of cognition demarcates between theories, determines a subset oftrue theories. Fodor’s account, then, does not give us the kind of cognitiveexplanation Chomsky expects. Indeed, Fodor agrees with Chomsky that if cog-nition is thoroughly modular, then we shall have a clear demarcation of prob-lems and mysteries, but Fodor’s (1983, 2000) key claim is precisely to denythe antecedent here: that the mind is not massively modular is what makes itmysterious!

The theory theory view also fails to give Chomsky the support he wantsfor the problem-mystery distinction. The point here is straightforward and isindependent of the details of the theory theory approach. The general princi-ples at issue are comparative ones: they help us decide between theories orhypotheses, they do not produce the theories for us. It makes very little sense,for example, to say that we only select simple theories. We favour the simplertheory, ceteris paribus. The rider accommodates the fact that we happily neg-lect the dictates of a given principle, if so doing gives us a greater, all-round

16 E.g., Fodor (1983, p. 123) thinks that even a wild-eyed generalist position such asHume’s is still endogenously restricted because such ‘minds’ can only access informationderived from perceptual input.


fit with the other principles: as regards causal structure, the move from Carte-sian to Newtonian mechanics is an example; so is, perhaps, the developmentof quantum mechanics this century. Being comparative, these principles can-not preclude certain hypotheses or theories from consideration, they can onlyadvice us against them once they are on the table, as it were. Consider, forexample, one of Chomsky’s (2000a, p. 85) speculative examples: dark matter.There are a number of proposals on the market, involving, variously, the sizeand shape of the universe, the presence of super-massive (hence, super-dense)black holes, hitherto undetected elementary particles, etc. Now let us hypoth-esise that the nature of dark matter is mysterious for us. In what way couldthis be a function of our meta-empirical principles? It is certainly not to thepoint to say that the true theory is too complex. It might be too complex, butthis would have nothing to do with our favouring simplicity; after all, if thecorrect theory is too complex to entertain, then we cannot get around to judg-ing its simplicity relative to another theory. What if the truth of the matter didnot admit to a causal explanation? Again, this would not necessarily portendmystery. A variety of indeterminacy hypotheses have been happily entertainedand accepted in the absence of a settled interpretation (read ‘mechanism’),notoriously, the collapsing wave packet in quantum theory. We like causalmechanisms, but we can and do forego them; mutatis mutandis, I submit, forthe other principles. The principles help us decide between the theories on thetable, but they will not reject all the theories, still less provide a licence for usto say that no theory will do. Again, therefore, the theory theory approach,even if it were otherwise acceptable to Chomsky, does not provide for a cog-nitive explanation of the problem-mystery distinction.

The position we have arrived at is that while the strict construal of science ispatently inadequate to satisfy any of the faculty diagnostics, it clearly does makesense of the problem-mystery distinction in the way Chomsky sets it up. On theother hand, while the views we have just been considering do offer the kind ofprinciples relevant to theory construction and assessment that may well be innate(if not quite faculty-like), they do not offer a cognitive ground for the theorydemarcation Chomsky wants. Perhaps, as it seems, Chomsky wants it both ways.It must be kept in mind that Chomsky’s SFF is an unabashed speculation and, forall we presently know, there might be innate principles that are rich and specificenough to determine the set of theories we may access. As it stands, I think theproposal falls between the two stools of the strict and liberal construals.

In the next and final section I shall look at Chomsky’s specific argumentfor a SFF based upon the poverty of stimulus diagnostic. This separate treat-ment is apposite, for Chomsky, at least in one place, appears to understand ourfourth diagnostic as the crucial one.

