And this reason is to be found only in the fitness or in the degree of perfection which these worlds possess, each possible thing having the right to claim existence in proportion to the perfection which it involves. This is the cause for the existence of the greatest good; namely, that the wisdom of God permits him to know it, his goodness causes him to choose it, and his power enables him to produce it.
According to the above, each possible world contains a specific degree of perfection, and God simply singles out the one that has the most. Just as there is a pre-existing harmony between realms of the body and soul, there is a similar harmony between the natural world and moral world.
Thus, if I commit some evil, I can count on being punished through some natural phenomenon, such as a disease or natural disaster. Similarly, if I perform a good act, I can count on nature rewarding me, such as through good health or good weather. We can say also that God, the Architect, satisfies in all respects God the Law Giver, that therefore sins will bring their own penalty with them through the order of nature, and because of the very structure of things, mechanical though it is.
And in the same way the good actions will attain their rewards in mechanical way through their relation to bodies, although this cannot and ought not always to take place without delay. If God is all powerful, it seems that it was within his ability to create a world without such enormous evils. Leibniz responds with a classic answer given by Augustine and others, that is, sometimes evil is necessary to bring about a greater good:.
The best course is not always that one which tends towards avoiding evil, since it is possible that the evil may be accompanied by a greater good. For example, the general of an army will prefer a great victory with a slight wound to a state of affairs without wound and without victory.
Further, he argues, a world with free creatures who commit evil is better than a world without free creatures. However, Leibniz argues, there is no moral requirement for God to intervene in such dramatic ways, when he can counterbalance such evil through more natural means:. It was consistent with order and the general good for God to grant to certain of his creatures the opportunity to exercise their freedom, even when he foresaw that they would turn to evil: for God could easily correct the evil, and it was not fitting that in order to prevent sin he should always act in an extraordinary way.
Thus, a world with evil may be better than a world without evil. From that time I was convinced that I must once and for all seriously undertake to rid myself of all the opinions which I had formerly accepted, and begin to build anew from the foundation, if I wanted to establish any firm and permanent structure in the sciences. But as this enterprise appeared to be a very great one, I waited until I had attained an age so mature that I could not hope that at any later date I should be better fitted to execute my design.
This reason caused me to delay so long that I should feel that I was doing wrong were I to occupy in deliberation the time that yet remains to me for action. Today, then, since very opportunely for the plan I have in view I have delivered my mind from every care [and am happily agitated by no passions] and since I have procured for myself an assured leisure in a peaceable retirement , I will at last seriously and freely address myself to the general upheaval of all my former opinions.
Now for this object it is not necessary that I should show that all of these are false; I will perhaps never arrive at this end. But reason already persuades me that I ought no less carefully to withhold my assent from matters which are not entirely certain and indubitable than from those which appear to me evidently to be false.
Consequently, if I am able to find in each one some reason to doubt, this will suffice to justify my rejecting the whole. For that end it will not be necessary for me to examine each one in particular, which would be an endless task. But because the destruction of the foundations necessarily brings with it the downfall of the rest of the edifice, I will only in the first place attack those principles upon which all my former opinions rested.
All that up to the present time I have accepted as most true and certain I have learned either from the senses or through the senses; but it is sometimes proved to me that these senses are deceptive, and it is wiser not to trust entirely to anything by which we have once been deceived. Doubting Hypothesis 1: My Senses are Unreliable e. It may be that the senses sometimes deceive us concerning things which are hardly perceptible, or very far away. However, there are yet many others to be met with as to which we cannot reasonably have any doubt, although we recognize them by their means.
For example, there is the fact that I am here, seated by the fire, wearing a dressing gown, having this paper in my hands and other similar matters.
How could I deny that these hands and this body are mine? Perhaps only comparing myself to certain people who lack sense, whose cerebella are so troubled and clouded by the violent vapors of black bile, that they constantly assure us that they think they are kings when they are really quite poor, or that they are clothed in purple when they are really without covering, or who imagine that they have a head made of pottery, or are nothing but pumpkins, or are made of glass.
But they are mad, and I should not be any the less insane were I to follow examples so extravagant. Doubting Hypothesis 2: Maybe I am Dreaming. At the same time I must remember that I am a man, and that consequently I am in the habit of sleeping, and in my dreams I represent to myself the same things or sometimes even less probable things, than do those who are insane in their waking moments. How often has it happened to me that in the night I dreamt that I found myself in this particular place, that I was dressed and seated near the fire, while in reality I was lying undressed in bed!
At this moment it does indeed seem to me that it is with eyes awake that I am looking at this paper; that this head which I move is not asleep, that it is deliberately and of set purpose that I extend my hand and perceive it; what happens in sleep does not appear so clear nor so distinct as does all this.
But in thinking over this I remind myself that on many occasions I have in sleep been deceived by similar illusions, and in dwelling carefully on this reflection I see so evidently that there are no certain indications by which we may clearly distinguish wakefulness from sleep that I am lost in astonishment.
My astonishment is such that it is almost capable of persuading me that I now dream. Now let us assume that we are asleep and that all these particulars, for example, that we open our eyes, shake our head, extend our hands, and so on, are but false delusions.
Let us also reflect that possibly neither our hands nor our whole body are such as they appear to us to be. At the same time we must at least confess that the things which are represented to us in sleep are like painted representations which can only have been formed as the counterparts of something real and true. In this way, those general things at least that is, eyes, a head, hands, and a whole body are not imaginary things, but things really existent.
For, as a matter of fact, painters, even when they study with the greatest skill to represent sirens and satyrs by forms the most strange and extraordinary, cannot give them natures which are entirely new, but merely make a certain medley of the members of different animals.
Or if their imagination is extravagant enough to invent something so novel that nothing similar has ever before been seen, and that then their work represents a thing purely fictitious and absolutely false, it is certain all the same that the colors of which this is composed are necessarily real.
For the same reason, although these general things—that is, [a body], eyes, a head, hands, and such like—may be imaginary, we are bound at the same time to confess that there are at least some other objects yet more simple and more universal, which are real and true.
Of these, just in the same way as with certain real colors, all these images of things which dwell in our thoughts, whether true and real or false and fantastic, are formed. To such a class of things pertains corporeal nature in general, and its extension, the figure of extended things, their quantity or magnitude and number, as also the place in which they are, the time which measures their duration, and so on.
That is possibly why our reasoning is not unjust when we conclude from this that Physics, Astronomy, Medicine and all other sciences which have as their end the consideration of composite things, are very dubious and uncertain; but that Arithmetic, Geometry and other sciences of that kind which only treat of things that are very simple and very general, without taking great trouble to determine whether they are actually existent or not, contain some measure of certainty and an element of the indubitable.
For whether I am awake or asleep, two and three together always form five, and the square can never have more than four sides, and it does not seem possible that truths so clear and apparent can be suspected of any falsity [or uncertainty].
Nevertheless I have long had fixed in my mind the belief that an all-powerful God existed by whom I have been created such as I am. But how do I know that he has not brought it to pass that there is no earth, no heaven, no extended body, no magnitude, no place, and that nevertheless [I possess the perceptions of all these things and that] they seem to me to exist just exactly as I now see them?
But possibly God has not desired that I should be thus deceived, for he is said to be supremely good. If, however, it is contrary to his goodness to have made me such that I constantly deceive myself, it would also appear to be contrary to his goodness to permit me to be sometimes deceived, and nevertheless I cannot doubt that he does permit this. I will remain obstinately attached to this idea, and if by this means it is not in my power to arrive at the knowledge of any truth, I may at least do what is in my power [that is, suspend my judgment], and with firm purpose avoid giving credence to any false thing, or being imposed upon by this arch deceiver, however powerful and deceptive he may be.
But this task is a laborious one, and insensibly a certain lethargy leads me into the course of my ordinary life. Just as a captive who in sleep enjoys an imaginary liberty, when he begins to suspect that his liberty is but a dream, fears to awaken, and conspires with these agreeable illusions that the deception may be prolonged, so insensibly of my own accord I fall back into my former opinions, and I dread awakening from this slumber, lest the laborious wakefulness which would follow the tranquility of this calmness should have to be spent not in daylight, but in the excessive darkness of the difficulties which have just been discussed.
The Meditation of yesterday filled my mind with so many doubts that it is no longer in my power to forget them, yet I do not see in what manner I can resolve them. Just as if I had all of a sudden fallen into very deep water, I am so baffled that I can neither make certain of setting my feet on the bottom, nor can I swim and so support myself on the surface. I will nevertheless make an effort and follow anew the same path as that on which I yesterday entered, that is, I will proceed by setting aside all that in which the least doubt could be supposed to exist, just as if I had discovered that it was absolutely false.
