Online research in philosophy

Draft. Berkeley denied the existence of abstract ideas and any faculty of abstraction. At the same time, however, he embraced innate ideas and a faculty of pure intellect. This paper attempts to reconcile the tension between these commitments by offering an interpretation of Berkeley's Platonism.

Here's one way this chapter could go. After defining the terms 'innate' and 'idea', we say whether Chomsky thinks any ideas are innate -- and if so, which ones. Unfortunately, we don't have any theoretically interesting definitions to offer; and, so far as we know, Chomsky has never said that any ideas are innate. Since saying that would make for a very short chapter, we propose to do something else. Our aim is to locate Chomsky, (...) as he locates himself, in a rationalist tradition where talk of innate ideas has often been used to express the following view: the general character of human thought is due largely to human nature. (shrink)

Introduction: The Idea oflnnateness Philosophical controversies are notoriously long-lived. And in point of venerability the controversy around innate ideas ...

In P. Carruthers, S. Laurence, & S. Stich (Eds.). The innate mind: Structure and content. (pp. 305-337). New York: Oxford University Press.

Philosophers have long debated whether any ideas are innate in the human mind and if so, what they might be. The issues here are real and important but it often seems that the discussion of them isn’t. One of the main reasons that these discussions are frequently so frustrating is that the various sides seem to be talking past each other rather than engaging in genuine argument. When this happens, it seems to me that it is usually because (...) the issues they are discussing have not been formulated clearly enough. To avoid that problem and also to motivate what follows, I want to begin with an overview of some philosophical concepts and questions before I get to the historical part of my paper. (shrink)

This article starts from the assumption that there are various innate contributions to our view of the world and explores the epistemological implications that follow from this. Specifically, it explores the idea that if certain components of our worldview have an evolutionary origin, this implies that these aspects accurately depict the world. The simple version of the argument for this conclusion is that if an aspect of mind is innate, it must be useful, and the most parsimonious explanation (...) for its usefulness is that it accurately depicts the world. There are a number of important criticisms of this argument. These include the idea that evolutionary justifications are circular, that evolved mental content and principles are not necessarily accurate, and that, if the argument is taken seriously, it has some highly dubious consequences. These criticisms necessitate various qualifications to the initial argument. Nonetheless, it is argued that, in some cases, important conclusions can be drawn about the world from an analysis of evolved contributions to our view of the world. An evolutionary approach cannot provide an ultimate justification for any belief; however, in certain circumstances, it supports the conclusion that a given belief is a reasonable first approximation. To the extent that innate content and principles pertain to topics in metaphysics, they can be viewed as a naturalistic source of metaphysical knowledge. (shrink)

Pierre Gassendi, who did not like nonsense, said of the idea of infinity: ‘if someone calls something "infinite" he attributes to a thing which he does not grasp a label which he does not understand’. Gassendi’s is a harsh judgement for, surely, we all do quite cheerfully and successfully use the concept of infinity, and in a variety of contexts. Yet if Gassendi’s judgement is too hard it is easy enough to have sympathy with his claim. For it is a (...) perennial fact that we never, in Descartes’s phrase, seem to have an ‘adequate idea’ of infinity. Nor is this just because it is an abstract noun like friendship or strength, for it retains this familiar lack of adequacy when it appears in its adjectival or adverbial forms: infinite space, infinite power, infinitely large, infinitely good. It is not my intention in this paper to offer a philosophical account of this familiar state of affairs, though perhaps what I shall have to say will throw some little light on the matter. It is rather to explore how discussions of such questions take us into issues at the heart of the foundations of modern philosophy, and specifically, into the great debate which I will refer to by the usual title as that between the Rationalists and the Empiricists, of whom the protagonists are traditionally identified as Descartes on the one side and Locke on the other. It would not be out of place for somebody to say in response to that famous contrast that either it is hackneyed or else it is mistaken. It is hackneyed because we all know that Descartes and Locke represent contrasting traditions in modern philosophy and there is nothing new to be said about it. It is mistaken because, as a matter of fact, it is simplistic to set them up as dogmatic exponents of their respective schools. There are rationalist elements in Locke’s Essay, especially in Book IV, and there is a strong empiricist element in Descartes, especially in his science. Those emphasizing the former, Webb for example in the last century and Aaron in this, have underlined the place of intuition and demonstration in Locke’s account of knowledge. Descartes’s empirical leanings have been noted in his account of the role of experiment in the natural sciences. There is of course no denying these aspects of their philosophies. But my path will be more revisionist than supportive of such readings of their work. I shall argue that the dominant (though not the only) strain in Descartes is a rationalist one and that Locke was keenly aware of this and strongly hostile to it. On the other side, whilst Locke was impressed by much of Descartes’s presentation of knowledge, and borrowed heavily from it, he never looks tike subscribing at all to the central rationalist doctrines, and indeed saw his work as a major refutation of them. In all of this his account of our idea of infinity plays an exemplary role. But before we reach Locke we should go back to Descartes. (shrink)

Questions about learning and discovery have fascinated philosophers from Plato onwards. Does the mind bring innate resources of its own to the process of learning or does it rely wholly upon experience? Plato was the first philosopher to give an innatist response to this question and in doing so was to provoke the other major philosophers of ancient Greece to give their own rival explanations of learning. This book is the first to examine these theories of learning in relation (...) to each other. It presents an entirely new interpretation of the theory of recollection which also changes the way we understand the development of ancient philosophy after Plato. The final section of the book compares ancient theories of learning with the seventeenth-century debate about innate ideas, and finds that the relation between the two periods is far more interesting and complete than is usually supposed. (shrink)

Contemporary debates in epistemology devote much attention to the nature of knowledge, but neglect the question of its sources. This book focuses on the latter, especially on the question of innateness. Carruthers' aim is to transform and reinvigorate contemporary empiricism, while also providing an introduction to a range of issues in the theory of knowledge. He gives a lively presentation and assessment of the claims of classical empiricism, particularly its denial of substantive a priori knowledge and of innate knowledge. (...) He argues that we would be right to reject the substantive a priori but not innateness, and then presents a novel account of the main motivation behind empiricism, which leaves contemporary empiricists free to accept innate knowledge and concepts. Carruthers closes with a discussion of scepticism, arguing that acceptance of innate concepts may lead to a decisive resolution of the problem in favor of realism. (shrink)

