Re: Ontolog Forum • Michael DeBellis

I remember Doug Medin from the year I was at Illinois and I recall a colloquium talk Frank Keil gave at Michigan State which intrigued me because he echoed ideas from Kant about the synthetic à priori, but I didn’t get a chance to ask him more about it.

As far as Fodor’s line goes, I’m generally sympathetic to faculty psychology, if only because it suits the ways mathematicians and programmers analyze and synthesize both functions and structures, but the faculties required for intelligence and inquiry interact with each other and have mutual recourse to each other far too intricately to deserve the name modules in the strictest technical sense.

Still, if all we’re talking about is a native knack or a natural instinct for latching onto subsumptions wherever they may occur then I could go along with that for the sake of further argument.

I agree with previous comments that “subsumption” suffers from a surfeit of senses but here’s two places where I found it natural to use “subsumes” or one of its synonyms, once in a logical sense and once in a grammatical sense.

• Aristotle’s “Apagogy” • Abductive Reasoning as Problem Reduction
• Generalities About Formal Grammars

There are reasons arising from Peirce’s logic and mathematical category theory for this usage but I’ll have to save that for another time.

cc: Ontolog Forum