A dispute · spans 3 eras
Are There Innate Ideas?
Is the mind born furnished or empty?
Plato thought we were born with knowledge that had to be recollected – the Meno dialogue has Socrates extract a geometric proof from an uneducated slave boy by careful questioning, as evidence. Descartes thought the idea of God and the basic axioms of mathematics were innate. Locke spent the first hundred pages of his Essay arguing they are not – the mind is a blank slate. Modern cognitive science has revived the question: language acquisition, numerical sense, face recognition, certain moral intuitions – all look hard to explain without something like innate structure.
// The sides
Innate ideas exist
The mind arrives in the world already structured – with ideas and principles experience could never have given: it only awakens them at the proper time; experience shows only what is – where, then, does our knowledge of what must be come from?