Locke on innate ideas

Rationalism & Empiricism

Rene Descartes? ? ? ? ? John Locke

Benedict Spinoza? ? ? ? George Berkeley

G.W. Leibniz

1. As a Historical Period

- Early modern period (c. 1600 - 1891)

- Including scientific revolution, Englightenment, height of colonialism, slave trade, disenfranchisement of women, unfettered capitalism, etc.

- Stereotype: 17th century as rationalist systems; 18th cnetury as century of experiment, observation and empiricism

2. As a Geographical Divide

- Rationalists: Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz,?Northern Europe

- Empiricists: Locke, Berkeley, Hume, British Isles

- Newton: "Hypotheses non fingo!"

- Repetition in Anglo-American-analytic/continental divide

3. As a Philosophical Type

- Question of how we attain knowledge...

- Key claim: "We have no other source of knowledge than experience" --- affirmed by empiricists and denied by rationalists.

- Leibniz: "The senses, although they are necessary for all our actual knowledge, are not sufficient to give us the whole of it."

- Hume: "If we take in our hand any volume of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance --- let us ask... Does it contain any experiemental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames, for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion."

4. As a Retrospective Polemic

- No early-modern philosopher called themselves empiricist or rationalist.

- 19th century invention by historians of philosophy

- Polemical to show limitations and one-sidedness of past philosophy (and therefore prove advantages of present, i.e., progress of philosophy)

- What about Spinoza's and Descartes' empiricism?

- What about Elizabeth of Bohemia, Emilie du Chatelet, Mary Shepherd and Anne Conway?

What is Empiricist about Locke's Essay concerning Human Understanding?

- All ideas come from sense experience (nothing else but that)

- Mind is a tabula rasa, i.e., no ideas exist there before experience

- Knowledge is typically a posteriori, gained through sense experience

- Project of philosophy to show the origins of ideas in sense experience

Empiricism as Introspection

- Essay as "under-labourer" clearing the ground for science.

- Turning within to inspect the mind and its ability to know before turning out towards scientific pursuits.

-? Psychology as first science, as prologue/prolegomena

- Sensation = outer experience

- Reflection = inner experience

- Philosophy must begin with reflection to make possible good sensation

Empiricism as Critique

- Cartesian = "to enquire into the Original, Certainty and Extent of human knowledge"

- Critique as verificationism = verifying all ideas against their origin in sense experience

Indirect Realism

- Idea = "...stands for whatsoever is the Object of the Understanding, when a man thinks" Or:'Whatsoever the Mind perceives in itself, or is the immediate object of Perception, Thought or Understanding'

- Rejects the view that we directly and immediately perceive external objects

- What we perceive according to indirect realism is just an intermediary between object and perceiver

Two properties (Lowe)

- Atomistic --- we perceive simple ideas and construct complex ideas out of them

- Constructivist --- "all of our ideas (=concepts) ultimately 'derive' from experience"

What is an Innate Idea?

- Nativism vs non-nativism

- "Some primary notions... Characters as it were stamped upon the Mind of Man, which the Soul receives in its very first Being; and brings into the world with it"

- Innate = non-acquired, i.e., ideas we have had since birth and not obtained through experience.

- E.g. Plato's Ideas or Descartes on perfection or God

- Locke's position: "There are certain ideas (units of mental content) which were neither acquired via experience nor constructed by the mind out of ideas received in experience."

Locke's Arguments against Innate Ideas I

- Innate ideas depend on evidence of universal assent

- Innate ideas without universal assent?

????e.g. Descarets: ideas like a congenital disease, present from birth, whose symtoms only emerge later in life; Leibniz: mind like a block of marble in which a yet-to-be-formed statue is prefigured by faults and veins in the stone.

- Locke's response: