ABSTRACT
In the famous debate between Chomsky and Piaget (Piatelli-Palmarini, 1980), which included a number of other leading philosophers and scientists, the problem of explaining conceptual growth and change proved so intractable that Fodor was led to declare:
There literally isn’t such a thing as the notion of learning a conceptual system richer than the one that one already has; we simply have no idea of what it would be like to get from a conceptually impoverished to a conceptually richer system by anything like a process of learning.
(Fodor, 1980, p. 149)