I will ever follow in this road until I have met with something which is certain, or at least, if I can do nothing else, until I have learned for certain that there is nothing in the world that is certain. Archimedes, in order that he might draw the terrestrial globe out of its place, and transport it elsewhere, demanded only that one point should be fixed and immovable. In the same way I will have the right to conceive high hopes if I am happy enough to discover one thing only which is certain and indubitable.
I suppose, then, that all the things that I see are false; I persuade myself that nothing has ever existed of all that my fallacious memory represents to me. I consider that I possess no senses; I imagine that body, figure, extension, movement and place are but the fictions of my mind.
What, then, can be distinguished as true? Perhaps nothing at all, unless that there is nothing in the world that is certain. But how can I know there is not something different from those things that I have just considered, of which one cannot have the slightest doubt? Is there not some God, or some other being by whatever name we call it, who puts these reflections into my mind?
That is not necessary, for is it not possible that I am capable of producing them myself? I myself, am I not at least something? But I have already denied that I had senses and body. Yet I hesitate, for what follows from that? Am I so dependent on body and senses that I cannot exist without these? But I was persuaded that there was nothing in all the world, that there was no heaven, no earth, that there were no minds, nor any bodies: was I not then likewise persuaded that I did not exist?
Not at all; of a surety I myself did exist since I persuaded myself of something [or merely because I thought of something]. But there is some deceiver or other, very powerful and very cunning, whoever employs his ingenuity in deceiving me. All opinions [about God freely directing events] arise from commonly held notion that all things in nature act as men themselves act, namely, with an end in view.
It is accepted as certain, that God himself directs all things to a definite goal for it is said that God made all things for humans, and humans that he might worship him. I will, therefore, consider this opinion, asking first, why it obtains general acceptance, and why all men are naturally so prone to adopt it.
Secondly, I will point out its falsity. Lastly, I will show how it has given rise to prejudices about good and bad, right and wrong, praise and blame, order and confusion, beauty and ugliness, and the like. However, this is not the place to deduce these misconceptions from the nature of the human mind. It will be sufficient here, if I assume as a starting point, what ought to be universally admitted, namely, that all people are born ignorant of the causes of things, that all have the desire to seek for what is useful to them, and that they are conscious of such desire.
From here it follows, first, that people think themselves free inasmuch as they are conscious of their volitions and desires, and never even dream, in their ignorance, of the causes which have disposed them so to wish and desire. Secondly, that people do all things for an end, namely, for that which is useful to them, and which they seek.
Thus it happens that they only look for a knowledge of the final causes of events, and when these are learned, they are content, as having no cause for further doubt. If they cannot learn such causes from external sources, they are compelled to turn to considering themselves, and reflecting what end would have induced them personally to bring about the given event, and thus they necessarily judge other natures by their own.
Further, as they find in themselves and outside themselves many means which assist them not a little in their search for what is useful, for instance, eyes for seeing, teeth for chewing, herbs and animals for yielding food, the sun for giving light, the sea for breeding fish, etc.
Now as they are aware that they found these conveniences and did not make them, they think they have cause for believing, that some other being has made them for their use.
As they look upon things as means, they cannot believe them to be self-created. But, judging from the means which they are accustomed to prepare for themselves, they are bound to believe in some ruler or rulers of the universe endowed with human freedom, who have arranged and adapted everything for human use. They are bound to estimate the nature of such rulers having no information on the subject in accordance with their own nature, and therefore they assert that the gods ordained everything for the use of humans, in order to bind humans to themselves and obtain from him the highest honor.
Hence also it follows that everyone thought out for himself, according to his abilities, a different way of worshipping God, so that God might love him more than his fellows, and direct the whole course of nature for the satisfaction of his blind greed and insatiable avarice. Thus the prejudice developed into superstition, and took deep root in the human mind; and for this reason everyone strove most zealously to understand and explain the final causes of things; but in their attempt to show that nature does nothing in vain, nothing which is useless to humans, they only seem to have demonstrated that nature, the gods, and men are all mad together.
Consider, I ask you, the result: among the many helps of nature they were bound to find some hindrances, such as storms, earthquakes, diseases, etc.
