Page 85 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

distinction is necessary. Whereas findings (1) and (2) pertain to representationally effective quality concepts, the bases of similarity in findings (3) and (4) are not quality concepts but quality detectors.
A closely similar puzzle arises when one considers how individuals are recognized. To be sure, an indi- vidual concept must be essentially historical. Stage 6 of object permanence is only attained when the infant can construct a history for an individual as it is moved from place to place invisibly. Likewise, Piaget's story (1952:225) of his daughter Jacqueline's mistaken rec- ognition of the slug encountered when leaving the house and some hundreds of yards further off suggests a failure to construct such a history. However, it must be presumed that recognition of individuals is often merely heuristic and depends not upon construction of a space-time trajectory but on the detected recur- rence of a particular cluster of attributes and qualities. At any rate, under this presumption individual detec- tors consist of just such cluster-specifications. But this leads to:
Paradox (2): The formation of a type-detector depends on apprehension of the world as consisting of distinct individuals, rather than of a single recurring individual. This in turn depends upon the formation of individual- detectors which define unit categories. But such detectors can only be aggregates of perceived attributes, features and qualities, in other words of type-detectors, com- pleting a vicious circle.
Paradox (2) is surely sensibly resolved by supposing that certain type-detectors of attributes, features, and qualities are genetically transmitted. Even the par- simonious philosopher Quine (e.g., 1969) allows some such innate quality 'space' as a cognitive given. These innate type-detectors will then bootstrap the process of acquisition of individual-detectors and then of novel type-detectors, breaking the vicious circle.
5. First Language and First Concepts
According to the previous section, 18-month-old chil- dren can form concepts of individuals and of certain environmental categories such as basic-level cate- gories. But they cannot yet form concepts of qualities such as shapes or colors. These early concepts are underpinned by individual- and type-detectors, some of which detect constitutional categories and are therefore innatelyspecified.
Studies of early vocabulary broadly confirm these conclusions. Eighteen-month-old vocabulary con- tains many proper names and pronominal expressions denoting individuals, and nominal expressions denot- ing basic-level categories. Moreover, Katz, et al. (1974) showed that very young children, presented with the contrasting ostensions This is X and This is an X are apt to take X to denote an individual in the former case and a basic-level category in the latter.
Expressions denoting qualities are slow to appear in early language, with color adjectives, for example,
not well established until the fourth year. Early adjec- tives appear to denote instead temporary, undesirable properties such as hot, wet, dirty, and broken (Nelson 1976). These extrinsic properties are psychologically salient and command attention, whereas intrinsic properties of shape, color, etc., are always in com- petition for attention. It may be that the psychological prominence of these extrinsic properties makes it easier for children to form concepts of them.
The prospects for establishing alignments between the developing conceptual apparatus of children and the structures of early language are therefore reason- ably promising, and such alignments should assist the development of theory in both domains of devel- opment. Besides the obvious need for examination of other sorts of early concept than those so far explored, notably of concepts of action, study of the issues considered here is badly hampered by the lack of suit- able metalanguage for describing the content of ex- pressions (meaning) and the thoughts that prompt such expressions.
See also: Language Acquisition in the Child; Thought and Language.
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