Of course our genes will make some capacities very much easier to learn than others, and of course our genes themselves are not learned. But the point remains that genes themselves are not cognitive capacities, and that anything worth calling a cognitive capacity will depend to some degree on learning and so not be innate.
David PapineauEven if no learning to speak of was involved in locking my mental term onto doorknobs, it is odd to say that therefore my possession of a doorknob concept is innate, just as it is odd to say that my head-injury-caused singing is innate.
David PapineauI realize that I won't have quite enough time to understand everything - but that hasn't stopped me wanting to understand as much as I can.
David PapineauOn the methodological issue, I think that would be hopeless to try to adjudicate between my view and orthodoxy by appeal to phenomenological introspection. We need to know about brain mechanisms.
David PapineauThe 'phenomenal concept' issue is rather different, I think. Here the question is whether there are concepts of experiences that are made available to subjects solely in virtue of their having had those experiences themselves. Is there a way of thinking about seeing something red, say, that you get from having had those experiences, and so isn't available to a blind person?
David PapineauEverybody agrees that a future in which you are dead is a very bad thing, and that it isn't made any better by your not being around to notice how bad it is.
David PapineauI think that there are non-physical laws all right: genuine (if not strict) laws written in the language of biology, economics, and so on. But I don't regard that as a contentious issue. Even reductionists about chemistry will think that there are special chemical laws whose formulation makes essential use of chemical terminology.
David Papineau