Day by day, experience protested and showed by infinite examples that good and evil fortunes fall to the circumstance of pious and impious alike. Still they would not abandon their inveterate prejudice, for it was more easy for them to class such contradictions among other unknown things of whose use they were ignorant, and thus to retain their actual and innate condition of ignorance, than to destroy the whole fabric of their reasoning and start afresh.
They therefore laid down as an axiom, that God's judgments far transcend human understanding. Such a doctrine might well have sufficed to conceal the truth from the human race for all eternity, if mathematics had not furnished another standard of truth in considering solely the essence and properties of figures without regard to their final causes.
There are other reasons which I need not mention here besides mathematics, which might have caused men's minds to be directed to these general prejudices, and have led them to the knowledge of the truth. I have now sufficiently explained my first point. This, I think, is already evident enough, both from the causes and foundations on which I have shown such prejudice to be based, and also from Prop.
However, I will add a few remarks, in order to overthrow this doctrine of a final cause utterly. That which is really a cause it considers as an effect, and vice versa: it makes that which is by nature first to be last, and that which is highest and most perfect to be most imperfect. Passing over the questions of cause and priority as self-evident, it is plain from Props. The effect which requires for its production several intermediate causes is, in that respect, more imperfect.
But if [to the contrary] those things which were made immediately by God were made to enable him to attain his end, then the things which come after, for the sake of which the first were made, are necessarily the most excellent of all. Further, this doctrine does away with the perfection of God: for, if God acts for an object, he necessarily desires something which he lacks.
Certainly, theologians and metaphysicians draw a distinction between the object of want and the object of assimilation. Still they confess that God made all things for the sake of himself, not for the sake of creation. They are unable to point to anything prior to creation, except God himself, as an object for which God should act, and are therefore driven to admit as they clearly must , that God lacked those things for whose attainment he created means, and further that he desired them.
We must not omit to notice that the followers of this doctrine , anxious to display their talent in assigning final causes, have imported a new method of argument in proof of their theory — namely, a reduction, not to the impossible, but to ignoranc e; thus showing that they have no other method of exhibiting their doctrine.
For example, if a stone falls from a roof onto someone's head, and kills him, they will demonstrate by their new method, that the stone fell in order to kill the man. For, if it had not by God's will fallen with that object, how could so many circumstances and there are often many concurrent circumstances have all happened together by chance?
Perhaps you will answer that the event is clue to the facts that the wind was blowing, and the man was walking that way. So, again, when they survey the frame of the human body, they are amazed; and being ignorant of the causes of so great a work of art, conclude that it has been fashioned, not mechanically, but by divine and supernatural skill, and has been so put together that one part will not hurt another. Hence anyone who seeks for the true causes of miracles, and strives to understand natural phenomena as an intelligent being, and not to gaze at them like a fool, is set down and denounced as an impious heretic by those, whom the masses adore as the interpreters of nature and the gods.
Such persons know that, with the removal of ignorance, the wonder which forms their only available means for proving and preserving their authority would vanish also. But I now quit this subject, and pass on to my third point. Please answer all of the following questions. What are Descartes four rules of inquiry and his four provisionary codes of morals? Why, according to Descartes, is God not a deceiver, and what is the function of the clarity and distinctness mechanism?
What are the things that Descartes doubts because of the dream hypothesis? What are the things that Descartes doubts because of the Evil Genius hypothesis? According to Spinoza, how did ignorant people come up with the idea that God acts with a purpose?
Short essay: pick any one of the following views in this chapter and criticize it in a minimum of words. Malebranche: seeing all things through God; mind-body occasionalism; extreme occasionalism; why God permits evil. Spinoza: God as the only substance; mind-body parallelism; God does not act with a purpose; determinism; human bondage. Leibniz: monads; mind-body parallelism; the best of all possible worlds. Introduction B. Methods of Investigation Like other thinkers of the time, Descartes was attracted to the notion of a scientific method of investigation, which when followed would enable him to make new discoveries and push the boundaries of knowledge.
He describes here his own experience when applying this rule: The first of these was to accept nothing as true which I did not clearly recognize to be so; that is to say, carefully to avoid precipitation and prejudice in judgments, and to accept in them nothing more than what was presented to my mind so clearly and distinctly that I could have no occasion to doubt it. Systematic Doubt Once establishing his method of investigation, Descartes proceeds to build a system of knowledge that he can trust with absolute certainty.
