Innate Ideas Part II
Innate Ideas Part 1 here
Numbers
- We never experience numbers directly though we can see evidence of them
- The empiricists thought we worked out numbers from experience, like counting apples
- We can have an idea of a triangle in our minds but what about sided figure, as Descartes points out
- The number 5.3217 make sense logically but I may have never encountered it.
Innate Language Skills
- The American linguist Noam Chomsky developed the idea of a Language Acquisition Device (LAD) in the early sixties
- Language seems to develop faster than the input would suggest
- He found evidence of a universal (deep) grammar common to all languages
- The idea remains controversial
Morality
- GE Moore thought that morality was intuitive
- We can describe the colour yellow in terms of the wavelength of light but that is not what it is like for us
- It is directly known and cannot be defined
- We can query any definition further eg the utilitarian idea that good is the greatest happiness for the greatest number
- So the definition is not known
Moral Minds
Biologist Marc D Hauser’s 2006 book claims that we have a part of the brain devoted to morality.
- Morality is largely biological as Richard Dawkins Claims
- It is also like Chomsky’s language device and function as a form of universal moral grammar
- But it can still be changed by experience just as we can acquire different languages depending on where we are born
- Take the moral test
Beauty and Justice
- Plato thought we could never learn about beauty and justice from experience
- We know when something beautiful matches our inner idea
- Beauty is part of the world of forms: universal ideas that we cannot experience in everyday life.
The Open Argument
- Hume thought that morality consists of natural sympathy
- This sounds like Moore’s ideas but Hume said it came from inner sense impressions driven by emotion and denied innateness
- Moore’s view is known as the Open Question Argument because it leaves the definition of goodness open
- The idea that we have innate moral values has been raised again by Marc D Hunter
See Also
Reason v Experience Thoughts without concept are empty; intuition without concepts are blind. This...
This post is mostly centred around Descartes The most famous rationalist was Rene Descartes (1596...
Hume states that we can never see a cause. We might see one billiard ball hit another and the second...
Does the concept of simple ideas make sense? A unicorn can be divided into different concepts but...
» Some Summary and Selected Snippets
» What is Tautology?
» Rationalism
» Hume And Causation
» Empiricism Continued