Marc A. Hight has given us a well-researched, well-written, analytically rigorous and thoughtprovoking book about the development of idea ontology in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The book covers a great deal of material, some in significant depth, some not. The figures discussed include Descartes, Malebranche, Arnauld, Locke, Leibniz, Berkeley, and Hume. Some might think it a tall order for anyone to grapple with the central works of these figures on a subject as fundamental as the nature of (...) class='Hi'>ideas. And while reading the book, I must admit to having had this thought a few times. Seventeen pages on Descartes’ theory of ideas, covering the development of his ontology of ideas, the distinction between formal reality and objective reality, the nature of mental representation, the contagion theory of causation, the doctrine of innate ideas as ungrounded dispositions, and the interactionism/occasionalism controversy? Wow. And yet Hight has done his homework. He knows the figures and the relevant interpretive controversies well, he focuses on many of the passages that are relevant to the book’s central thesis, and in the end offers us a compelling narrative as an alternative to what he identifies as “the traditional view of what transpired in the early modern period” (2). (shrink)

Philosophers have often claimed that general ideas or representations have their origin in abstraction, but it remains unclear exactly what abstraction as a psychological process consists in. We argue that the Lockean aspiration of using abstraction to explain the origins of all general representations cannot work and that at least some general representations have to be innate. We then offer an explicit framework for understanding abstraction, one that treats abstraction as a computational process that operates over an (...) class='Hi'>innate quality space of fine-grained general representations. We argue that this framework has important philosophical implications for the nativism-empiricism dispute, for questions about the acquisition of unstructured representations, and for questions about the relation between human and animal minds. (shrink)

Strong nativist views about numerical concepts claim that human beings have at least some innate precise numerical representations. Weak nativist views claim only that humans, like other animals, possess an innate system for representing approximate numerical quantity. We present a new strong nativist model of the origins of numerical concepts and defend the strong nativist approach against recent cross-cultural studies that have been interpreted to show that precise numerical concepts are dependent on language and that they are restricted (...) to speakers of languages with the right kind of structure. (shrink)

Essay, Ii8) Although theorizing about ideas figures prominently in philosophy before him, Locke introduced what became known as the "New Way of Ideas," by considering all metaphysical and epistemological questions through an examination of the nature and origin of the mind's content. Although sometimes disagreeing with him on important details, other empiricists of the modern era follow Locke by first theorizing about the origin of ideas, and second by classifying ideas into types, based on origin and (...) characteristics discovered by mental inspection. The shared features of the empiricist notion of ideas is that ideas are not innate, and that they are the result of sensation and reflection. (See INNATENESS). (shrink)

Radical Concept Nativism (RCN) is the doctrine that most of our concepts are innate. In this paper I will argue in favour of RCN by developing a speculative account of concept acquisition that has considerable nativist credentials and can be defended against the most familiar anti-nativist objections. The core idea is that we have a whole battery of hard-wired dispositions that determine how we group together objects with which we interact. In having these dispositions we are effectively committed to (...) an implicit conceptual scheme and acquiring concepts is a matter of labelling the elements of that scheme. (shrink)

This article illustrates in which sense genetic determinism is still part of the contemporary interactionist consensus in medicine. Three dimensions of this consensus are discussed: kinds of causes, a continuum of traits ranging from monogenetic diseases to car accidents, and different kinds of determination due to different norms of reaction. On this basis, this article explicates in which sense the interactionist consensus presupposes the innate?acquired distinction. After a descriptive Part 1, Part 2 reviews why the innate?acquired distinction is (...) under attack in contemporary philosophy of biology. Three arguments are then presented to provide a limited and pragmatic defense of the distinction: an epistemic, a conceptual, and a historical argument. If interpreted in a certain manner, and if the pragmatic goals of prevention and treatment (ideally specifying what medicine and health care is all about) are taken into account, then the innate?acquired distinction can be a useful epistemic tool. It can help, first, to understand that genetic determination does not mean fatalism, and, second, to maintain a system of checks and balances in the continuing nature?nurture debates. (shrink)

I argue that Berkeley's distinctive idealism/immaterialism can't support his view that objects of sense, immediately or mediately perceived, are causally inert. (The Passivity of Ideas thesis or PI) Neither appeal to ordinary perception, nor traditional arguments, for example, that causal connections are necessary, and we can't perceive such connections, are helpful. More likely it is theological concerns,e.g., how to have second causes if God upholds by continuously creating the world, that's in the background. This puts Berkeley closer to Malebranche (...) than to Hume. -/- As far the what I call the "first strategy;" defending the passivity of ideas by ordinary introspection, I refer to the work of the French psychologist Albert Michotte,(1940) and those now extending his experiments, to show that (1) there is an immediate and quite robust visual impression of causality, (admitted in fact by Berkeley, Malebranche and Hume) and (2) of more importance, the impression isn't due to projecting into nature expectations gained from experienced regularities. (shrink)

In Book I, Part I, Section VII of the Treatise, Hume sets out to settle, once and for all, the early modern controversy over abstract ideas. In order to do so, he tries to accomplish two tasks: (1) he attempts to defend an exemplar-based theory of general language and thought, and (2) he sets out to refute the rival abstraction-based account. This paper examines the successes and failures of these two projects. I argue that Hume manages to articulate a (...) plausible theory of general ideas; indeed, a version of his account has defenders in contemporary cognitive science. But Hume fails to refute the abstraction-based account, and as a result, the early modern controversy ends in a stalemate, with both sides able to explain how we manage to speak and think in general terms. Although Hume fails to settle the controversy, he nevertheless advances it to a point from which we have yet to progress: the contemporary debate over abstract ideas in cognitive science has stalled on precisely this point. (shrink)

