A Critical Analysis on the Refutation of Innate Ideas in John Locke’s Philosophical Thoughts

Epistemology is an attempt to understand the role of knowledge, its origin, development and validity. The scientists, psychologists, educationalists, moral philosophers – all are analyzing the importance of epistemology in the knowledge process. Epistemology is considered one of the branches of knowledge, and it supports logic by emphasizing the interrelation between the two. While explaining the significance of epistemology R.M. Chisholm says that it deals with issues like the distinction between knowledge and true opinion and the relation between conditions of truth and criteria of evidence. Such issues constitute the subject matter of the theory of knowledge. In the history of Western philosophy, the modern period is significant because, during this period, there were two schools of thought regarding the validity of knowledge and emerged. One is Rationalism, and the other is Empiricism. Rationalism emphasizes that the source of knowledge is the reason. However, the Empiricism emphasizes experience as the basis for knowledge. In both movements, namely, rationalism and empiricism, epistemology has been attempting to find the answers to some questions: What do we know? How do we know? What are the sources of knowledge? What is the difference between belief and knowledge? Furthermore, is it possible to get valid knowledge? The prominent empiricist John Locke read the writings of Descartes. He rejected Descartes' innate ideas logically, and he has elaborately explained the source of knowledge, the limit of knowledge, validity of knowledge, and its kinds in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding. His empiricism received much criticism from the latest philosophers because he adapted some philosophical ideas from the pioneers. This article aims to justify whether John Locke’s epistemology is neutral by explaining the basic characteristic of empiricism and its critiques. This study as a qualitative approach depends both on the primary as well as secondary sources related to the study as books. This study attempts to understand Locke from a critical standpoint. In the end, an attempt is made to show how Locke's central and bias philosophy has relevance even today. Received: 15 July 2021 / Accepted: 28 September 2021 / Published: 5 November 2021

Is There a Scientific Method?

Modern science relies largely on method or, rather, on the claim that by employing a systematic, impersonal method, human reasoning can transcend the mind’s subjective experience of reality and discover the true, external causes of experience. In the early stages of modern science’s emergence out of medieval and Renaissance nature philosophy, Francis Bacon argued that this method was to be based on induction and experiment, without a priori mental input and with a minimum of mathematics. Rene Descartes argued that the required method was to be based on deduction, mathematics, and a priori and innate ideas, with a minimum of experiment. For Descartes, experiment served primarily as a check on deductive reasoning; for Bacon, experiment was a source of knowledge and constrained our inductive reasoning about empirical facts. Despite their differing styles, Descartes and Bacon together concretized the idea that a systematic method of reasoning could give us knowledge of the world.

Towards a Platonic critique of ideology

Plato is accused by some of being a totalitarian, “top-down” thinker, a claim that is linked not just to his politics but to his philosophical proclivities more generally. This essay will argue that Plato’s method and metaphysics collectively provide a few avenues for questioning this outcome. I think Plato’s Socratic-style provides resistance to a hegemonic and carapaced metaphysics, and moreover I would argue that there is a greater coherence between Plato’s method and his positive teaching than is allowed for by some. Through an engagement with central Platonic doctrines, namely his account of philosophical dialogue, the transcendental Good, as well as participation, and recollection, it is argued that Plato’s relational metaphysics does not fit seamlessly into an “ideological” or “naïve” rendering of intellectual intuition, an exclusionary dualism of material and spiritual substance, or an uncritical evocation of “innate ideas,” and, moreover, that it allows for a greater plurality of perspectives, all ordered towards a deeper realism and unity within the Good Beyond Being.

The Concept of Understanding and its Idealistic Interpretation in the Theoretical Philosophy of V.V. Rozanov

The article is devoted to the analysis of the key provisions of Rozanov’s early theoretical treatise “On Understanding”, which is a model of Russian philosophical idealism. It shows that Rozanov’s work, which anticipated some ideas of hermeneutics and phenomenology in the 20th century, remained unnoticed within the Russian philosophical tradition. The purpose of this article is to reveal the basis of Rozanov’s thesis that the first idea of reason potentially contains all knowledge in unity. The author analyzes the following aspects of Rozanov’s work related to the problem of understanding: the motive and purpose of writing a treatise, the theme of innate ideas, the concept of vivacity of ideas, the theory of potential knowledge and its subject, the cyclical process of understanding, the difference between mind and reason, understanding from knowledge. Rozanov’s interpretation of the idea of reason, the scheme of reason, and the doctrine of number are also reconstructed. The paper concludes: the fundamental thesis of Rozanov about the embeddedness of all knowledge in the unity of the first idea of reason is justified by the primacy of the position of the idea in the taxonomy of cognitive acts. And also, by the fact that the purpose of the cognitive process pushes reason to itself.

