Overview

Book I of Locke’s Famous Essay is a sustained argument against the rationalist notion of innate ideas. These notes are made on a copy of the Essay usefully excerpted by Jonathan Bennett. Welcome to British Empiricism.

Outline

Chapter I: Introduction

  1. Since the understanding is (a) the distinctive feature of humans, and (b) not self-critiquing, it is useful - if difficult - to inquire into it.
  2. This book, then, will inquire into the origin, certainty, and extent of human knowledge, as well as the grounds and degrees of belief, opinion, and assent.
  3. It is useful to know where the line gets drawn between opinion and knowledge. This entails knowing just how confident we should be that our opinions are right. The method:
    1. Find the origin of ideas and how the understanding “comes to be equipped with them”.
    2. Show what knowledge the understanding has by means of these ideas.
    3. Finally, briefly take a look at faith and opinion.
  4. The therapeutic aim of this project is to “to be peacefully reconciled to ignorance of things that turn out to be beyond the reach of our capacities.”
  5. This should not distress us: God has given humans everything they need to discover how to thrive in this life and how to find their way to a better one (by forming of virtuous characters).
  6. Scoping our mental powers is useful in setting our expectations neither too low nor too high.
  7. It’s a bit of hubris to attempt to plumb deep concepts like being in the way we have until now (presumably this is a reference to Descartes). By creating our knowledge boundaries we can have a more satisfying and realistic kind of philosophical discourse.
  8. Heretofore, “idea” means “whatever is the object of the understanding when a man thinks” - first up: how do ideas come to mind?

Chapter II: No innate principles in the mind, and particularly no innate speculative principles

  1. Locke does not believe that there are innate ideas, and this chapter will present his reasons for that belief.
  2. People often evidence the idea of innate ideas by reference to putatively universal speculative/theoretical and practical principles.
  3. This universal consent does not necessarily imply innate ideas, especially if there are other candidate explanations.
  4. Worse still, there is no universal consent in the first place.
  5. “Children and idiots” do not subscribe to putatively universal speculative (e.g. logical) principles. Since this is the case, it seems clear that human brains tout court don’t merely arrive with some “imprinted” principles.
    1. Even those who think that all knowledge is acquired believe the capacity for knowledge is innate.
  6. To avoid this problem, philosophers often suggest that humans come to these truths when they arrive at the use of reason.
  7. That claim must in turn mean either that (a) as soon as people come to the use of reason they also automatically arrive at these so-called innate truths, or that (b) reason helps humans arrive at them.
  8. If the claim is (b), then what they seem to mean is that “whatever truths reason can enable us to know for certain are all innate.”
    1. This eradicates the distinction between maxims (innate or - I think - what Kant will call analytic truths) and theorems (non-innate or - again, I think - synthetic truths).
  9. The idea that “Reason shows us those truths that have been imprinted” amounts to saying that “the use of reason enables a man to learn what he already knew.”
  10. In short, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to suppose that all of reason’s flailing and floundering should be needed to discover something that was imprinted on us by nature.
  11. It is therefore false that reason could assist us in knowing innate truths, if it did, that would prove that they are not innate.
  12. On the other hand, if the claim [from 7, above] is (a), then it is both false and frivolous.
    1. It’s false because we can empirically observe the emergence of reason before the approval of so-called innate maxims.
    2. It’s frivolous because there’s no justification for believing it unless you’re deeply invested in its utility as an argument for innate truths.
  13. All this adds up to entail that maxims may be assented to after the emergence of reason, but this is true of all knowable truths, and thus has no power to cordon off innate from non-innate truths.
  14. (§§14-16) How can x’s innateness be derived from the premise that a person first knows x when he comes to be able to reason? Why not derive something’s innateness from its being first known only when a person comes to be able to speak? (Or to walk? to sing?)
    1. There is some truth to the thesis that basic general maxims are not known to someone who doesn’t yet have the use of reason.
    2. He has alternative to innateness for how this works. His theory rests on the assumption - which he doesn’t declare until later - that to think a general maxim one must have general ideas, and that to express a general maxim one must be able to use general words.
  15. Some people have tried to secure universal assent to so-called innate ideas by saying that they are generally assented to as soon as they are proposed, and the terms they are proposed in are understood.
  16. But can prompt assent given to a proposition upon first hearing it and understanding the terms really is a certain mark of an innate principle? If so, there are apparently a lot of innate principles (about number, physics, metaphysics). Locke’s point is that self-evidence does not imply innateness.
  17. There is good evidence that we can’t specific principles can’t be accepted on the strength of general ones, as the former often empirically precede the latter.
  18. There doesn’t seem to be a reason for connecting usefulness to innateness, and in any case Locke plans to question whether the more general maxims are of any great use.
  19. Put another way - if these putatively innate principles were really innate, why would they need to be proposed in order to be assented to?
  20. Locke is unsympathetic to the suggestion that the knowledge of innate principles is implicit knowledge (which would be made explicit upon their being proposed).
  21. The idea that a proposition counts as innate if it is assented to when first proposed and understood looks plausible only because it assumes that when the proposition is proposed and made to be understood, nothing new is learned.
    1. The idea that these truths are taught might seem objectionable.
    2. But in truth, they are taught: They have learned the terms and their meanings, neither of which was born with them; and they have acquired the relevant ideas, which were not born with them any more than their names were.
    3. Locke then presents his account of what happens when someone assents to a self-evident proposition. We’ll come back to this in detail in Book 2.
  22. Since the putatively innate principles are not universal, they are not, in fact, innate.
  23. (§§25-26) It may be objected that Locke doesn’t really know what the thoughts of infants are like. But he thinks that we do.
  24. The innatist must allow that the truths innately implanted in our minds don’t always present themselves to our consciousness, and he is forced to explain that this happens because our innately given intellectual possessions may be “corrupted by custom or borrowed opinions, by learning and education.”
    1. However, if this was the case, those innate truths “should appear fairest and clearest” in the minds of “children, idiots, savages, and illiterate people,” yet we find no trace of them in such people.

