(normally) leads to something that leads to something ... that builds
the "animal" concept. The same is true of other concepts. You find
early precursors of these concepts, but the further back you go the less
they look like the concepts you are interested in and the more you find
generative structures that usually result in the concepts you want to
explain. You have to redescribe the concepts as you move backward in
time, and at some point you are certainly studying extremely early-
developed structures with huge consequences for the child's future
concepts, but these structures do not correspond to the conceptual
labels you started with. In particular, it is very likely that genetic mate-
rial has a direct effect on the separation between cortical areas and on [113]
the neural pathways that get these neural areas to interact. How brain
connections get activated to support inference systems obviously
requires a lot of further calibration.
The confusion is created here by our tendency to understand con-
cepts as encyclopedia entries that describe objects. So we wonder
whether infants have some part of the entry that we find in the adult
mental encyclopedia. But, as I said above, the encyclopedia description
is rather misleading. Ontological categories in fact consist of a set of
switch settings activating or inactivating this or that inference system.
As philosopher Ruth Millikan pointed out, concepts are much less
descriptions than skills. The "animal" concept is the skill to recognize
actual animals and make appropriate inferences about them. So there
is a gradual development here, in concepts as in motor skills; there is
no clear cutoff at which the child has acquired the animal concept.
Indeed, one can always become better at that particular skill.^17
Loose talk of "innateness" seems to imply that we will find in infants
the same concepts that we observe in adults. But the actual study of
developing minds reveals something more complex—a series of skeletal
principles, initial biases and specialized skills that result in adult con-
cepts, if the child is provided with a normalenvironment. This is in fact
much clearer if we leave aside concepts for a while and consider bodily
development. Children are born the way they are and develop the way
they do because the organism's architecture is provided by its genotype.
All normal children grow a set of milk teeth, then lose them and grow a
permanent set during middle childhood. But this requires adequate
conditions. Vitamin-deprived children may have a different develop-
mental trajectory, to be sure, and we know nothing of children raised in
zero gravity or fed through an intravenous drip instead of chewable
food. We can exclude these circumstances as irrelevant, not just
THE KIND OF MINDITTAKES