Of course nothing will have come of it because they're too trapped in their own reality tunnels to sort it out. However, they're so blinkered that the state of things must indeed be pretty bad if they've noticed.

After years of stagnation in which we want to pretend we're so damn sophisticated and not like animals, perhaps some humility is required and we can accept that we are brute things. We enjoy shagging and get annoyed if we get hungry, so perhaps we haven't got the finely honed, technically accomplished brains we give ourselves credit for. Perhaps we still have a way to evolve.

Strange as it may at first seem, the concepts which we use to give meaning to the world seem to be with us at birth; that is, they're innate and all that happens as we grow is that the environment around us triggers them.

I know this is ludicrous, and I know this is basically Plato's theory of recollection changed so as to appear scientific, but the evidence is pretty compelling. Jerry Fodor is an American linguist who is amazed to find that all his research points towards our innate possession of concepts.

His theory works along the lines of us having these innate building block concepts which can then be combined in multifarious ways as we progress through life to give us our concepts of things as they pop up. Thus, Fodor claims to pursue "mad-dog nativism" because no one can refute his arguments.

And the more experimental data he comes across, the more he is confirmed in his views.

Noam Chomsky, all round good guy, supplies a fine example which you could perform yourself if you were lucky enough to have access to a couple of delightful little kids...

Get a cardboard box and put one marble inside it and another a bit away from it. Hey presto, it's as simple as that. Next, ask the kids which of the marbles is nearer the box. They will answer that the one you put outside the box is nearer. Ask them why the one actually inside the box is not the nearest and they will screw up their tiny little faces before eventually giving a response along the lines of it being in the box, not near.

All very normal and unremarkable, or so you would think. Chomsky however, takes this as evidence of a sophisticated grasp of a very abstract notion; a three dimensional cube with space inside it that can be filled with many different things, or indeed be left empty, will still be recognized to be a box.

This notion of a container thus prevents things inside it being 'near' to it, since there is something absurd about using such a description, which appears to be viewed as a category error.

Just as a French horn cannot sprout flowers because it is in the category of musical instrument, rather than being a plant, so a box is a container and things held within it are trivially near it. All fair enough, I think you'd be inclined to admit, but Chomsky points out that when we model the world we draw 2-D squares or 3-D cubes and find it hard to represent the notion of containment, even though as shown above even at an early age we have an intuitive understanding of a box.

Thus Chomsky concludes, we have an in-built unconscious comprehension of the concept 'box'. Yes this is a weird result, but there simply is no other way to explain the experiment. Kids from all cultures experience the triggering effect of something in their immediate environment which enables them to recognize a box, but the complexity involved in every person coming to be able to employ such a skill cannot even be modeled by our 'sophisticated' computing knowledge.

We think we have the 'know how' but we don't. I urge researchers to be more humble and open-minded in future. Some nifty cross discipline investigation will reveal steps to be taken. And if philosophers feel inclined to come down from their ivory towers and get their hands dirty, then they are more than welcome.