Chapter III: No innate practical principles

  1. It is even more obvious that no practical principles are universally assented to than that no speculative principles are, as none of them are even self-evident.
  2. Further, it is empirically clear that no moral principles enjoy universal assent. The closest examples are justice and the keeping of contracts, which criminals flaunt.
  3. You may want to say that criminals accept those principles even though they don’t act on them. Locke argues that it is “very strange and unreasonable” to suppose that there are innate practical principles that show up in what men think but don’t affect their behavior, because what makes a principle practical (rather than speculative) is its bearing upon action.
  4. Another reason for doubting that there are any innate practical principles is that the truth of all these moral rules depends on some underlying rules from which they must be deduced; and this could not be so if they were innate, or even if they were merely self-evident.
  5. Exempli gratia, a Christian, a Hobbsean, and a Greek philosopher would all give different reasons to justify the widely accepted moral principle that one ought not to lie.
  6. This doesn’t detract from the moral and eternal obligation that these rules evidently have. It does show, though, that the outward acknowledgment men pay to them (in their words) does not prove that they are innate principles.
  7. Further, this verbal justification may simply be lip service. If we take people’s actions to show what they think, “we shall find that they have no such inner respect for these rules, and are not so sure they are bound by them.”
  8. You might urge that people’s consciences help to prevent them from breaking the rules. But “if conscience is a proof of innateness, contraries can be innate principles; because sometimes men will conscientiously promote what others conscientiously avoid.”
  9. Locke inclines to believe that if moral rules were innate, people wouldn’t break them. To the contrary, he gives quite a few examples of people doing unpleasant things.
  10. History teaches us that practical principles are not universal. Those that seem to be are pragmatic - they hold society together, and subsequently are not taken to hold between societies (e.g. murder is forbidden intra-society but war is sanctioned).
  11. It may be objected that a rule’s being broken doesn’t prove that it is not known. This is true, but it seems inconceivable that entire societies could defy a universal rule in speech and action. Locke insists that for any practical rule, there is an example of this.
  12. Practical rules, though, may not be propositions at all (and therefore incapable of being true or false), but rather commands.
    1. To make it capable of being assented to as true, we must turn it into a proposition (e.g. “It is the duty of parents to preserve their children).
    2. But duty cannot be understood without reference to law; and a law cannot be known or supposed without even more supporting infrastructure.
  13. Locke now sees it safe to conclude that “no principle is innate if it is in any place generally allowed to be broken.”
    1. If a practical principle were innate, men would have to know that it was set by God who would certainly punish breaches of it very severely, and someone who knows that about a law will certainly be deterred from breaking it.
    2. The last (unrelated) point is that denying innate laws (”something imprinted on our minds”) does not preclude the existence of laws of nature (”something we can come to know of through the proper use of our natural faculties”), in which Locke believes.
  14. For all the talk about innate moral laws, no one seems to be able to provide a clear catalog of them, which is in itself counter-intuitive.
  15. (§§15-19) Here Locke discusses a writing by Lord Herbert of Cherbury.
    1. After completing the previous sections, he reports, someone told him that Lord Herbert had given a list of innate principles and an account of the criteria by which they can be classified as innate.
    2. Locke says that not all the items on the list satisfy all the criteria, and that they are satisfied by plenty of things not on the list. Some are criticized as vague or ambiguous, some as trivial, etc.
  16. There’s often an appeal made to universal moral laws as those laws which are universally agreed upon by “men of right reason” (who are always the men speaking at the time). Locke disdains this line, calling it a “short cut to infallibility” and an “absurd approach.”
  17. §§21-6 discuss the absolute confidence that people have in the truth of certain doctrines - different doctrines in different societies. Locke offers to explain this phenomenon, largely in terms of early education.
    1. §23: Since the normative principles of an individual in formation are the oldest thing in his or her mind, and since the individual in question can’t remember the source of them, it is natural to attribute them to God or nature.
    2. §24: Everyone has some revered principles, “on which he bases his reasonings, and by which he judges of truth and falsehood, right and wrong.”
    3. §25: Social pressure stops people from examining the revered propositions critically.
    4. §26: The effects of habituation allow us to fancy that the products ouf our education and the fashions of his country (however absurd) are innate practical principles.
  18. This explanation is the only one that can explain why so many conflicting propositions are thought to be innate.

