Innatism

Question 1

How can we disprove knowledge empiricism?

Answer 1

• To prove knowledge empiricism wrong and establish rationalism as correct, we need at least one example of a synthetic truth that is known a priori.
• There are two potential ways of demonstrating synthetic a priori knowledge:

-Intuition and deduction (Descartes’Meditations)
Innate knowledge (Plato’s Meno)

Question 2

Outline the claim of innatism.

Answer 2

• Another way we may argue for rationalism is via the possibility of innate knowledge.
• Innate knowledge is knowledge you’re born with and so doesn’t require experience to be known. So, innate knowledge is a priori.

Question 3

Outline the slave boy argument

Answer 3

-Plato argues that we are born with certain kinds of knowledge. The key facts of Plato’s argument for innate knowledge are listed below:

• Meno’s slave has never been taught geometry, so he doesn’t know geometry
• Socrates draws a square on the ground that is 2 feet x 2 feet
• Socrates asks Meno’s slave a series of questions
• Meno’s slave correctly answers the questions
• This leads him to realise the area of the square is 4 feet, despite having no knowledge of geometry.

Question 4

What does Leibniz say on necessary truths?

Answer 4

-Knowledge of necessary truths is not derived from experience. Experience only teaches us how things are on any occasion; it cannot teach us how things must be. We can only discover contingent truths through empirical evidence. So it seems that all necessary truths are a priori.

• Leibniz then argues that we should regard such a priori reasoning by ‘attending carefully and methodically to what is already in our minds’. This is what Plato’s example of the slave boy argument shows.
• We need sense experience to form abstract thoughts. This makes sense experience necessary but not sufficient for knowledge of necessary truths. If sense experience isn’t sufficient, then the knowledge must already be part of our minds.

Question 5

How do philosophers argue that experience triggers innate knowledge?

Answer 5

• Philosophers who defend innate knowledge argue for it as ‘knowledge which cannot be gained from experience’, e.g. geometry (Plato) and other necessary truths (Leibniz).
• Since we are not consciously aware of this knowledge from birth, there is some point at which we first come to be aware of it.

Question 6

How is experience ‘enabling’ knowledge different from simply learning from experience?

Answer 6

The idea of triggering is commonest used in the stuff of animal behaviour. E.g. for some birds, a baby bird need only hear a little bit of the bird song of its species before being able to sing the whole song by itself. There has been far too little experience of the song sung by other birds for the baby bird to learn from experience; rather the experience has triggered its innately given song.

• This is the same with babies. E.g. at 3-4months they start thinking of objects as existing when they don’t have it rather than only existing when they are experiencing them.
• The claim is that our capacities are ‘predisposed’ towards thinking truly about the world in some ways rather than others. So experience merely triggers our knowledge, rather than being the source of it.

Question 7

How does Locke argue against innate knowledge?

Answer 7

-Locke argues that we have no innate (propositional) Knowledge. He begins by asking how we acquire our ideas and by ‘idea’, he means ‘whatever it is that you are capable of thinking about in the mind’.

• Alternatively, an ‘idea’ is any ‘immediate object of perception, thought, or understanding’. So to be aware he has multiple definitions for idea:
  1) A complete thought, taking the form of a proposition, e.g. ‘bananas are yellow’
  2) A sensation or sensory experience, e.g. a visual sensation of yellow.
  3) A concept, e.g. ‘yellow’

Question 8

What is Lockes formal argument against innatism?

Answer 8

P1. If there is innate knowledge, it is universal
P2. For an idea to be part of the mind, the mind (the person) must know or be conscious of it: ‘it seems to me nearly a contradiction to say that there are truths imprinted on the soul that it doesn’t perceive or understand. No proposition can be said to be in the mind which it has never known or been conscious of.
C1. Therefore, innate knowledge is knowledge that every human being is or has been conscious of.
P3. Children and ‘idiots’ do not know theorems in geometry or ‘it is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be’. (They don’t know these claims because they don’t understand them).
C2. Therefore, these claims are not innate.
P4. There are no claims that are universally accepted, including by children and ‘idiots’.
C3. Therefore there is no innate knowledge.