Innate Ideas and Innate Knowledge Reasons for believing in innate ideas and innate knowledge: 1.

Innate ideas and knowledge explain the virtually universal agreement of all people on certain matters that are remote from direct sense observation and common experience. (Those Locke is attacking at Essay, pp. 48-65). 2. The appeal to innate knowledge relieves us of the need to demonstrate commonly accepted principles of common sense, morality and religion. (Crusius, Reid) 3. Innate ideas account for the centrality to our system of knowledge of certain abstract conceptions, and justifies our use of them. (Descartes, Leibniz) 4. Innate knowledge accounts for the certainty and necessity of self-evident principles. (Descartes) 5. Innate knowledge accounts for our capacity to know general and necessary truths that go beyond our experience of their instances (Leibniz) 6. Innate ideas account for certain complex computational abilities that are universal among human beings (such as those involved in learning languages). (Chomsky) Lockes principal arguments against innate ideas and knowledge: 1. All our knowledge must rest on intuition and demonstration, especially in matters of morality and religion. (Essay I.II.9; I.IV.24). 2. Whatever is imprinted on the mind is something the mind perceives or has perceived. (Essay I.II.5) 3. All our ideas and knowledge can be well accounted for without appealing to innate ideas or knowledge. (Essay II.I.1) Some questions relevant to the dispute between Locke and Leibniz about innate ideas: 1. Do we have any ideas or knowledge before we have sensations? 2. Do innate ideas and innate knowledge refer to anything beyond our faculties for acquiring ideas and knowledge? 3. Can we account for our knowledge of general and necessary truths merely by appealing to the ideas provided us by the senses and those created by our understanding using these ideas? 4. Can we explain our possession, or justify our use, of ideas such as being, possibility, sameness, substance, cause, God, and triangle without appealing to the thesis that they are innate? 5. Can we justify our use of these same ideas against skeptical objections without appealing to the thesis that they are innate?