Hume introduced important innovations concerning the theory of ideas. The two most important are the distinction between impressions and ideas, and the use he made of the principles of association in explaining mental phenomena. Hume divided the perceptions of the mind into two classes. The members of one class, impressions, he held to have a greater degree of force and vivacity than the members of the other class, ideas. He also supposed that ideas are causally dependent (...) copies of impressions. And, unlike Locke and others, Hume makes positive use of the principle of association, both of the association of ideas, and, in a more limited way, of the association of impressions. Such associations are central to his explanations of causal reasoning, belief, the indirect passions (pride and humility, love and hatred), and sympathy. These views about impressions and ideas and the principles of association form the core of Hume’s science of human nature. Relying on them, he attempts a rigorously empirical investigation of human nature. The resulting system is a remarkable but complex achievement. (shrink)

This dissertation aims at forging an archetectonic link between Kant's first and third Critiques within a cognitive-semantic framework. My aim is to show how the major conceptual innovations of Kant’s third Critique can be plausibly understood in terms of the theoretical aims of the first, (Critique of Pure Reason). However, unlike other cognition-oriented approaches to Kant's third Critique, which take the point of contact between the first and third Critique's to be the first Critique's Transcendental Analytic, I link these two (...) works via the first Critique's Transcendental Dialectic, specifically its discussions of the "ideas of pure reason." According to Kant, the “ideas of pure reason” (IPRs) — viz., the notions of self, world-whole, and God — are innate content-bearing entities representing three types of transempirical object, none of which are possible objects of cognition. However, although Kant denies that these rather unique content-bearers can be used for purposes of “speculative cognition,” he does think that they have an internal functional value for human cognitive systems. Although under my analysis of their functional value the IPRs subserve a highest-order aim which derives from theoretical reason — namely, to ground and optimize cognitive systematicity — their directive content in fact renders their implementation(thus their form of intentionality) more characteristic of practical reason. Kant’s positive account of reason’s “interest” in and use of the IPRs exhibits a kind of cognitive pragmatism. Of utmost concern to the cognitive-semantic enterprise, as I conceive it, is the development of (what might be called) a metaphysics of intentionality. A `metaphysics of intentionality', as I use the term, refers to a coherent set of postulative propositional cognitions (or, at any rate, content-bearing entities) implemented, first, for the sake of rationally explaining the phenomenological unity and object-directed character of our perceptual states and, second, to explain why the objects represented in such states are, or must be, law-governed and thus necessarily amenable to scientific investigation. On my view, the discussions in Kant’s third Critique nontrivially contribute to the development of a metaphysics of intentionality and thus to the larger cognitive-semantic enterprise of Kant's first Critique, and it is this link that lends Kant's third Critique a cognitive significance. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to consider the following question: To what extent is it permissible for a liberal democratic state to suppress the spread of illiberal ideas (including anti-democratic ideas)? I will discuss two approaches to this question. The first can be termed the clear and imminent danger approach, and the second the preventive approach. The clear and imminent danger approach implies that it is permissible for liberal states to suppress the spread of illiberal doctrines and (...) ideas only if they pose a clear and imminent danger to security and/or the stability of liberal democratic institutions. The preventive approach, which is the one that I will propose and defend, goes further than this: it implies that it can also be permissible for a liberal state to restrict the spread of illiberal doctrines and ideas in order to prevent certain extremist illiberal groups (which I will term offensive illiberal groups) from gaining increased popular and political support, and in order to prevent such groups from becoming significant and powerful political actors. However, the evaluation and choice of liberty-limiting suppressive measures should be guided and restricted by two principles or side-constraints: the significance principle and the least restrictive means principle. (shrink)

The paper reveals some mostly unnoticed and unexpected trends in reception of novel ideas in science. The author formulates certain principles of the reception of these ideas by scientific communities and justifies them by examples from modern mathematics and non-classical logic.

This paper first expounds the Aristotelian conception of universals. Afterwards, it determines (a) that in the metaphysics of the Stagirite there is place for divine Ideas as archetypes, and (b) which are the relations that exist between things and Ideas. It concludes, in the light of the above, with a reconsideration of the Aristotelian critique of Plato’s theory of anamnesis.

The analytic method by which Descartes discovered the first principle of his philosophy—cogito, ergo sum—is a unique cognitive process of direct insight and nonlogical inference. It differs markedly from inductive as well as deductive procedures, but also from older models of the direct noetic apprehension of first principles, notably those of Plato and Aristotle. However, a critical examination of Descartes’s argument for the innateness of the idea of God shows that there are serious obstacles in the way of his employment (...) of the analytic method of discovery to reach this or any other conclusion about ideas that do not fall within the scope of ordinary human experience. (shrink)

It used to be a commonplace that the discipline of philosophy was deeply concerned with questions about the human condition. Philosophers thought about human beings and how their minds worked. They took an interest in reason and passion, culture and innate ideas, the origins of people’s moral and religious beliefs. On this traditional conception, it wasn’t particularly important to keep philosophy clearly distinct from psychology, history, or political science. Philosophers were concerned, in a very general way, with questions (...) about how.. (shrink)

Thus declares Francis Hutcheson, expressing a view widespread during the Enlightenment, and throughout the history of philosophy. According to this tradition, we are by nature moral, and ourS concern for good and evil is as natural to us as our capacity to feel pleasure and pain. The link between morality and human nature has been a common theme since ancient times, and, with the rise of modern empirical moral psychology, it remains equally popular today. Evolutionary ethicists, ethologists, developmental psychologists, social (...) neuroscientists, and even some cultural anthropologists tend to agree that morality is part of the bioprogram (e.g., Cosmides & Tooby, 1992; de Waal, 1996; Haidt & Joseph, 2004; Hauser, 2006; Ruse, 1991; Sober & Wilson, 1998; Turiel, 2002). Recently, researchers have begun to look for moral modules in the brain, and they have been increasingly tempted to speculate about the moral acquisition device, and innate faculty for norm acquisition akin to celebrated language acquisition device, promulgated by Chomsky (Dwyer, 1999; Mikhail, 2000; Hauser, this volume). All this talk of modules and mechanism may make some shudder, especially if they recall that eugenics emerged out of an effort to find the biological sources of evil. Yet the tendency to postulate an innate moral faculty is almost irresistible. For one thing, it makes us appear nobler as a species, and for another, it offers an explanation of the fact that people in every corner of the globe seem to have moral rules. Moral nativism is, in this respect, an optimistic doctrine—one that makes our great big world seem comfortingly smaller. I want to combat this alluring idea. I do not deny that morality is ecumenical, but I think it is not innate—at least that the current state of evidence is unpersuasive. Morality, like all human capacities, depends on having particular biological predispositions, but none of these, I submit, deserves to be called a moral faculty. Morality is a byproduct—accidental or invented—of faculties that evolved for other purposes.. (shrink)