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Induction and Convergence

For Chomsky, the most telling indicator that a competence is faculty-based isits satisfaction of our fourth diagnostic. We have already seen, though, that sci-ence is not a competence in the way that language is, say: our acceptance ofthe theory of geodesic planetary orbits is patently not underdetermined by datain the same way that our acceptance of the principles of binding theory is. Inwhat respect, then, does the fourth diagnostic militate for a SFF? Chomsky(1975b, p.24-5; cf. 1971, pp.49-50) has contended that without a SFF “it wouldbe impossible for scientists to converge in their judgement on particularexplanatory theories that go far beyond the evidence at hand,... while at thesame time rejecting much evidence as irrelevant or beside the point, for themoment at least” [my emphasis]. The nature of the inference here appears tobe that if our convergence is to be possible (not a miracle), we need extra-empirical principles to weed out all but a few of the contrary theories that wecould otherwise find to comport with the data; a SFF is simply the seat of suchprinciples. I must say that I find this argument to be very weak indeed; beforedemonstrating why, however, a word of caution is in order.

Chomsky’s early views were certainly motivated by Quine and, especially,Goodman’s work on induction: Chomsky agreed with many others that uncon-strained induction is untenable, whether as a model of learning or the normsof science, but he also rejected any empiricist band-aids to cover the problem(see Chomsky, 1975a, Introduction). Chomsky, to my knowledge, however,offers the above direct argument to a SFF only in the two places cited above(see below for a qualification); his more recent discussions simply associatethe SFF thesis with the coherency of the problem-mystery distinction (e.g.,Chomsky, 1991b, p. 41; 1993, pp. 44-5; 2000a, pp. 82-3). Perhaps, then,Chomsky’s considered view is that there is no inference from the inductivepractise of science to the existence of a SFF (cf., Chomsky, 1980, pp. 139-40).Whatever the case may be, the argument is worth considering, for it purportsto offer precisely the backing the SFF thesis requires.

Chomsky’s concern, of course, is with the cognitive basis of our rational-ity, not with the clarification of the concepts of validity or justification. Thathumans, especially in their scientific mode, are concerned to cleave to rationalnorms, tells us a simple truth about human thought: there is a slack betweenour receipt of data and the convergent beliefs we arrive at. Such a slack, how-ever, amounts to no more than the fact that we are not blank slates. Crucially,the possibility remains open that the innate equipment that enters into our abil-ity to take up the slack is not the set of the methodological principles that gov-ern self-conscious scientific investigation and even if it is, it does not follow,as made clear above, that the equipment makes up a faculty. All that does fol-


low is that the scientist needs some innate equipment to be so much as a thinkeras opposed to a S-R device. Let us see this in some detail.

An underdetermination thesis UT says, for some set of methodologicalcanons C, that data-set D does not confirm or corroborate a theory T on thebasis of C at the expense of all other contrary theories. Now if we do in factconverge on T, then, relative to UT, any potential addition to C would over-ride the underdetermination problem, i.e., UT would not show that there is norational justified choice to be had. It might be that every theory is underdeter-mined by every possible D given any C, but I know of no argument thatattempts to show that this is so. To assess any given UT then, we need to askwhether the associated C is reasonable or realistic. If the answer is ‘No’, thenwe do not have a sound underdetermination claim; if the answer is ‘Yes’, thenwe do. So, Chomsky is perfectly correct in thinking that some C is required,but the requirement is not based on a need to overcome underdetermination;C is needed so that our theories may rationally confront the data in the firstplace, whether or not the confrontation leads to underdetermination. Where,then, does the claim come from that the scientists’ C must be innate? For allthat has been said, it is still open to think of C as the product of our thought,rather than being our thought as such, as it were. It looks as if the claim thatscientists’ C is the innate content of a faculty floats free of any underdetermi-nation thesis.

