On Fodor’s Theory Of Concept Acquisition

In recent years,the study of concept in the field of philosophy has gradually deepened,and the development of concept is also related to many disciplines.The theory of concept acquisition was established by the earliest idea that concepts are ideas.With the prosperity of modern cognitive science,many thoughts such as behaviorism have enriched and developed concept acquisition,but they have failed to get rid of the core idea of concept formation —— the principle of empirical association psychology.Fodor,a famous analytical philosopher,criticized this classic concept acquisition theory.It is believed that if the model is formed according to the empirical concept--the hypothesis test model,the concept cannot be obtained.During the operation of this model,hypotheses need to be proposed and confirmed continuously.Since you can already make a hypothesis about a concept,it means you already own the concept.Then the model doesn’t allow you to learn any concept,so the concept has to be preexisting.Fodor’s concept acquisition theory is based on his mental representation.So how does his concept acquisition theory help people acquire concepts?This paper focuses on this problem and is divided into four parts:The first part discusses that his theory of concept acquisition is influenced by modern empiricists,Chomsky,Putnam and other famous philosophers,and builds on it.The second part mainly discusses the connotation of the concept acquisition theory,and expounds the concept acquisition from the two directions of how simple concepts produce complex concepts and how experience and concepts lock in.The third part mainly demonstrates two characteristics of concept acquisition theory.One is his innateness and the other is the process of acquiring the concept of Fodor by integrating empiricism and rationalism from the ontological perspective.The fourth part expounds the criticism of his theory by other philosophers after he put forward his own theory.In short,this paper will start from the above four parts to conduct a preliminary study on the "concept acquisition theory".Summarize and analyze the development context of history and the current mainstream thought,and then focus on the concept of Fodor to obtain the main content of the theory,and finally make an objective evaluation of the theory.