He writes, It is now some years since I detected how many were the false beliefs that I had from my earliest youth admitted as true, and how doubtful was everything I had since constructed on this basis. He writes, Now for this object it is not necessary that I should show that all of these are false -- I will perhaps never arrive at this end.
That would cast doubt on virtually every belief I have, including whether I even have a body: I have long had fixed in my mind the belief that an all-powerful God existed by whom I have been created such as I am. He writes, [Suppose that] there is some deceiver or other, very powerful and very cunning, who ever employs his ingenuity in deceiving me. However, in the very act of grasping his existence, he is exercising several mental abilities, which he describes here: But what then am I?
Spirit-Body Dualism Once Descartes knows that a three-dimensional physical world exists, he continues by arguing that human beings are constructed of both a physical body and a spirit-mind, a position called spirit-body dualism.
All the wiring in my brain, he argues, feeds to that single point right in the center of my brain: It is merely the most inward of all its parts, namely, a certain very small gland which is situated in the middle of its substance and so suspended above the duct whereby the animal spirits in its anterior cavities have communication with those in the posterior.
Sensory Information: Viewing through God Consider first the problem of how sensory information gets from my physical body into my spirit-mind. He explains the difficulty of this conversion process here, speculating about what it would take to turn a physical stone into a non-physical angel: It is even more difficult to produce an angel [that is made of spirit] out of a [physical] stone, than to produce the angel out of nothing.
They are synthetic. See Table 1 below for a summary of these categories. Significance: Receives minimal attention because it is not a primary source of contention in philosophical debates. Examples: Mathematical truths e. Although such truths are commonly considered analytic, Kant disagreed, classifying them as synthetic instead.
Category of knowledge: synthetic a posteriori. Examples: Truths about the external world known immediately via the senses or scientific investigation. A Priori Rational Category of knowledge: analytic a priori. Examples: The deliverance of pure logic; statements that are true by definition known by grasping their meanings. Category of knowledge: synthetic a priori. Significance: Controversial category posited by the Kantian synthesis. While truths in this category are contingent in the strict logical sense their denial is not logically contradictory , Kant claimed for them a kind of metaphysical necessity in that they hold universally and are eternal.
There remains the question of how our concepts discriminate and organize the information received from the senses. These goals are achieved through acts of synthesis. For Kant, apprehension in perception involves locating an object in space and time. The synthesis of reproduction in imagination consists in connecting different elements in our minds to form an image.
And synthesis of recognition in a concept requires memory of a past experience as well as recognizing its relation to present experience. By recognizing that the past and present experience both refer to the same object, we form a concept of it. To recognize something as a unified object under a concept is to attach meaning to percepts. This attachment of meaning is what Kant calls apperception Guyer Apperception is the point where the self and the world come together.
For Kant, the possibility of apperception requires two kinds of unity. First, the various data received in experience must themselves represent a common subject, allowing the data to be combined and held together.
That is, we are in an unspoken agreement regarding the mind-independent world in which we live, facilitated by our subjective experiences but regulated by the innate mental structures given to us by the world. In his Critique of Pure Reason , Kant sums up his epistemology by drawing an analogy to the Copernican Revolution the shift in astronomy from a geocentric to a heliocentric model of the universe, named after Nicolaus Copernicus — , the sixteenth-century Polish mathematician and astronomer :.
Up to now it has been assumed that all our cognition must conform to the objects; but all attempts to find out something about them a priori through concepts that would extend our cognition have, on this presupposition, come to nothing. Hence let us once try whether we do not get farther with the problems of metaphysics by assuming that the objects must conform to our cognition, which would agree better with the requested possibility of an a priori cognition of them, which is to establish something about objects before they are given to us.
This would be just like the first thoughts of Copernicus, who, when he did not make good progress in the explanation of the celestial motions if he assumed that the entire celestial host revolves around the observer, tried to see if he might not have greater success if he made the observer revolve and left the stars at rest.
Now in metaphysics we can try in a similar way regarding the intuition of objects. If intuition has to conform to the constitution of the objects, then I do not see how we can know anything of them a priori; but if the object as an object of the senses conforms to the constitution of our faculty of intuition, then I can very well represent this possibility to myself.