The 20^th century has been a tumultuous time in psychology – a century in which the discipline struggled with basic questions about its intellectual identity, but nonetheless managed to achieve spectacular growth and maturation. It’s not surprising, then, that psychology has attracted sustained philosophical attention and stimulated rich philosophical debate. Some of this debate was aimed at understanding, and sometimes criticizing, the assumptions, concepts and explanatory strategies prevailing in the psychology of the time. But much philosophical work has also been (...) devoted to exploring the implications of psychological findings and theories for broader philosophical questions like: Are humans really rational animals? How malleable is human nature? and Do we have any innate knowledge or innate ideas? One particularly noteworthy fact about philosophy of psychology in the 20^th century is that, in the last quarter of the century, the distinction between psychology and the philosophy of psychology began to dissolve as philosophers played an increasingly active role in articulating and testing empirical theories about the mind and psychologists became increasingly interested in the philosophical underpinnings and implications of their work. Our survey is divided into five sections, each focusing on an important theme in 20^th century psychology which has been the focus of philosophical attention and has benefited from philosophical scrutiny. (shrink)

Recently in these pages it has been argued that a relatively straightforward version of an old argument based on evolutionary biology and psychology can be employed to support the view that innate ideas are a naturalistic source of metaphysical knowledge. While sympathetic to the view that the “evolutionary argument” is pregnant with philosophical implications, I show in this paper how it needs to be developed and deployed in order to avoid serious philosophical difficulties and unnecessary complications. I sketch (...) a revised version of the evolutionary argument, place it in a new context, and show that this version in this context is not vulnerable to the standard criticisms levelled against arguments of this general type. The philosophical import of this version of the argument lies not in any metaphysical conclusions it sanctions directly, but in the support it lends to the metaphilosophy of commonsense. (shrink)

At least since Locke, philosophers and psychologists have usually held that concepts arise out of sensory perceptions, thoughts are built from concepts, and language enables speakers to convey their thoughts to hearers. Christopher Gauker holds that this tradition is mistaken about both concepts and language. The mind cannot abstract the building blocks of thoughts from perceptual representations. More generally, we have no account of the origin of concepts that grants them the requisite independence from language. Gauker's alternative is to show (...) that much of cognition consists in thinking by means of mental imagery, without the help of concepts, and that language is a tool by which interlocutors coordinate their actions in pursuit of shared goals. Imagistic cognition supports the acquisition and use of this tool, and when the use of this tool is internalized, it becomes the very medium of conceptual thought. (shrink)

In the 17th century, there was a lively debate in the intellectual circles with which Locke was familiar, revolving around the question whether the human mind is furnished with innate ideas. Although a few scholars declared that there is no good reason to believe, and good reason not to believe, in the existence of innate ideas, the vast majority took for granted that God, in his infinite goodness and wisdom, has inscribed in human minds innate (...) principles that constitute the foundation of knowledge, as well in practical as in theoretical matters. It was in opposition to the latter group, which included Descartes, leading Anglican divines, and the Cambridge Platonists, that Locke directed his attack upon innate ideas in the first book of the Essay.1 In the minds of those who weighed in on one side or the other, the importance of the controversy related to epistemological, moral, and religious doctrines. At the epistemological level, innatists (or, as I will also call them, nativists) held that all knowledge of the natural and supernatural world available to humans is based on fundamental “speculative” axioms, theoretical principles that neither require nor are capable of proof. These principles, such as the causal principle – that nothing comes from nothing – or the principle of non-contradiction – that nothing can both be and not be at the same time, were taken to be both universal and necessary, and hence impossible to derive from experience. To the mind of an innatist, if these principles are not based on experience and are not (as chimerical ideas were thought to be) constructed out.. (shrink)

The idea that formal geometry derives from intuitive notions of space has appeared in many guises, most notably in Kant’s argument from geometry. Kant claimed that an a priori knowledge of spatial relationships both allows and constrains formal geometry: it serves as the actual source of our cognition of principles of geometry and as a basis for its further cultural development. The development of non-Euclidean geometries, however, seemed to definitely undermine the idea that there is some privileged relationship between our (...) spatial intuitions and mathematical theory. This paper’s aim is to look at this longstanding philosophical issue through the lens of cognitive science. Drawing on recent evidence from cognitive ethology, developmental psychology, neuroscience and anthropology, I argue for an enhanced, more informed version of the argument from geometry: humans share with other species evolved, innate intuitions of space which serve as a vital precondition for geometry as a formal science. (shrink)

: Malebranche famously objects to Descartes' argument that the nature of the mind is better known than the nature of body as follows: if we had an idea of the mind's nature we would know the possible range of modes of the mind, including the sensory modes, but we do not know those modes and thus can't have an idea of the mind's nature. I argue that Malebranche's objections are readily answerable from within the Cartesian system. This argument involves examining (...) the status of sensations in Descartes, innate ideas, and Malebranche's occasionalism. (shrink)

Locke on Human Understanding, is a comprehensive introduction to John Locke's major work, Essay Concerning Human Understanding . Locke's Essay remains a key work in many philosophical fields, notably in epistemology, metaphysics and the philosophies of mind and language. In addition, Locke is often referred to as the first English empiricist. Knowledge of this influential work and figure is essential to Enlightenment thought. E. J. Lowe's approach enables students to effectively study the Essay by placing Locke's life and works in (...) their intellectual and historical context. The book provides a critical examination of the leading themes in the Essay , illuminating the main lines in Locke's thinking. Such topics include innate ideas, perception, primary and secondary qualities, personal identity, free will, action and language. Finally, E. J. Lowe examines the comtemporary work being done on this highly influential English philosopher. (shrink)

