Do we have Innate Ideas?

Hi guys, so hopefully this essay will be a little more accessible than my last post here.

Basically, the question is: do humans have innate ideas, or do we get everything from experience?

Feel free to skip all the background information and post your opinion, but the background info will be aid you in having a good, philosophically relevant response.

If you raise a question that is answered in this original post, it will not really help the conversation.

For background, I will explain how Descartes answers this question, and then show views contrary to Descartes, in Locke and Berkeley. Basically Descartes, being a rationalist, says we have innate ideas, while Locke and Berkeley, as empiricists, say we get all our ideas from experience only.

Rene Descartes was a rationalist, meaning that he believed that the mind, rather than the senses, was the source of intellectual wisdom. His rational for said theory was that his senses can be deceived about the world. For example, when one is dreaming, one thinks it is real in the moment, and often will see or even hear things that aren't actually occurring in reality. Furthermore - and this is tricky, so read carefully - Descartes doubts that we truly experience objects through the senses, since they only seem to give us an image of them in the mind. Furthermore, all we experience is a collection of qualities that seem to go together, and yet we still call that collection a single object. This leads him to believe in innate ideas, which seem to explain how we understand concepts like 'objects' that we do not experience. We require innate concepts to distinguish between what we experience and what reality is actually like. For example, a perfect cube is something we never experience, and yet we understand the concept. This, for Descartes, is evidence that their are innate ideas: things like logical mathematics, and metaphysics, which help us make sense of the world. According to Descartes, even our sensory ideas involve innate concepts: bodies have no real properties resembling our ideas of colours, sounds, and tastes, except in the mind of the perceiver. This implies that the content of these ideas comes from the mind itself, and not from experience. To illustrate his point about innate ideas, Descartes uses a piece of wax. (This is important - if you read nothing else about Descartes, read this.) Descartes takes a piece of wax, and notes it's qualities. He than melts the wax, and notes it's qualities have changed. However, throughout the process, he notices that he still believes the wax is the same piece of wax, even though he has two completely different experiences of two completely different objects. This continuity is not known by the senses, because we clearly experience two different objects. It is the innate concept of continuous objects that the mind posits on the experienced piece of wax that allows us to experience it as a continuous object. This leads to how Descartes classifies thought: he thinks we have two ways of thinking. One is imagination: you can imagine a triangle quite clearly, and this imagined triangle is a result of sensory experience. However, when one tries to imagine a chilligon (1000 sided object) it is nearly impossible. However, one still understands the concept of a chilligon through pure intellection. This is the relationship between concept and experience: using our pure intellection, we understand the concept of the wax as a single object underlying through it's changes.

On the flip side, empiricists like Locke, Hume, and Berkeley are against Descartes.

Locke thought that humans have no innate ideas, and are born as a tabula rasa - a blank slate. Locke says this because if there were innate ideas (a priori knowledge) than it would be shared by everyone. However, since there are no such shared ideas, the mind is a blank slate at birth. The one ability Locke does believe everyone shares is the capacity to acquire ideas - this ability is their reason. As an empiricist, Locke's solution to where ideas come from is experiences. Locke identifies two types of ideas: simple and complex. Simple ideas are individual experiences of qualities - like 'large' or 'red'. Complex ideas are combinations of simple ideas - like 'chair' or 'computer'. He says our knowledge of these objects comes from their secondary qualities - which is really saying from their primary qualities. For Locke, there are no real generalities, only particulars - the qualities that make something up, not the something itself. When we say 'its a tree', there is no one tree that corresponds with 'tree' - it is an arbitrary word to describe trees in general, which we notice we have some similar experiences of and therefore we create, in our mind, an abstract general idea of tree that has only a few qualites that we perceive every tree has - but not every quality of every tree.. For Locke, something is real if it can be traced back to experience - so even though we may not experience complex ideas themselves, they are based upon experience. Complex ideas are basically our concepts - however, unlike for Descartes, in this case, they are not innate, but grounded in experience.

George Berkeley raised some issues concerning Locke's simple and complex ideas. However, like Locke, he was an empiricist, and would not side with Descartes. This is complex, so if you don't understand the first time around, try rereading it. Berkeley said that simple and complex ideas cannot be separated in the way Locke does, since we dont experience just simple ideas. Instead, we use our complex ideas to imagine individual simple ideas existing on their own, as opposed to our experience of them which is that they are always part of something else (you can't have 'red' without something being red.) Furthermore, Berkeley objects to abstract general ideas, since we don't experience them. Abstract general ideas strip down their relevant objects (like various individual trees) and assign to them some common attributes that they all share. However, we don't experience trees in this way - we experience many individual trees. For Berkeley, all our experiences are particular; there is no general whatsoever, whereas for Locke, there had been. Berkeley is also concerned about primary qualities and how they seem to vary from person to person - someone might say something is very big, while the other might say it is only somewhat big. If this is the case, they must all be secondary qualities - but if they are, there are no primary qualities, and the distinction fails.


