Innate idea
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In philosophy and psychology, an innate idea is a concept or item of knowledge which is said to be universal to all humanity—that is, something people are born with rather than something people have learned through experience.
The issue is controversial, and can be said to be an aspect of a long-running nature versus nurture debate, albeit one localised to the question of understanding human cognition.
==Philosophical debate==Doo Doo
Scientific ideas
In his Meno, Plato raises an important epistemological quandary. How is it that we have certain ideas which are not conclusively derivable from our environments? Noam Chomsky has taken this problem as a philosophical framework for the scientific enquiry into innatism. His linguistic theory, which derives from 18th century classical-liberal thinkers such as Wilhelm von Humboldt and René Descartes, attempts to explain in cognitive terms how we can develop knowledge of systems which are too rich and complex to be derived from our environment. One such example is our linguistic faculty. Our linguistic systems contain a systemic complexity which could not be empirically derived. The environment is too variable and indeterminate, according to Chomsky, to explain the extraodinary ability to learn complex concepts possessed by very young children. It follows that humans must be born with a universal innate grammar, which is determinate and has a highly organized directive component, and enables the language learner to ascertain and categorize language heard into a system. Noam Chomsky cites as evidence for this theory the apparent invariability of human languages at a fundamental level. In this way, linguistics has provided a window into the human mind, and has established scientifically theories of innateness which were previously merely speculative.
One implication of Noam Chomsky's innatism is that at least a part of human knowledge consists in cognitive predispositions, which are triggered and developed by the environment, but not determined by it. Parallels can then be drawn, on a purely speculative level, between our moral faculties and language, as has been done by sociobiologists such as E. O. Wilson and evolutionary psychologists such as Steven Pinker The relative consistency of fundamental notions of morality across cultures seems to produce convincing evidence for the these theories. In psychology, notions of archetypes such as those developed by Carl Jung, suggest determinate identity perceptions.
References
- Descartes, Rene. Meditations on First Philosophy with Selections from the Objections and Replies, translated by John Cottingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
- Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. 1690.
- Leibniz, Gottfried. Discourse on Metaphysics and Related Writings, edited and translated by R.N.D. Martin and Stuart Brown (Manchester and New York:Manchester University Press, 1988).
- Chomsky, Noam. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. (Cambridge, Mass, 1965)