Atheism and Theism JJ Haldane - Common Sense Atheism

102 J.J. Haldane
developed by physical processes from non-thinking species. Where do concepts
come from? Traditionally there have been two main answers to this
question: innatism and abstractionism. According to the first, the ability to
classify things under general categories is something one is born with. According
to the second, the mind derives concepts from experience by selectively
attending to relevant features and ignoring other aspects of the things in
question. In the late 1950s Peter Geach produced a powerful argument against
this latter thesis. 13 The suggestion that the concept square, say, is acquired by
experiencing a variety of square objects and attending to their squareness,
while bracketing their other aspects, is absurd because in order to attend
selectively to the squareness of square objects you must already have the
concept square: attending to an instance of a feature F as such, is an exercise
of the concept f.
Innatism is well placed in this regard since it claims that all normal human
beings do have the concept square and many more concepts besides. But this
quickly gives rise to problems of its own. How many concepts do we have –
1, 10, 100, 1,000, 10,000? how are they related? are we born with the concept
square and the concept rectangle or just the one and, if so, which one? are our
innate geometrical concepts Euclidean or non-Euclidean? how could we be
born with concepts of things that didn’t exist at the time? did cavemen have
the concept telephone but just never have occasion to use it? how did innate
ideas get there? As Jack Smart observes at the outset of his essay there are
rarely or never knock-down arguments in philosophy and an innatist can
always find something to say; but I am pretty sure that Smart and I agree that
to defend this view you have to be willing to make large claims – such as
that our ideas were given us by God who implanted the right number, of the
right sort, at the right time. In the past this is what many famous innatists
maintained. More recently, the fashion has been to rely on evolution, but
even those who take a naturalistic materialist point of view and are willing
to invoke evolution to explain our existence are generally doubtful that it can
offer an explanation of innate ideas. 14
Where does this leave the issue? We certainly have general concepts but
if we were not born with them and we did not acquire them by abstraction
how did we come by them? One answer is suggested by the later writings of
Wittgenstein when he emphasizes again and again the fact that we are language
users whose understanding is shaped by our participation in forms of
life that are not of our own making. Wittgenstein never explicitly presents a
theory of anything (depending upon one’s attitude, therein lies his wisdom
or his pretension); and in order to develop the possibility that may lie in what
he has to say it will be useful to refer back to Aquinas who also has interesting
suggestions about the origin of concepts. 15 For Wittgenstein we learn
to think as we learn to speak. The ability to structure experience is acquired