Consider Hume on induction. Hume demonstrated the deductive underde-termination of theories (hypotheses); that is, for any D, if theory T is confirmedby entailing D, then there are contrary theories that are equally confirmed. Thisnotion of underdetermination, however, amounts to the now trivial claim thatscientific inference is non-demonstrative or, so as not to exclude the Popper-ian, deduction cannot amount to justification. As regards Chomsky’s inferenceto a SFF, if this is the only underdetermination a scientist must face, then allthat follows about convergence is that it cannot be explained on the assump-tion that the scientist’s canons are wholly deductive. For example, theories T1,T2,…Tn might all entail D, but if T1 were the only theory consistent with anassociated favoured theory Tn+1, then it would be rational to choose T1. Other-wise put, Chomsky’s argument can be spiked by so little as an appeal to a sin-gle canon of reason (e.g., choose the theory that least disrupts your other com-mitments) that goes beyond the entailment of D; there is not a whiff here of aninference to an innate SFF. I do not mean to suggest, of course, that any suchcanon(s) would in fact uniquely single out a theory in any epistemic scenario;my point is only that deductive underdetermination leaves such an option open.

As indicated above, a notion of underdetermination closer to what Chom-sky has in mind is the one due to Goodman’s (1954/83) ‘new riddle of induc-

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tion’. Familiar details aside, Goodman shows that if hypothesis H (e.g., ‘Allemeralds are green’) is confirmed by its observed instances (i.e., green emer-alds), then a contrary hypothesis H* (‘All emeralds are grue’) is also confirmedby the same instances, where ‘grue’ means ‘either green if first examined before2050AD or blue if not first examined before 2050AD’. The riddle is that weunerringly take the ‘green’ hypothesis to be confirmed (to some degree) by theobservation of emeralds, even though the grue hypothesis is confirmed to thesame degree by the emeralds. If we did not so converge, we would have noshared sense of laws, natural kinds, explanation, prediction, etc., but the basisfor the convergence appears to be prior to the actual framing and corroborationof hypotheses. Do we need the SFF thesis to explain this?

To keep things finite, let us assume that Goodman’s claim is well-founded.What Goodman shows is that enumerative induction is not sufficient to givea hypothesis a unique degree of confirmation. So, if we wish to explain con-vergence on, say, ‘green’ rather than ‘grue’, we have no greater license fromthe riddle than to add to C (= enumerative induction). This, of course, is pre-cisely what Goodman did, for good or ill, with his historical notion ofentrenchment: roughly, we converge on ‘green’ because, unlike ‘grue’, it hasbeen successfully projected in the past. Alternatively, Harman (1994) proposesa practical principle of simplicity to rule out ‘grue’. Now, these and manyother ‘solutions’ do not necessarily speak to the ‘genetic problem’ of howhumans do in fact converge (Chomsky, 1971, p.6). But the same point holdsfor the riddle itself: it does not so much as indicate the shape of a cognitivesolution, still less necessitate one along faculty lines. At best, the riddle showsthat enumerative induction is inadequate as either a model of justification or,indeed, cognition. This is an instance of the general moral: underdetermina-tion arguments are negative; they work against a given set of methodologicalcannons, they do not establish the identity of the cannons which in general arerequired for rational convergence.

I have not insisted that we should read Chomsky’s direct argument fromconvergence to a SFF as being a gloss on Goodman’s riddle. For sure, Chom-sky (1975a, pp. 33-4; 1971, pp.6-8) does appeal with perfect legitimacy to theriddle as a central plank in the argument against a general empiricist model oflearning, but no direct association with a SFF is made. Perhaps, though, Chom-sky, at least in (1975b) where the direct argument is made, is conflating theSFF thesis with Fodor’s position on concept learning. The proceedings of the1975 Royaumont conference (Piattelli-Palmarini, 1980) suggest this. Fodorand Chomsky there argued that the moral of Goodman’s riddle is that anyinduction is “logically impossible” without an “a priori [innate] ordering ofhypotheses [or predicates]”; Fodor took this to be “so self-evident that it is


