Locke and the Controversy over Innate Ideas

Abstract

Perhaps most common reading of Book I of Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding has been to take it as a verbose and misdirected polemic aimed at a quaint doctrine of ideas popular among Cartesians in seventeenth century. Having, so this interpretation goes, disposed of innate ideas, Locke then ready in Book II to establish his basic empiricistic tenet, principle that nothing in mind which was not first in senses. This customary reading, however, must be mistaken at least for reason that Locke not an in sense spelled out by that tenet. For there in mind, according to Locke, if in this much to be included in addition to materials-the simple and complex ideas-out of which it composed, which was not first in senses. In fact, official concept of introduced at outset of Book IV of Essay so construes knowledge that there can be no that was first in senses. For knowledge there conceived of in such a way as to be creation of mind, or of understanding, as it goes about its business of relating ideas, definition of knowledge being the perception of connexion of and agreement, or disagreement and repugnancy of any of our The customary reading of Book I as an empiricist stand against rationalism (especially in its Cartesian form) wrong, however, for reasons more complex than those of a wrong view of Locke's genetic psychology. To show why this reading wrong and to try to get straight on just what polemic of that book against innateness really about purpose of what follows. To begin with in making sense of controversy over innate ideas, notice that bulk of Book I turns out upon examination to consist in an attack upon innate principles rather than innate ideas. Of four chapters second and third strike out at two different sorts of innate principles, first, what Locke calls speculative and, second, what he calls practical. Paradigms for two sorts are, for first, Whatsoever is, is and It impossible for same thing to be and not to be' and, for second, of which Locke discusses quite a number of examples, That one should do as he would be done unto (I, iii, 4) and That men should keep their compacts. (I, iii, 5). Only