innate idea

innate idea, in philosophy, an idea allegedly inborn in the human mind, as contrasted with those received or compiled from experience. The doctrine that at least certain ideas (e.g., those of God, infinity, substance) must be innate, because no satisfactory empirical origin of them could be conceived, flourished in the 17th century and found in René Descartes its most prominent exponent. The theory took many forms: some held that a newborn child has an explicit awareness of such ideas; others, more commonly, maintained that innate ideas have some implicit form, either as a tendency or as a dormant capacity for their formulation, which in either case would require favourable experiential conditions for their development.

John Locke’s vigorous criticism later in the century was directed against innate principles (supposed axioms, both theoretical and practical, implanted in the mind by nature) and the innate ideas claimed as the terms of the principles. But Locke’s empiricism, as he acknowledged in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), had difficulty with certain key concepts, such as substance, “which we neither have nor can have by sensation or reflection,” and cause, about which he largely anticipated David Hume’s difficulties in the 18th century. Locke seems to have shared some of the assumptions of his opponents (e.g., that if an idea is innate it cannot be wrong) and to have sensed that the issue is one of logic (of the status of a priori propositions) and not of genetic psychology. Completing this distinction, the 18th-century philosopher Immanuel Kant replaced the doctrine of innate ideas with questions about a priori concepts, which he characterized in terms not of their origin but of their necessity as conditions of human experience of an objective world. In the 20th century, Noam Chomsky argued for the necessity for postulating innate ideas to explain the amazing speed and facility with which children typically acquire natural languages.