Thomas Jefferson

“Thomas Jefferson” demonstrates that Jefferson combined elements of Epicureanism with components of Stoicism and Christianity to form a unique philosophy. Jefferson derived from the Stoics and from Cicero the belief in an innate moral sense. Like these forebears, Jefferson envisioned the moral sense as a mere instinct for good that required training (reason acting on experience) to develop into full-blown virtue, rather than as a collection of Platonic innate ideas. Christianity furnished him with the concepts of a creator, a resurrection, and an afterlife. It also provided a system of ethics based on positive benevolence. He preferred the warmth and benevolence of Christianity to the cold obligations of classical philosophy, which centered on the mere avoidance of injury to oneself and others. Epicureanism provided other essential features of Jefferson’s philosophy, such as a materialist metaphysics and consequent rejection of miracles. Although Jefferson’s Epicureanism did not lead him to reject the doctrine of divine providence commonly held in his day, it contributed greatly to his belief that God worked solely through natural causes to achieve his ends. The Epicurean emphasis on the role played by reason (logic) acting on experience in uncovering truth and its concept of free will also influenced the Virginian.

Our Big Hearts

Can you tell what a stranger feels just by looking at their face? Could you distinguish fear from anger even in a person from an entirely unfamiliar culture (without having the opportunity to learn about it from experience)? Laypeople assume they can, because they believe that emotions are inborn, and they are universally imprinted on the body, both externally, on the face, and internally (I sense anxiety in the rumbling of my gut). In fact, people believe that emotions are innate precisely because they believe that emotions are “in the body.” So strong is their conviction that they will insist on their belief even when told that the emotions in question are in fact acquired. Our tendency to view “warm” feelings as embodied and innate is the exact mirror image of our tendency to view “cold” concepts as ephemeral and disembodied. A review of the scientific literature reveals that similar presumptions also plague the debate on universal emotions in affective science. Chapter 10 shows how Essentialism (a principle invoked to explain our aversion to innate ideas) also promotes the promiscuous presumption of innate emotions by laypeople and scientists alike.

Nativist Intuitions

Having shown that innate knowledge is a viable scientific hypothesis with considerable evidence in its support, the next three chapters examine laypeople’s intuitions about innate knowledge. We describe a series of experiments that contrasts people’s intuitions about the origins of cognitive traits (those that capture knowledge) and noncognitive traits (either sensory, motor, or emotive capacities). Results show that people believe that cognitive traits are not innate. People maintain these convictions even when they are provided with detailed descriptions of experiments from infant research (those reviewed in previous chapters), complete with an explanation of the rationale and method; while science clearly suggests these principles are present in newborns, people insist that they aren’t. Other results demonstrate that our antinativist intuitions are a bias, as people maintain these intuitions despite explicit evidence to the contrary, and even when they are presented with innate knowledge of nonhuman species. These results show that people are systematically and selectively biased against innate ideas.

Contemporary Concept Nativism: Some Methodological Remarks

The innate knowledge problem is a classical problem in philosophy, which has been known since the classical antiquity. Plato in his dialogues Meno and Phaedo formulated the doctrine of innate ideas and proposed an early version of the poverty of the stimulus argument, which is the most frequently used argument in innate knowledge debates. In the history of philosophy there was also an opposite view. This approach is often associated with J. Locke’s philosophy. Locke thought that all our knowledge about the world is a product of the universal learning mechanisms whose functioning is based on perception. The question about the presence of innate ideas in the human mind still remains relevant. New findings in cognitive science and neurosciences and also some recent arguments from philosophers contribute to the contemporary discussion between the spokesmen of the rival approaches to this problem. The paper presents the investigation of one of the approaches to solving the problem of innate concepts, which is called a “concept nativism.” It highlights the outstanding characteristics of the concept nativism: (a) domain specificity position, (b) belief that domain-specific mechanisms of learning are innate and (c) belief that at least some concepts are innate. The article also proposes an analysis of notions “innateness” and “idea” which is important for understanding nativists’ approach to innate ideas theory. And finally, it describes the most popular nativists’ arguments: (a) references to empirical studies using the preferential looking technique, (b) the poverty of the stimulus argument and (c) the argument from animals.