The philosophical theory of innate ideas has its roots in
Plato. In
Meno, Socrates manages to get a slave boy to recognize certain mathematical truths (the example concerns the properties of a square) simply by asking the right questions. The conclusion drawn is that the boy already has the knowledge within him; Socrates was merely 'drawing it out'. Innate ideas play a crucial role in the metaphysical systems of the 17th-century rationalists. For
Descartes, the mind possesses innate awareness of certain fundamental concepts (God, triangle, mind, body), as well as of certain elementary propositions of logic (such as 'it is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be'). The infant may be distracted by bodily stimuli from reflecting on these truths but 'nonetheless it has them in itself, and does not acquire them later on; if it were taken out of the prison of the body, it would find them within itself' (letter of 1641). Such theories receive short shrift from empiricist philosophers — notably
John Locke in the
Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). According to Locke, talk of innate knowledge must imply conscious awareness, yet many people are obviously unaware of many of the allegedly innate principles: children, for example, 'have not the least apprehension or thought of them'. To this
Leibniz replies (in the
New Essays on Human Understanding, written 1705) that 'we must not expect that we can read the eternal laws of reason in the soul as in an open book'. The ideas are present not in a fully developed form but as dispositions or
virtualités.
In recent years the debate between rationalists and empiricists over innate ideas has aroused fresh interest in the context of the linguistic theories of Noam Chomsky. According to Chomsky, the ability of children to become language users, i.e. to acquire a set of highly complex and creative skills on the basis of very meagre sensory data, suggests that the child has innate knowledge of the principles of 'universal grammar' (see
language: Chomsky's theory). However, while the human ability to master language does suggest the presence of innate, genetically determined structures and predispositions in our brains, it is doubtful whether such structures should be said to amount to 'knowledge' of concepts or principles in anything like the sense supposed by the traditional theory of innate ideas.
(Published 1987)— John G. Cottingham
Bibliography- Hook, S. (ed.) (1969). Philosophy and Language.
- Stich, S. (ed.) (1975). Innate Ideas.
