Locke’s attack on innate ideas

The attack on innate ideas and Locke’s project

As William Uzgalis puts it, the Essay is “concerned with determining the limits of human understanding in respect to a wide spectrum of topics. It…tells us in some detail what one can legitimately claim to know and what one cannot”. The central goal of Locke’s project is to determine the limits of human understanding.

Locke referred to himself as an ‘underlabourer’ to the likes of Boyle, Huygens and Newton. In doing so, Uzgalis suggests he is not only displaying a certain “literary modesty”, but also contrasting the positive discoveries of the scientists with his own attempt to show the inadequacies of the Aristotelian and Scholastic – and to some degree Cartesian – philosophies. Thus, within the apparently neutral project of determining the limits of human understanding, we see a distinctively positive project.

In the four books of the Essay, Locke considers the sources and nature of human knowledge. In Book 1 he argues there are no innate ideas, and hence that the mind is a sort of blank slate on which experience writes. The role of this Book, then, is to make the case that being innate is not a way in which the understanding is furnished with principles and ideas.

We can see two ways in which this doctrine plays a part in Locke’s wider project:

• The doctrine of innate ideas, Locke tells us, is used by “Masters and Teachers” to illegitimately control the minds of their students – Uzgalis points to the scholastics and Aristotelians as the targets for this attack. Thus, Locke’s attack on innate principles is also an expression of his view of the importance of free and autonomous inquiry in the search for truth. For Locke, using reason to grasp the truth is part of optimising human flourishing.

• Locke, like Descartes, is focussing on tearing down what Uzgalis calls “the foundations of the old Aristotelian scholastic house of knowledge”; while Descartes’ focus was on the empiricism at the foundations, Locke’s focus is on the claim that innate ideas provide its first principles. The attack on innate ideas is thus also the first step in the demolition of the scholastic model of science and knowledge.

Descartes’ view on innate ideas

Jolley contends that it is not clear Descartes has a doctrine of innate ideas per se; instead, Descartes’ account is somewhat unstable, with innate ideas invoked for differing reasons. According to Jolley, Descartes’ views on innate ideas are targeted towards:

1. A theory of causation (for example, as in the Comments on a Certain Broadsheet). The doctrine of innate ideas allows Descartes to reconcile perception with his mechanistic theory of physics, via the Aristotelian ‘causal-likeness principle’.

2. An innate idea of God, for his cosmological argument.

3. As a basis for his theory of necessary truths as those implanted in us in God, so that we can’t doubt them. Descartes’ theory of necessary truths is psychologistic: God could have willed other necessary truths, but the ones he has chosen he implants in us such that we cannot, on reflection, doubt them.

Descartes distinguishes between two ‘levels of innateness’:

• Innate ideas proximately caused by a mental disposition.

• Innate intellectual ideas not abstracted from, nor given in, sense experience.

According to the Comments, sensory ideas are innate in the first sense but not the second. On the other hand, innate mathematical ideas are innate in both sense – see, for example, Descartes’ argument in the Fifth Replies. On the other hand, in the letter to Hyperaspistes, Descartes seems to go still further and say the infant’s mind is mainly perceiving sensations but nonetheless knows all self-evident truths in the same way as adults when they are not attending to them – though interpreting this passage is difficult given Descartes’ different (and conflated) uses of the word ‘attention’.

Meditation III

Descartes distinguishes between ‘ideas’ and ‘volitions or judgements’:

• Ideas are images of things, such as we have when we think of a man or an angel.

• Other thoughts have further forms, such as when I will, or am afraid, or deny. In these cases, my thought includes something more than the likeness of the thing. This category includes volitions or emotions and judgements.

Ideas considered solely in themselves cannot strictly be false; only judgements bear truth value. Ideas appear to come in three sorts:

1. Innate – “my understanding of what a thing is, what truth is, what thought is, seems to derive simply from my own nature”.

2. Adventitious – “my hearing a noise, or seeing the sun…comes from things which are located outside me, or so I have hitherto judged”.

3. Invented by me – “sirens…and the like are my own invention”.

Our innate idea of God is the ‘stamp of a craftsman’ on our soul.

Comments on a Certain Broadsheet

Descartes writes that “I have never…taken the view that the mind requires innate ideas which are something distinct from its own faculty of thinking. I did, however, observe there were certain thoughts in me which neither came to me from external objects nor were determined by my will, but which came solely from the power of thinking in me; so I applied the term ‘innate’…in order to distinguish them from…‘adventitious’ or ‘invented’. This is the same sense as that in which we say generosity is ‘innate’ in certain families…they are born with a certain…tendency to contract them”.

He goes on to scoff at the idea that “the power of thinking could achieve nothing on its own” and argue that “if we bear…in mind the scope of our sense…we must admit that in no case are the ideas of things presented to us by the sense just as we form them in our thinking….there is nothing in our ideas which is not innate to the mind or the faculty of thinking, with the sole exception of those circumstances which relate to experience”.

He makes an argument similar to that in the Fifth Replies:

1. Nothing reaches our mind from external objects through the sense...

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