Saltzstein and Kasachkoff (2004) critique the social intuitionist model (Haidt, 2001), but the model that they critique is a stripped-down version that should be called the “possum” model. They make three charges about the possum model that are not true about the social intuitionist model: that it includes no role for reasoning, that it reduces social influence to compliance, and that it does not take a developmental perspective. After I defend the honor of the social intuitionist model, I raise two (...) areas of legitimate dispute: the scope and nature of moral reasoning, and the usefulness of appealing to innate ideas, rather than to learning and reasoning, as the origin of moral knowledge. I present three clusters of innate moral intuitions, related to sympathy, hierarchy, and reciprocity. (shrink)

As Paul Griffiths [2002] puts it, “innateness” is associated with different clusters of related ideas where each cluster depends on different historical, cultural and intellectual contexts. In psychology innateness is typically opposed to learning while the biological opposite of innate is ‘acquired’. ‘Acquired’ and ‘learned’ have different extensions. Learning is one way to acquire a character but there are others. Cuts and scratches are unlearned yet acquired; if we could acquire languages by popping a pill, then languages would (...) be unlearned yet acquired according to the wide biological application of the term [Sober, 1998]. Further, in psychology and philosophy innateness is often associated with both “universality” (or species-specificity), and, relatedely, innate traits are often thought to be “fixed” or “unmodifiable”. But, biologists recognize a range of developmental patterns that a specific trait may take. Some are universal, but others are not, as in the case of innate diseases. Some are “fixed” in the sense that once we develop them we have them for the rest of our lives; some innate diseases are like this, but others, are modifiable. Sober [1998] cites a case of an Egyptian vulture that when first confronted with an ostrich egg and a stone, will break the egg with the stone, but if the vulture repeatedly comes to find broken eggs to be empty, it will eventually stop breaking eggs. These examples lend support to Griffiths’s thesis, since the concept of innateness in psychology appears to be in several ways distinct from the concept of innateness in biology. (shrink)

In the Fifth Meditation, Descartes makes a remarkable claim about the ontological status of geometrical figures. He asserts that an object such as a triangle has a 'true and immutable nature' that does not depend on the mind, yet has being even if there are no triangles existing in the world. This statement has led many commentators to assume that Descartes is a Platonist regarding essences and in the philosophy of mathematics. One problem with this seemingly natural reading is that (...) it contradicts the conceptualist account of universals that one finds in the Principles of Philosophy and elsewhere. In this paper, I offer a novel interpretation of the notion of a true and immutable nature which reconciles the Fifth Meditation with the conceptualism of Descartes' other work. Specifically, I argue that Descartes takes natures to be innate ideas considered in terms of their so-called 'objective being'. (shrink)

_In the normal course of events, children manifest linguistic competence equivalent to that of adults in just a few years. Children can produce and understand novel sentences, they can judge that certain strings of words are true or false, and so on. Yet experience appears to dramatically underdetermine the com- petence children so rapidly achieve, even given optimistic assumptions about children’s nonlinguistic capacities to extract information and form generalizations on the basis of statistical regularities in the input. These considerations underlie (...) various (more specific) poverty of stimulus arguments for the innate specification of linguistic principles. But in our view, certain features of nativist arguments have not yet been fully appreciated. We focus here on three (related) kinds of poverty of stimulus argument, each of which has been supported by the findings of psycholinguistic investigations of child language. (shrink)

: Plato's founding position in the tradition of epistemological nativism has been underestimated. In addition to his notorious, naively non-dispositional model of learning as recollection, Plato offers several neglected dispositional models of innate ideas, including Diotima's model of mental pregnancy in the Symposium, in which maturing mental embryos begin not with the actual content of the knowledge to be acquired, but with a specific potentiality that must be actualized through series of specific kinds of experience and mental activity. (...) A survey of dialogues from Meno to Phaedrus shows that Plato typically favors such dispositional models, and that he raises doubts about the non-dispositional details of the recollection model where it occurs. (shrink)

The idea that some characteristics of an organism are explained by the organism's intrinsic nature, whilst others reflect the influence of the environment is an ancient one. It has even been argued that this distinction is itself part of the evolved psychology of the human species. The distinction played an important role in the history of philosophy as the locus of the dispute between Rationalism and Empiricism discussed in another entry in this encyclopedia. This entry, however, focuses on twentieth-century accounts (...) of the innate/acquired distinction. These accounts have for the most part been inspired by the sciences of mind and behaviour. (shrink)

One question that has created controversy among interpreters is just how much is in doubt at the end of the Dream Argument in Meditation I. I argue that there is doubt about the existence of composite bodies not yet about the existence of a physical world. I also caution against using later parts of the Meditations to interpret the First Meditation on account of the order of reasons in this work. I connect the Omnipotent God argument to Descartes's views about (...) innate ideas and analyze the First Meditation in relation to Descartes's anti-aristotelian purposes. (shrink)

For the Venice Architecture Biennale 2010, curator Rietveld Landscape has been invited by the Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAI) to make a statement about the potential of landscape architecture to contribute to resolving the complex challenges that our society faces today. These challenges call for innovation; for a culture centred on design skills and cooperation between scientists and creative pioneers. The installation ‘Vacant NL, where architecture meets ideas’ calls upon the Dutch government to make use of the enormous potential of (...) inspiring, unoccupied buildings from the 17th, 18th, 19th, 20th and 21st centuries for innovation within the creative knowledge economy. Images of the installation can be found here: www.rietveldlandscape.nl/en/projects/439. (shrink)

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) was hailed by Bertrand Russell as "one of the supreme intellects of all time." A towering figure in Seventeenth century philosophy, his complex thought has been championed and satirized in equal measure, most famously in Voltaire's Candide. In this outstanding introduction to his philosophy, Nicholas Jolley introduces and assesses the whole of Leibniz's philosophy. Beginning with an introduction to Leibniz's life and work, he carefully introduces the core elements of Leibniz's metaphysics: his theories of substance, identity (...) and individuation; monads and space and time; and his important debate over the nature of space and time with Newton's champion, Samuel Clarke. He then introduces Leibniz's theories of mind, knowledge, and innate ideas, showing how Lenin anticipated the distinction between conscious and unconscious states, before examining his theory of free will and the problem of evil. An important feature of the book is its introduction to Leibniz'smoral and political philosophy, an overlooked aspect of his work. The final chapter assesses legacy and the impact of his philosophy on philosophy as a whole, particularly on the work of Immanuel Kant. Throughout, Nicholas Jolley places Lenin in relation to some of the other great philosophers, such as Descartes, Spinoza and Locke, and discusses Leibniz's key works, such as the Monadology and Discourse on Metaphysics. (shrink)

