This will appear in a collection edited by Joon Park, Eric Snyder, and Richard Samuels called Numerical Cognition: Debates and Disputes with a ton of other great papers.

In this spirit I discuss one example of an empiricist model of concept learning that also struggles with rational causation. I also try to work through how constructivists try to resolve the problem, getting the method right, even if the details are still fuzzy in many places.

I note, following Braine, that this isn't unique to nativism but is more like a cultural difference that also explains why some ppl identify as nativists and others as empiricists. The former often care more about characterizing the final structure of thought, the latter about processes of change.

"...This internal connection between concept learning and epistemic notions like evidence is the source of the strong intuition that concept learning is some sort of rational process.” This, kind of rational/causal connection, I argue, is what many strong nativist accounts lack.

In LOT2 Fodor muses, "Perhaps COW is learned from experiences with cows? If so, then experiences with cows must somehow witness that it’s cows that COW applies to...."

They posit innate counting principles, magnitude representations, or even arithmetic principles that define integer concepts, but struggle to explain how these contents get expressed in language or behavior during development. What they lack, I argue, is a model of rational causation.

Prominent nativist accounts of number word learning address one problem of ontogenesis (i.e., providing models capable of describing the abstract content that humans come to have), but often lack detailed accounts of developmental change, and how innate content is deployed.

I explore Martin Braine's question "Is Nativism Sufficient", related to Fodor's point that "there must be a mechanism by which an organism determines which of its innate concepts is contextually appropriate... or innate representations remain inert, contributing nothing to cognition.”

IMO tactics that emerged in war time became simple dispositions of ideological intolerance. It’s fairly common in psychology to breeze past theory you don’t find aesthetically pleasing in a paper to accept it if it shows something interesting. Not nearly as much in linguistics.

For me it's 99.9% in linguistics. Psych ppl are mostly critical but nice

,

6. Month 21-25: Resubmit and wait
7. See 5.

collecting new data (though they won't test the hypothesis), citing Reviewer, and workshopping individual sentences to avoid triggering the reviewer, wondering if any your ideas are actually any good or if you really are an imposter, while telling students they DEFINITELY ARE NOT.
...

Project Joy/Dread Lifepan:
1. Month 1 (study conception): Pure joy
2. Months 2-4: pilots, methods, pre-reg. Hard, but so fun.
3. Months 5-7: Data collection, analysis writing: I'm in heaven
4. Months 8 - 14: Waiting in anxiety
5. Months 15-20: Dread, healing, reconsidering life choices,
...

YOU'RE RUINING OPEN SCIENCE!

I want an metric that automatically scores the severity of Reviewer 2's remarks, and then weights the significance of actually publishing the paper on this basis. This would start to reflect the true work that goes into publishing!