History of Modern Philosophy Spring 2025

Locke on Innate Ideas

Overview

Locke has two lines of argument about innate ideas: negative and positive.

The negative arguments seek dispute the claims that some ideas are innate to the mind. The positive arguments seek to show that we can explain why people have the ideas that are said to be innate as the product of experience.

Negative arguments

Here is Locke’s chief negative argument.

to say that there are truths imprinted on the soul which it does not perceive or understand — imprinting, if it signifies anything, being nothing else but the making certain truths to be perceived. For to imprint anything on the mind without the mind’s perceiving it seems to me hardly intelligible. If therefore children and idiots have souls, have minds, with those impressions upon them, they must unavoidably perceive them, and necessarily know and assent to these truths. (Locke [1690] 2019, 349R)

he thinks these things all go together:

So if you have an infant or “idiot” who cannot perceive, understand, know, and assent to even simple truths like “A and not-A are contradictories” or “B = B” then those are not innate ideas.

It is fair to ask whether that is a reasonable test, that is, whether all of those things must go together. At the same time, it does raise the question of how we would decide that someone who has very limited abilities to communicate understands something.

After presenting this basic case, Locke disputes several versions of the theory that some ideas are innate.

For example, suppose the innateness theory was that children and idiots have the innate ideas in their minds but fail to acknowledge them. Locke thinks this involves a contradiction: the ideas are said to be both understood and not understood at the same time (Locke [1690] 2019, 350).

Other versions of the innateness thesis are:

Locke’s general strategy is to argue that the innateness theory faces a dilemma. If it holds that everyone assents to any particular idea, then it is false. If it holds that there are ideas that would be assented to under certain conditions, then it fails to distinguish between innate and acquired ideas, since the relevant conditions could be ones in which the ideas are acquired.

Positive arguments

On the positive side, Locke gives an empiricist account of how experience fills the mind with its ideas.

He distinguishes between simple ideas and complex ideas. Simple ideas are ideas of individual qualities while complex ideas involve combinations of simple ones (Locke [1690] 2019, 358).

Simple ideas can come in any one of four ways:

  1. one sense
  2. more than one sense
  3. reflection
  4. either sense or reflection

(1) One sense: solidity from touch (359). Feel that an object fills space, excludes other solids. It resists your hand, e.g.

(2) More than one sense: space, extension, figure, rest, and motion. Eyes and touch. (360)

(3) Reflection: Perception or thinking, volition or willing.

(4) Sensation or reflection: Pleasure or delight (object or thought could be pleasant), pain or uneasiness (object or thought could be painful), power (ability to move our own bodies), existence, unity (both objects and thoughts have it)

Question: how do we know what simple ideas make up a complex object? Why do we think that the three tennis balls I have been using as props are three separate things rather than a single collection of colors and roundish shapes? Or, conversely, why do we think they are only three rather than ten or twenty objects?

References

Locke, John. (1690) 2019. “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.” In Modern Philosophy: An Anthology of Primary Sources, edited by Roger Ariew and Eric Watkins, 3rd ed., 346–451. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company.