The 20th century has been a tumultuous time in psychology – a century in which the discipline struggled with basic questions about its intellectual identity, but nonetheless managed to achieve spectacular growth and maturation. It’s not surprising, then, that psychology has attracted sustained philosophical attention and stimulated rich philosophical debate. Some of this debate was aimed at understanding, and sometimes criticizing, the assumptions, concepts and explanatory strategies prevailing in the psychology of the time. But much philosophical work has also been (...) devoted to exploring the implications of psychological findings and theories for broader philosophical questions like: Are humans really rational animals? How malleable is human nature? and Do we have any innate knowledge or innate ideas? One particularly noteworthy fact about philosophy of psychology in the 20th century is that, in the last quarter of the century, the distinction between psychology and the philosophy of psychology began to dissolve as philosophers played an increasingly active role in articulating and testing empirical theories about the mind and psychologists became increasingly interested in the philosophical underpinnings and implications of their work. Our survey is divided into five sections, each focusing on an important theme in 20th century psychology which has been the focus of philosophical attention and has benefited from philosophical scrutiny. (shrink)

Kant criticizes the so-called hypothesis at the end of the B-Deduction on the ground that it entails scepticism. I examine the historical context of Kant's criticism, and identify the targets as both Crusius and Leibniz. There are two claims argued for in this paper: first, that attending to the context of the opposition to certain forms of nativism affords a way of understanding Kant's commitment to the so-called , by contrasting the possession conditions for the categories with those for (...) class='Hi'>innate ideas; secondly, it provides an insight with regard to Kant's understanding of the dialectic with scepticism. Kant's claim is that a certain explanatory lacuna that attaches to Humean empiricism can be seen to apply equally to any nativist theory. The lacuna concerns the explanation of the modal purport of a priori necessity, i.e. how it is that our consciousness can even distinguish contents that are represented as necessary features of objects. (shrink)

It has become a veritable industry to defend Descartes against the charge of circularity and, to a lesser extent, to argue that he successfully responds to the skepticism of Sextus Empiricus. Since one of Sextus’ main skeptical ploys is to press the charge of circularity against any view, and because Descartes does reply to Sextus, it is worthwhile to criticize these efforts in the same paper. I argue that Descartes did not successfully respond to Sextus’ skeptical arguments. I argue that (...) he is guilty of not one but of five distinct circularities in his defense of empirical knowledge, thst clearing him of such charges can only be had by rendering him naively dogmatic, and that he fails to respond to a Pyrrhonisn contraposition argument. One circle concerns divine logical voluntarism. Another concerns the semantic component of innate ideas. A third arises from his natural inability to disbelieve whatever he clearly and distinctly perceives. A fourth circularity arises in Descartes’ proof that he cannot have generated his idea of God. A final circularity concerns Descartes’ attempt to verify the reliability of his thinking nature by employing that very same thinking nature. To substantiate these claims I review the principles of Sextus’ arguments briefly and I reexamine Descartes’ texts and doctrines in detail. I also take occasion to reflect on why Descartes’ foundationalist program must have failed. (shrink)

Through a close analysis of texts from the Second Objections and Replies to the Meditations, this article addresses the tension between the pursuit of certainty and the preservation of divine transcendence in Descartes’s philosophy. Via a hypothetical “atheist geometer,” the Objectors charge Descartes with pantheism. While the Objectors’ motivations are not clear, the objection raises provocative questions about the relation of the divine and the human mind and about the being of created or dependent entities inDescartes’s metaphysics. Descartes contends that (...) there are real, eternal essences present in the human intellect as innate ideas. I argue that this claim implicates him in pantheism, not merely univocity. In the course of the analysis, I consider recent interpretations by Wells, Marion, and Hatfield. (shrink)

Four philosophical problems--predication, speech acts, rules, and innate ideas--are discussed in the light of their implications for psychological and linguistic research. The discussion of predication concerns both form and use. With respect to form, it is argued that our lexical memory is organized according to a predicate-argument formula that underlies the subject-predicate form of our sentences. With respect to use, it is argued that the illocutionary force of the sentence as a speech act must be taken into account. (...) Both the formation and the use of such verbal constructions are normally characterized by systems of rules, but there is no clear account of what a rule is or how it might operate to control behavior, and this problem is especially difficult when, as in language, the person's knowledge of the rules is implicit. The innate basis for our human ability to acquire linguistic rules is considered and the problem of innateness is redefined around the conjecture that there are innate, language-specific mechanisms unique to human beings. The problem of investigating such language-specific mechanisms psychologically, however, is quite difficult at the present time. (shrink)

Wall, G. Locke's attack on innate knowledge.--Harris, J. Leibniz and Locke on innate ideas.--Greenlee, D. Locke's idea of idea.--Aspelin, G. Idea and perception in Locke's essay.--Greenlee, D. Idea and object in the essay.--Mathews, H. E. Locke, Malebranche and the representative theory.--Alexander, P. Boyle and Locke on primary and secondary qualities.--Ayers, M. R. The ideas of power and substance in Locke's philosophy.--Allison, H. E. Locke's theory of personal identity.--Kretzmann, N. The main thesis of Locke's semantic theory.--Woozley, A. (...) D. Some remarks on Locke's account of knowledge.--Laudan, L. The nature and sources of Locke's views on hypotheses. (shrink)

Jonathan Bennett engages with the thought of six great thinkers of the early modern period: Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume. While not neglecting the historical setting of each, his chief focus is on the words they wrote. What problem is being tackled? How exactly is the solution meant to work? Does it succeed? If not, why not? What can we learn from its success or its failure? These questions reflect Bennett's dedication to engaging with philosophy as philosophy, not as (...) museum exhibit, and they require a close and demanding attention to textual details; these being two features that characterize all Bennett's work on early modern philosophy. For newcomers to the early modern scene, this clearly written work is an excellent introduction to it. Those already in the know can learn how to argue with the great philosophers of the past, treating them as colleagues, antagonists, students, teachers. -/- Volume 2: In this volume Jonathan Bennett examines the views of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume on thought and sensation, meaning, language, classification, innate ideas and knowledge, our knowledge of necessary truths (bringing in Descartes and Leibniz as well), the basis for our belief that we live in a world of material things, causation, the fundamental difference between colours and shapes, the passage of time and our ability to live through it. While finding much to criticize, Bennett shows that we can learn much about these and other topics under the guidance and inspiration of the energy, courage, and insight of these three great British philosophers. (shrink)