Yet because I cannot stop with these intuitions, if they are to become cognitions, but must refer them as representations to something as their object and determine this object through them, I can assume either that the concepts through which I bring about this determination also conform to the objects, and then I am once again in the same difficulty about how I could know anything about them a priori, or else I assume that the objects, or what is the same thing, the experience in which alone they can be cognized as given objects conforms to those concepts, in which case I immediately see an easier way out of the difficulty, since experience itself is a kind of cognition requiring the understanding, whose rule I have to presuppose in myself before any object is given to me, hence a priori, which rule is expressed in concepts a priori, to which all objects of experience must therefore necessarily conform, and with which they must agree.
Blackburn, Simon. Truth : A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Critchley, Simon. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ellis, Addison. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. The Internet Classics Archive. Russell, Bertrand. The Problems of Philosophy.
Project Gutenberg. Vernon, Kenneth Blake. Chomsky, Noam. Reflections on Language. New York: Random House. Volume 2. Volume 1. Guyer, Paul. Kant and the Claims of Knowledge. Hume, David. Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Edited by Jonathan Bennett. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Paul Guyer and Allen Wood. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Leibniz, G. New Essays on Human Understanding. Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Quine, W. Knowledge that is dependent on, or gained through, sense experience. A posteriori truths are truths known after experience. The philosophical position according to which all our beliefs and knowledge are based on experience.
Empiricism is opposed to rationalism. The philosophical position that regards reason, as opposed to sense experience, as the primary source of knowledge. Rationalism is opposed to empiricism. Knowledge gained without sense experience. A priori truths are truths known prior to experience.
The philosophical position, held by many rationalists, according to which we have certain ideas in our minds from birth, ideas which can be realized through reason. In other words, it is impossible for a necessary truth to be false.
For example, it is a necessary truth that a triangle has three sides, which means that it is impossible for a triangle to have any other number of sides. The opposite of necessity is contingency.
For example, it is a contingent truth that crows are black, since they are black but could have been white. The claim that crows are white is a contingent falsehood, since it happens to be false but could have been true. Ideas that contain a single element, such as a patch of brown or the idea of red. Simple ideas are basic and indivisible as opposed to complex ideas. Thus, learning the theorem allows us, in effect, to recall what we already know. Plato famously illustrates the doctrine with an exchange between Socrates and a young slave, in which Socrates guides the slave from ignorance to mathematical knowledge.
Since our knowledge is of abstract, eternal Forms, which clearly lie beyond our sensory experience, it is independent, for its justification, of experience.
The metaphysical assumptions in the solution need justification. We are confident that we know certain propositions about the external world, but there seems to be no adequate explanation of how we gained this knowledge short of saying that it is innate. Its content is beyond what we directly gain in experience, as well as what we can gain by performing mental operations on what experience provides.
It does not seem to be based on an intuition or deduction. That it is innate in us appears to be the best explanation. Chomsky argues that the experiences available to language learners are far too sparse to account for their knowledge of their language.
To explain language acquisition, we must assume that learners have an innate knowledge of a universal grammar capturing the common deep structure of natural languages. They have a set of innate capacities or dispositions which enable and determine their language development. Chomsky gives us a theory of innate learning capacities or structures rather than a theory of innate knowledge.
His view does not support the Innate Knowledge thesis as rationalists have traditionally understood it. Indeed, such a theory, which places nativism at the level of mental capacities or structures enabling us to acquire certain types of knowledge rather than at the level of knoweldge we already posses, is akin to an empiricist take on the issue.
Locke and Reid, for instance, believe that the human mind is endowed with certain abilities that, when developed in the usual course of nature, will lead us to acquire useful knowledge of the external world. The main idea is that it is part of our biology to have a digestive system that, when fed the right kind of food, allows us to process the required nutrients to enable us to continue to live for a while.
Similarly, it is part of our biology to have a mental architecture that, when fed the right kind of information and experiences, allows us to process that information and transform it into knowledge. The knowledge itself is no more innate than the proccessed nutrients are.
Peter Carruthers argues that we have innate knowledge of the principles of folk-psychology. Folk-psychology is a network of common-sense generalizations that hold independently of context or culture and concern the relationships of mental states to one another, to the environment and states of the body and to behavior , p.
