Are There Any Innate Ideas?

‘It is an established opinion amongst men, that there are in the understanding certain innate principles; some primary notions, characters, as it were, stamped upon the mind of man, which the soul receives in its first being, and brings into the world with it.’ [1]

Innate ideas are those principles that are found present in the mind at birth as opposed to those which arrive and develop throughout our lives as a result of sensory experience. Whether or not these innate principles exist, holds for many philosophers many important implications. There are many examples of philosophers who at various times in the history of philosophy have put forward this theory in order to locate the source of valid knowledge. Famously, Plato claimed that knowledge procured from the senses is invalid. That the data received is merely a reflection or a shadow of reality and that the pure, true image of reality is imprinted upon our souls before birth. Without the possibility of any innate notions his theory would be implicitly invalid. René Descartes is another of these examples. Descartes asserted in The Meditations that our notion of the existence of the self: cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am), the existence of God, and some logical propositions like, from nothing comes nothing are all innate ideas and are all central to his philosophy. He believed that these innate ideas appear to us above all other notions in a way that is ‘clear and distinct’ [2] and that it is these ideas that are the source of all real knowledge. More recently, and in opposition to the already established rationalist movement, which bases itself on the belief that our knowledge of the world is acquired by the use of reason, and that sensory input is inherently unreliable, more a source of error than of knowledge, grew a school of philosophy known as empiricism. John Locke, who has come to be regarded as the chief founding father of this movement launched his attack on innate ideas when he published