Kenny, A. Descartes on the will.--McRae, R. Innate ideas.--McRae, R. Descartes' definition of thought.--Gombay, A. Cogito ergo sum: inference or argument?--Ashworth, E. J. Descartes' theory of clear and distinct ideas.--Alexander, R. E. The problem of metaphysical doubt and its removal.--Tweyman, S. The reliability of reason.--Percival, W. K. On the non-existence of Cartesian linguistics.

New in the Oxford Readings in Philosophy series, this volume brings together some of the best recent articles on John Locke's philosophy. The contributors, including some of the world's leading Locke scholars, focus on innate ideas, ideas and perception, primary and secondary qualities, free will, substance, personal identity, language, essence, knowledge, and belief. By bringing together in one place often difficult to find writings, the volume constitutes an essential collection for students and specialists.

Oxford Readings in Philosophy -/- The aim of this series is to bring together important recent writings in major areas of philosophical inquiry, selected from a variety of sources, mostly periodicals, which may not be conveniently available to the university student or the general reader. The editors of each volume contribute an introductory essay on the items chosen and on the questions with which they deal. A selective bibliography is appended as a guide to further reading. -/- This new volume (...) in the successful Oxford Readings in Philosophy series presents fifteen recently published articles on the main topics in Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding. The increased interest in Locke's philosophy over the past twenty years has resulted in more rigorous, better informed, and more philosophically sophisticated studies than ever before. The essays included here represent the best of this recent work. Each article covers one or more major issues in Locke's Essay. Together they cover all the key themes, including: innate ideas, ideas and perception, primary and secondary qulaities, free will, substance, personal identity, language, essence, knowledge, and belief. The authors include some of the world's leading Locke scholars: Michael R. Ayers, Margaret Atherton, J.L. Mackie, John Campbell, Vere Chappell, Martha Brandt Bolton, Jonathan Bennett and Kenneth P. Winkler. Their essays exemplify the best - and most accessible - recent scholarship on Locke, making it essential for students and specialists. (shrink)

En el presente artículo examino algunas propuestas recientes que pretenden caracterizar una noción de lo innato coherente y teóricamente útil usando conceptos e ideas de la biología del desarrollo o de la biología evolucionista (o ambas), y argumento que la mayoría de elIas o bien padecen serios problemas conceptuales, o bien no pueden capturar de maneras biológicamente interesantes algunas de las connotaciones más importantes asociadas al termino ‘innato’ tal y como se usa en algunas disciplinas cognitivas de corte evolucionista. (...) Asimismo, defiendo mi propia propuesta mostrando que no tiene los problemas que aquejan a las otras propuestas, y sí muchas de sus ventajas.Here l examine some recent proposals to characterize a notion of innateness having some theoretical usefulness and using some concepts and ideas from either developmental biology or evolutionary biology (or both), and argue that most of them either have serious conceptual problems, or else fail to capture in biologically interesting ways some of the important connotations associated to the term ‘innate’ as it is used in some cognitive disciplines of an evolutionary sort. I also make my own proposal, and show that it does not have the problems that the other proposals have, having many of their advantages. (shrink)

Leibniz’s Noveaux Essays are the exercise of a systems dialogue. It is in the first book, when he speaks about innate ideas, where its bases are set, and there Leibniz propounds the basic ideas of his controversy against Locke. Leibniz is convinced that his system is more perfect than Locke’s one and that, if Locke solved his contradictions, he would approach his own system. The hidden aim of the Noveaux Essays redaction is placed beyond a system dialogue, (...) and it can be seen in it the existence of a vast political dialogue whose purpose is the European unity. (shrink)

This is the first modern interpretation of Leibniz's comprehensive critique of Locke, the New Essays on Human Understanding. Arguing that the New Essays is controlled by the overriding purpose of refuting Locke's alleged materialism, Jolley establishes the metaphysical and theological motivation of the work on the basis of unpublished correspondence and manuscript material. He also shows the relevance of Leibniz's views to contemporary debates over innate ideas, personal identity, and natural kinds.

Carnap, R. Empiricism, semantics, and ontology.--Quine, W. V. Two dogmas of empiricism. Meaning and translation.--Sellars, W. Empiricism and the philosophy of mind.--Putnam, H. Brains and behaviour.--Popper, K. R. Science: conjectures and refutations.--Feyerabend, P. K. Science without experience. How to be a good empiricist--a plea for tolerance in matters epistemological.--Kuhn, T. S. Incommensurability and paradigms.--Hesse, M. Duhem, Quine and a new empiricism.--Chomsky, N. Recent contributions to the theory of innate ideas.--Putnam, H. The innateness hypothesis and explanatory models in linguistics.--Goodman, (...) N. The epistemological argument.--Quine, W. V. Linguistics and philosophy.--Edgley, R. Chomsky's theory of innate ideas.--Fodor, J. A. Methodological arguments for behaviorism.--Chomsky, N. Some empirical assumptions in modern philosophy of language.--Annotated bibliography (p. 319-326). (shrink)

READING LEIBNIZ. Context of Leibniz's philosophy -- Difficulties of reading Leibniz -- Using this book -- GOD AND THE BEST POSSIBLE WORLD. Two principles of knowledge -- The existence of god -- The nature of God -- The best of all possible worlds -- SUBSTANCES. Substance in early modern philosophy -- The simplicity and unity of substance in Leibniz -- Substances as points of view on the universe -- Interaction and pre-established harmony -- RATIONAL MINDS. Minute perceptions and levels of (...) awareness -- Necessary truths and innate ideas -- Knowledge -- identity and choice -- LEIBNIZ'S PHILOSOPHY AND LEIBNIZ AS PHILOSOPHER . (shrink)