superfluous to discuss it” (Piattelli-Palmarini, 1980, pp. 259-61). Now I do notso much think that this line is false, as woefully underspecified. What is “self-evident”, let us grant, is that blank-slate induction is impossible. Goodman(1954/83, p. 82) himself claimed this in arguing that a mere habituated fixa-tion on a regularity à la Hume cannot establish which predicates are the pro-jectible ones, because green and grue instances are equally regular by defini-tion. The point is well taken but it hardly leads us to credit the scientist witha SFF, even one which consists of a predicate metric alone. The inference isblocked because the scientist is patently not otherwise a blank slate. Such,indeed, is Goodman’s point: scientists’ choices are a function of history. Asregards the developing child, if one is running a hypothesis confirmationmodel of learning, as Chomsky (1965) was with language and Fodor (1975)was considering with concepts, then one faces the problem of explaining howthe child fixates on a given hypothesis when the data does not determine sucha choice. As with underdetermination generally, the answer is to be found ina methodological organon C. In the learning case, both Chomsky (1965) andFodor (1975) take C to consist, inter alia, of a simplicity metric defined overan innate set of grammars and predicates respectively. For present purposes Ihave no problem with such proposals, although both Chomsky (1981) andFodor (1981) rejected them in favour of triggering models (such is perhapswhy Chomsky ceases to appeal to Goodman after the development of the P&Papproach.) My point is simply that the scientist faces quite a different under-determination problem from the child: the child, on the assumption that he orshe is a hypothesis confirmer, needs some C prior to the data; this is enoughto undermine blank-slate empiricism in favour of an indeed self-evidentnativism. The issue for the scientist, on the other hand, is what, if anything,can go into C to enable one to arrive rationally at some hypothesis, but thereis no argument here to say that whatever C comprises must be what the childhas; a fortiori there is no argument which says that the scientist’s C must beinnate. I should say that if Chomsky and Fodor were guilty of this conflationof the child with the scientist at Royaumont, the confusion did not last. Thereis some dispute about this.

Putnam has persistently attributed to the ‘Chomskyan’ (a nomenclatureapparently co-extensive with ‘Fodorian’) an ambition to find an inductivealgorithm which would explain our scientific reasoning, an ambition that isspiked by Goodman’s riddle.17 In point of fact, though, even in his (1975),

17 For the association of Chomsky with inductive logic, with references to Goodman’s‘refutation’ thereof, see Putnam (1981, pp. 125-6; 1983, p. viii; 1988, pp. 82-3; 1992, pp. 14-6).

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Fodor was not arguing for a theory of inductive concept learning; his claimwas that if that is one’s model, then one is de facto committed to an innateinductive logic (his major point, of course, was that such a model does notamount to concept learning – there is no such thing – but to belief fixation.)Fodor’s (1981) triggering proposal is by definition non-rational: a trigger iscaused, it isn’t warranted. Since then, Fodor (1983, 1987, 2000) has claimedthat we have not a hope of a prayer of discovering any general inductive algo-rithm, because our computational theory of mind does not account for non-modular processes, viz. abductive ones. Chomsky (1980, p. 140; cf. Piattelli-Palmarini, 1980, p. 320) agrees with Fodor (see quotation in §4.)

Well, if Chomsky and Fodor do not run child and scientist together, weappear to be left with no argument from underdetermination to a SFF as theonly possible explanation of convergence. Notwithstanding Chomsky’s choiceof modality for his direct argument, let us relax his inference to a best expla-nation one. The thesis now becomes quite tempting, for it seems that its onlycompetitor is a sociological account, which threatens to make scientific con-vergence no more rational than our allegiances to football teams. The choicebetween cognition or society, however, does not exhaust the options.

Let us agree that individual scientists are rational, they hold to their theo-ries because they judge them to be true or at least well corroborated. So much,of course, does not explain convergence, but can we not say that agreementarises due to individuals being trained within a research program and their the-oretical energies being spent therein? Otherwise put, scientists employ theircognition to a highly restricted space whose shape is due to exogenous fac-tors; convergence is explained by ‘society’ determining the options fromwhich cognition chooses. Well, this appears quite inadequate. Chomsky’s SFFthesis is offered as an explanation of convergence, an appeal to research pro-grams seems to be simply a re-description of the explanandum; we want toknow why there are such programs in the first place. Such a riposte is apt forthose who take the sociological to be primitive, but that is not what I am sug-gesting.