It includes such beliefs as that pains tend to be caused by injury, that pains tend to prevent us from concentrating on tasks, and that perceptions are generally caused by the appropriate state of the environment. Carruthers notes the complexity of folk-psychology, along with its success in explaining our behavior and the fact that its explanations appeal to such unobservables as beliefs, desires, feelings, and thoughts.
He argues that the complexity, universality, and depth of folk-psychological principles outstrips what experience can provide, especially to young children who by their fifth year already know a great many of them. This knowledge is also not the result of intuition or deduction; folk-psychological generalizations are not seen to be true in an act of intellectual insight.
Empiricists, and some rationalists, attack the Innate Knowledge thesis in two main ways. First, they offer accounts of how sense experience or intuition and deduction provide the knowledge that is claimed to be innate. Second, they directly criticize the Innate Knowledge thesis itself. Locke raises the issue of just what innate knowledge is. If the implication is that we all consciously have this knowledge, it is plainly false.
Propositions often given as examples of innate knowledge, even such plausible candidates as the principle that the same thing cannot both be and not be, are not consciously accepted by children and those with severe cognitive limitations. Proponents of innate knowledge might respond that some knowledge is innate in that we have the capacity to have it.
That claim, while true, is of little interest, however. Locke thus challenges defenders of the Innate Knowledge thesis to present an account of innate knowledge that allows their position to be both true and interesting. A narrow interpretation of innateness faces counterexamples of rational individuals who do not meet its conditions.
A generous interpretation implies that all our knowledge, even that clearly provided by experience, is innate. Carruthers claims that our innate knowledge is determined through evolutionary selection p. Evolution has resulted in our being determined to know certain things e. Experiences provide the occasion for our consciously believing the known propositions but not the basis for our knowledge of them p.
The former have not yet reached the proper stage of development; the latter are persons in whom natural development has broken down pp. A serious problem for the Innate Knowledge thesis remains, however. We know a proposition only if it is true, we believe it and our belief is warranted. Their claim is even bolder: In at least some of these cases, our empirically triggered, but not empirically warranted, belief is nonetheless warranted and so known.
How can these beliefs be warranted if they do not gain their warrant from the experiences that cause us to have them or from intuition and deduction? Some rationalists think that a reliabilist account of warrant provides the answer. According to Reliabilism, beliefs are warranted if they are formed by a process that generally produces true beliefs rather than false ones. The true beliefs that constitute our innate knowledge are warranted, then, because they are formed as the result of a reliable belief-forming process.
He argues that natural selection results in the formation of some beliefs and is a truth-reliable process. An appeal to Reliabilism, or a similar causal theory of warrant, may well be the best way to develop the Innate Knowledge thesis. Even so, some difficulties remain. First, reliabilist accounts of warrant are themselves quite controversial. Second, rationalists must give an account of innate knowledge that maintains and explains the distinction between innate knowledge and non-innate knowledge, and it is not clear that they will be able to do so within such an account of warrant.
Suppose for the sake of argument that we have innate knowledge of some proposition, P. What makes our knowledge that P innate? To sharpen the question, what difference between our knowledge that P and a clear case of non-innate knowledge, say our knowledge that something is red based on our current visual experience of a red table, makes the former innate and the latter not innate?
In each case, we have a true, warranted belief. In each case, presumably, our belief gains its warrant from the fact that it meets a particular causal condition, e.
The insight behind the Innate Knowledge thesis seems to be that the difference between our innate and non-innate knowledge lies in the relation between our experience and our belief in each case. Yet, exactly what is the nature of this containment relation between our experiences, on the one hand, and what we believe, on the other, that is missing in the one case but present in the other?
The nature of the experience-belief relation seems quite similar in each. The causal relation between the experience that triggers our belief that P and our belief that P is contingent, as is the fact that the belief-forming process is reliable. The same is true of our experience of a red table and our belief that something is red.
The causal relation between the experience and our belief is again contingent. The process that takes us from the experience to our belief is also only contingently reliable. By appealing to Reliablism, or some other causal theory of warrant, rationalists may obtain a way to explain how innate knowledge can be warranted.
They still need to show how their explanation supports an account of the difference between innate knowledge and non-innate knowledge.
So, Locke's criticism -- that there is no true distinction between innate versus non-innate knowledge that rationalists may draw -- still stands, in the face of the best rationalist defense of the Innate Knowledge thesis. According to the Innate Concept thesis, some of our concepts have not been gained from experience.