Chapter IV: Other considerations about innate principles

  1. If the ideas that make up putatively innate truths are not themselves innate, then the propositions made up of them can neither be so.
  2. If we “attentively consider new-born children,” we can supposedly empirically tell that they don’t have preformed ideas, but rather acquire them through experience.
  3. If there are any innate principles, then surely this is one: It is impossible for the same thing to be, and not to be.
    1. But can anyone think, or will anyone say, that impossibility and identity are two innate ideas?
  4. Identity is itself a philosophically problematic concept, and this evidences that the idea isn’t “clear and obvious” to us.
  5. These questions aren’t trivial, since the actions they motivate are those by which we will be judged by God.
  6. “The whole is bigger than the part” can neither be innate, as the ideas of whole and part themselves cannot be innate.
  7. That God is to be worshiped is a great practical truth, but it can’t be innate unless our ideas of God and worship are as well.
  8. It seems that the closest candidate for an innate idea is “God,” but we know that both the ancients and those of other cultures (Locke appeals in some detail to Brazil and China) don’t seem to have this idea.
    1. Even in Europe, if the fear of legal or social consequences didn’t tie up people’s tongues, many more people would proclaim their atheism openly.
  9. Even if all mankind, at all times and places, had a notion of God, this would not be good evidence that the idea was innate.
    1. Since “the visible marks of extraordinary wisdom and power appear so plainly in all the works of the creation that any rational person who thinks seriously about them must conclude that they are the work of a God,” this belief could then spread through the world through communication amongst humans, so that the (supposed) universality of the idea of God could be explained in epidemiological terms (so to speak) rather than through innateness.
  10. Locke thinks it a very good argument to say: “The infinitely wise God has made it so; and therefore it is best.” But, he says, we put too much confidence of our own wisdom if we argue: “I think it best, and therefore God has made it so.”
    1. Thus it is futile to argue that God has innately imprinted our minds with an idea of him·
  11. Here again Locke insists that if there were an innate notion, it would be God, but that our empirical evidence of children’s faith development does not support this conclusion.
    1. “The truest and best notions men have of God were not (innately) imprinted, but acquired by thought and meditation and a right use of their faculties.”
    2. In §18, Locke engages in a less than pertinent discussion of substance. He will develop this at length in II.xxiii.
    3. He then recapitulates some of his earlier anti-innateness arguments, before introducing a new one:
  12. The memory argument
    1. Any ideas we have must be stored in memory.
    2. To access them thus means to remember them.
    3. Remembering means perceiving an idea with a consciousness that has perceived it before.
    4. If innate ideas are then in memory, they can be revived without any impression from outside.
    5. Locke thinks that the possibility of this is dubious.
  13. Since God is infinitely wise, it is hard to see what reason would God have to inscribe on the mind of man messages that are no clearer than (or can’t be distinguished from) messages that came there later?
  14. §22 is an admonition that we have to work for knowledge, and not expect it to be handed to us on a plate,
  15. §23 suggests that Locke’s aim in disrupting the foundations of knowledge has been his quest for truth, and continues with a long attack on the practice of basing one’s beliefs on what authorities say rather than on one’s own investigations.
  16. The idea of innate ideas, Locke thinks, is lazy and inculcates laziness in its adherents.
  17. The rest of the book intends to show how the understanding comes to knowledge of universal truths, if not by innate ideas.