Since scientists are rational creatures, as we all are, then endogenous fac-tors clearly have a role to play, but the fact of convergence does not lead us toany particular thesis about those factors. It is perfectly intelligible to appeal toa central, global rationality along the lines of Fodor (1983, 2000) or perhapssome ensemble of faculties. We must be careful, though, not to run child andscientist together again. There may be deep similarities as the theory theoryteaches, but while it is true, I think, that children’s commonsensical conver-gence is principally due to cognitive factors, the same explanation does notwork for scientists. It only takes one person to produce a hypothesis that


answers certain questions or makes novel predications that the extant com-petitors fail to do. This relative success means that the research gets taught, ithas possible technological side-effects, it attracts funding, it is popularised toa general audience,... it snowballs. In short, the norm is for scientists to con-verge on given extant hypotheses; the norm is not for them, as it is for chil-dren, individually and creatively to converge, although sometimes it happens.Again, there is nothing irrational in following a good idea. Individual scien-tists are not drones to the program, they simply tend to be unconcerned in theirday to day activities with formulating novel theories, for those they have workvery well and there is much interesting testing and tweaking to be done. Afterall, if there is nothing obviously wrong with one’s theory – it withstandsattempted falsifications and continues to explain novel data – then one wouldbe irrational to forsake it.

If this model is anywhere near correct, then individual scientists withincommunities, both through their education and in their maturity, do not facethe array of possible theories with data in hand and plum for just a few out ofthe indefinite options. Were this the case, a SFF would indeed be required,unless we thought science a miraculous affair. But scientists are always some-where, occupying a theoretical position. As such, the choices they make are ofthe form ‘I would rather be here than there’, or vice versa. They are notnowhere, child-like, deciding where they wish to be, but faced with underde-termination where ever they turn. Scientists will stay where they are, and arerational to do so, if their theories do enough good work. If the work dries up,or some other theory does more work better, or (indeed!) is simpler, or moreelegant, or integrates better with some other accepted theory, or if its mathe-matics is more user friendly,... then, ceteris paribus, it will be rational for thescientist to vacate his or her theory. I fail to see, then, the SFF thesis as thebest explanation of convergence: the rationality of science is not exhibited byconvergence in the face of underdetermination, it is manifest in the subtleinterplay of factors which determines when a scientist should move or shouldjust stay put.

Concluding Remarks

I have not sought to refute the SFF thesis either empirically or conceptually.At our current state of knowledge, the former route is unavailable and to fol-low the latter one would simply be to misunderstand the issue. Moreover, Ihave ran with the speculation, offering a number of substantiating proposalsand batting off some ill-founded ripostes. Charitably construed then, my claimis just that, upon reflection, it is unclear what the SFF thesis amounts to, morework needs to be done before we can seriously treat it as a hypothesis. I wish,

150 John Collins

though, for my conclusion to be slightly less modest: the deep problem withthe thesis is its presupposition of a universal individualism, the idea that theendogenous factors which shape any of our practises are specifiable inde-pendently of, and have primacy over, the exogenous ones. Such thinking iswhat drives the problem-mystery distinction and it is this that gives so muchsustenance to the SFF thesis, so much so that Chomsky nigh conflates the two.I have argued in respect to both problems and mysteries and scientific con-vergence that a two-way street approach is at least as viable for something asbroad and amorphous as science. Individualism is a sound assumption, I think,when we are dealing with a competence that has the look of a faculty, but sci-ence is not such a competence. Still, who knows... Would that we were allcapable of the Chomskyan speculations that have turned out to be true.18

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