Leibniz’s Noveaux Essays are the exercise of a systems dialogue. It is in the first book, when he speaks about innate ideas, where its bases are set, and there Leibniz propounds the basic ideas of his controversy against Locke. Leibniz is convinced that his system is more perfect than Locke’s one and that, if Locke solved his contradictions, he would approach his own system. The hidden aim of the Noveaux Essays redaction is placed beyond a system dialogue, (...) and it can be seen in it the existence of a vast political dialogue whose purpose is the European unity. (shrink)

Fodor has argued that, because concept acquisition relies on the use of concepts already possessed by the learner, all concepts that cannot be definitionally reduced are innate. Since very few reductive definitions are available, it appears that most concepts are innate. After noting the reasons why we find such radical concept nativism implausible, I explicate Fodor's argument, showing that anyone who is committed to mentalistic explanation should take it seriously. Three attempts at avoiding the conclusion are examined and (...) found to be unsuccessful. I then present an alternative way around Fodor's nativism; I maintain that concepts at a given level of explanation can be semantically primitive, yet at least partially acquired if some of the conditions at a lower level of explanation that are responsible for the concept's presence are themselves acquired. (shrink)

This is the first volume of a projected three-volume set on the subject of innateness. The extent to which the mind is innate is one of the central questions in the human sciences, with important implications for many surrounding debates. By bringing together the top nativist scholars in philosophy, psychology, and allied disciplines these volumes provide a comprehensive assessment of nativist thought and a definitive reference point for future nativist inquiry. The Innate Mind: Structure and Content, concerns the (...) fundamental architecture of the mind, addressing such question as: What capacities, processes, representations, biases, and connections are innate? How do these innate elements feed into a story about the development of our mature cognitive capacities, and which of them are shared with other members of the animal kingdom? The editors have provided an introduction giving some of the background to debates about innateness and introducing each of the subsequent essays, as well as a consolidated bibliography that will be a valuable reference resource for all those interested in this area. The volume will be of great importance to all researchers and students interested in the fundamental nature and powers of the human mind. Together, the three volumes in the series will provide the most intensive and richly cross-disciplinary investigation of nativism ever undertaken. They point the way toward a synthesis of nativist work that promises to provide a new understanding of our minds and their place in the natural order. (shrink)

The paper argues for the view advocated by Yolton that Locke's ideas are best viewed as intentional contents. Drawing on Smith and McIntyre's distincition between object- and content-theories of intentionality I seek it show that it belongs to the second category. The argument relies mainly on the analysis of Locke's discussion of meaning, the reality and adequacy of ideas and real essence.

According to Margaret Wilson, Leibniz is inconsistent when it comes to the question of whether one can have distinct ideas of sensible qualities, and this because he sometimes conceives of sensible qualities as sensations and sometimes conceives of them as complexes of primary qualities. When he conceives of them as sensations, he denies that we can have distinct ideas of sensible qualities; when he conceives of them as complexes of primary qualities, he asserts that we can. In this (...) paper I argue that Wilson is wrong to think that Leibnizian ideas admit of various degrees of confusion or distinctness. I also argue that although Wilson's problem admits of being reformulated in a manner consistent with a correct understanding of Leibnizian perceptions and ideas, this reformulated version of the problem admits to a satisfactory interpretive solution. (shrink)

The concept of an "idea" played a central role in 17th-century theories of mind and knowledge, but philosophers were divided over the nature of ideas. This book examines an important, but little-known, debate on this question in the work of Leibniz, Malebranche, and Descartes. Looking closely at the issues involved, as well as the particular context in which the debate took place, Jolley demonstrates that the debate has serious implications for a number of major topics in 17th-century philosophy.

This paper explores the fundamental ideas that have motivated the idea of emergence and the movement of emergentism. The concept of reduction, which lies at the heart of the emergence idea is explicated, and it is shown how the thesis that emergent properties are irreducible gives a unified account of emergence. The paper goes on to discuss two fundamental unresolved issues for emergentism. The first is that of giving a “positive” characterization of emergence; the second is to give a (...) coherent explanation of how “downward” causation, a central component of emergentism, is able to avoid the problem of overdetermination. (shrink)

The article examines from an historical perspective some of the key ideas used in contemporary bioethics debates both for and against the practices of assisted suicide and euthanasia. Key thinkers examined--spanning the Ancient, Medieval and Modern periods--include Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Hume, Kant, and Mill. The article concludes with a synthesizing summary of key ideas that oppose or defend assisted suicide and euthanasia.

In the chapter “A History of Ideas Concerning the Morality of Suicide, Assisted Suicide and Voluntary Euthanasia” author Craig Paterson explores questions concerning the legitimacy of the practices of suicide, assisted suicide, and voluntary euthanasia. The aim of this article is of identifying some of the main historical protagonists, and delineating some of the key arguments that have been used for the acceptance or rejection of these practices.

Some Radical New Ideas About Consciousness Consciousness and the Cosmos: A New Copernican Revolution Consciousness is our new frontier in modern science. Most scientists believe that it can be accomodated, explained, by existing scientific principles. I say that it cannot. That it calls all existing scientific principles into question. That consciousness is to modern science just exactly what light was to classical physics: All of our fundamental assumptions about the nature of Reality have to change. And I go on, (...) in this work,to spell out a whole new view of Reality, and of the Universe. And so, we'll have some fun! Modern science is already in deep trouble... Lorna Green. (shrink)

According to Locke, what are ideas? I argue that Locke does not give an account of the nature of ideas. In the Essay, the question is simply set to one side, as recommended by the “Historical, plain Method” that Locke employs. This is exemplified by his characterization of ‘ideas’ in E I.i.8, and the discussion of the inverted spectrum hypothesis in E II.xxxii. In this respect, Locke’s attitude towards the nature of ideas in the Essay is (...) reminiscent of Boyle’s diffident attitude the nature of matter. In posthumously published work, however, Locke suggests that the enquiry into the nature of ideas is one of the things that the enquiry into the extent of human knowledge undertaken in the Essay actually shows to lie beyond the “compass of human understanding”. In this respect, Locke’s attitude towards the nature of ideas is reminiscent of Sydenham’s attitude towards the nature of diseases. (shrink)