They are instead part of our rational make-up, and experience simply triggers a process by which we consciously grasp them. The main concern motivating the rationalist should be familiar by now: the content of some concepts seems to outstrip anything we could have gained from experience. An example of this reasoning is presented by Descartes in the Meditations. Although he sometimes seems committed to the view that all our ideas are innate Adams and Gotham , he there classifies our ideas as adventitious, invented by us, and innate.
Adventitious ideas, such as a sensation of heat, are gained directly through sense experience. Ideas invented by us, such as our idea of a hippogriff, are created by us from other ideas we possess. Innate ideas, such as our ideas of God, of extended matter, of substance, and of a perfect triangle, are placed in our minds by God at creation.
Our concept of God is not directly gained in experience, as particular tastes, sensations, and mental images might be. Its content is beyond what we could ever construct by applying available mental operations to what experience directly provides. From experience, we can gain the concept of a being with finite amounts of various perfections, one, for example, that is finitely knowledgeable, powerful and good.
We cannot however move from these empirical concepts to the concept of a being of infinite perfection. Descartes supplements this argument by another. Not only is the content of our concept of God beyond what experience can provide, the concept is a prerequisite for our employment of the concept of finite perfection gained from experience.
An empiricist response to this general line of argument is given by Locke Essay , 1. First, there is the problem of explaining what it is for someone to have an innate concept. Young children and people from other cultures do not consciously entertain the concept of God and have not done so.
Second, there is the objection that we have no need to appeal to innate concepts in the first place. Where Locke puts forth the image of the mind as a blank slate on which experience writes, Leibniz offers us the image of a block of marble, the veins of which determine what sculpted figures it will accept New Essays , Preface, p.
The mind plays a role in determining the nature of its contents. This point does not, however, require the adoption of the Innate Concept thesis. Locke might still point out that we are not required to have the concepts themselves and the ability to use them, innately. In contemporary terms, what we are required to have is the right hardware that allows for the optimal running of the actual software. For Locke, there are no constrains here; for Leibniz, only a particular type of software is, indeed, able to be supported by the extant hardware.
Put differently, the hardware itself determines what software can be optimally run, for a Leibnizian. According to Locke, experience consists in external sensation and inner reflection. All our ideas are either simple or complex, with the former being received by us passively in sensation or reflection and the latter being built by the mind from simple materials through various mental operations.
Right at the start, the account of how simple ideas are gained is open to an obvious counterexample acknowledged, but then set aside, by Hume in presenting his own empiricist theory. Consider the mental image of a particular shade of blue. If Locke is right, the idea is a simple one and should be passively received by the mind through experience. Hume points out otherwise:.
Even when it comes to such simple ideas as the image of a particular shade of blue, the mind seems to be more than a blank slate on which experience writes. This does not require our positing that concepts be part of the inner workings, at the beginning of our lives. On the other hand, consider, too, our concept of a particular color, say red.
For one thing, it makes the incorrect assumption that various instances of a particular concept share a common feature. Carruthers puts the objection as follows:. We get our concept of causation from our observation that some things receive their existence from the application and operation of some other things. Yet, to be able to make this observation, we must have our minds primed to do so.
Rationalists argue that we cannot make this observation unless we already have the concept of causation. For instance, his famous dictum "Cogito ergo sum" "I think, therefore I am" is a conclusion reached a priori and not through an inference from experience. Descartes held that some ideas innate ideas come from God ; others ideas are derived from sensory experience ; and still others are fictitious or created by the imagination.
Of these, the only ideas which are certainly valid , according to Descartes , are those which are innate. Baruch Spinoza expanded upon Descartes ' basic principles of Rationalism.
His philosophy centered on several principles, most of which relied on his notion that God is the only absolute substance similar to Descartes ' conception of God , and that substance is composed of two attributes, thought and extension. He believed that all aspects of the natural world including Man were modes of the eternal substance of God, and can therefore only be known through pure thought or reason.
Gottfried Leibniz attempted to rectify what he saw as some of the problems that were not settled by Descartes by combining Descartes ' work with Aristotle 's notion of form and his own conception of the universe as composed of monads. He believed that ideas exist in the intellect innately, but only in a virtual sense, and it is only when the mind reflects on itself that those ideas are actualized.
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