THOUGHTS?

BE RATIONAL

 

I think Kant's view is the most adequate. Of course, ideas gain their material from experience, but through thinking we can extend this 'raw matter' of ideas and form new concepts.

 

I like that you brought up Kant. So say I have the concept of a unicorn in my mind. What concept(s) am I really thinking of? I imagine a horse body, and a narwhal tusk on it's nose. But am I really imagining a new concept? Or just a combination of old ones?

 

Certainly a combination of old ones. There is nothing in the idea of a unicorn that is not derived from the ideas of a horse and of a narwhal.

 

Why? This isn't an argument, just a belief...

 

I took a psychology 101 course in University and I dare say it is the combination of both concepts that aid in our bottom-up as well as top-down thinking.

 

Here's a thought, what "experience" leads to a majority of humanity fearing snakes from a young age? Humans have evolved an innate tendency to fear and avoid snakes, like most primates. Fear and avoidance isn't something solely genetic, it's hardwired in our personalities. So, yes we do have innate ideas.

 

Let me flip this on you. If we have innate ideas, wouldn't everyone be scared of the snakes? Fear comes from the belief of danger or threat. If at a young age I believe that snakes are not a threat, I would not be scared of it. If innate ideas were a true concept, we all would have the same belief that the snake is a threat. We manifest our beliefs into emotions. How do we end up with conclusive beliefs? Through experience.

They say human instincts come from innate ideas, but that isn't true. Everything we know comes from experience.

Here are a few human instincts:

eat and drink; seek food and water
be interested in girls or boys (usually of opposite sex)
seek better resources than presently available

It's impossible to have these natural ideas unless you've experienced them prior.

 

How exactly flipping it on me? Living in South Florida, I've sure as hell seen tons of children at parks before they even learn how to walk freaking out when they see garden snakes out of fear. A better example, I had a toy snake and went up to my younger sister many years ago before she was even able to speak (maybe 6 months old) and she had never seen a snake before in her life. When I put it on her lap she started crying and freaking out. However she's completely fine with playing with other animal toys of animals she's never seen before.

Sure some people don't have that sense of fear for snakes, but you can't deny that others do at a young age. While babies and very young children do not usually fear snakes, they are unusually skilled at detecting them. There are studies showing that it is indeed innate and psychologists found that both adults and children could detect images of snakes among a variety of non-threatening objects more quickly than they could pinpoint frogs, flowers or caterpillars. The researchers think this ability helped humans survive in the wild. The fear of snakes is a reflection of 60 million years of evolutionary history working on our visual system.

So you argue that EVERYTHING comes from experience, but then why is it that humans and other primates have a section in their brain known as the pulvinar. For those who don't know what the pulvinar is, it's a part of the visual system that appears to be the sort of quicker, automatic visual system that allows us to respond without even being consciously aware of the object that we are responding to. Specifically, this system works the best in reaction to snakes.

You also gave the examples of human instincts, but are those not innate? How is a newborn that immediately heads towards the breast of its mother and suck for the first time come from "experience"? There has to be a first for everything.

 

You say the fear of snakes is an innate idea. For that to be plausible, everyone would have to have a natural fear of the snake when first encountering it. The very idea is absurd. As I explained before, beliefs don't come from nothing, it comes from experience. Beliefs are manifested into emotions, which is then translated to actions. Don't confuse reflexes for innate ideas, because reflexes aren't thought processed.

 

Ghast is correct. For an idea to be innate, it must be shared by anyone. This is easily arrived at through logic.
Also, we distinguish a section of the brain from ideas. Ideas are thinking - the pulvinar is not thinking, it is something that facilitates thinking. It is not an idea in the same way that an arm is not an idea.

 

I honestly believe all humans are a blank slate, it's experience which shapes us good or bad. Like Hamouze's example of snakes - I honestly believe we are shaped into these conceptions by our parents/society/experience.

The best example is that of a bee, children don't fear a bee until it stings them.

 

i think it's from experience, we are all taught and shown something.

 

We are blank slates upon being born except for survival instincts. Everything in the animal kingdom has basic survival instincts upon being born in my opinion.