Locke begins the Essay by repudiating the view that certain kinds of knowledge—knowledge of the

existence of God, of certain moral truths, or of the laws of logic or mathematics—are innate,
imprinted on the human mind at its creation. (The doctrine of innate ideas, which was widely held to
justify religious and moral claims, had its origins in the philosophy of Plato [428/427–348/347BCE],
who was still a powerful force in 17th-century English philosophy.) Locke argues to the contrary that
an idea cannot be said to be “in the mind” until one is conscious of it

But human infants have no conception of God or of moral, logical, or mathematical truths, and to
suppose that they do, despite obvious evidence to the contrary, is merely an unwarranted
assumption to save a position. Furthermore, travelers to distant lands have reported encounters
with people who have no conception of God and who think it morally justified to eat their enemies.
Such diversity of religious and moral opinion cannot not be explained by the doctrine of innate ideas
but can be explained, Locke held, on his own account of the origins of ideas.

Having developed in Book I his argument concerning the nonexistence of innate ideas, Locke
undertakes in Book II to describe in detail the process by means of which ideas come to be present
in human minds. His fundamental thesis is that experience alone is adequate to account for all the
ideas included in anyone's store of knowledge.

In Book II he turns to that positive account. He begins by claiming that the sources of all knowledge
are, first, sense experience (the red colour of a rose, the ringing sound of a bell, the taste of salt, and
so on) and, second, “reflection” (one’s awareness that one is thinking, that one is happy or sad, that
one is having a certain sensation, and so on). These are not themselves, however, instances of
knowledge in the strict sense, but they provide the mind with the materials of knowledge. Locke
calls the

All ideas, according to Locke, enter the mind by way of the senses or one's reflection on the
materials that have been received that way. The first of these he designates by the term sensation,
which refers to the conscious states that are produced by the action of external bodies on the mind.
It is in this way that we derive our notions of color, heat, cold, softness, hardness, bitter, sweet, and
all the sensible qualities of which one ever becomes aware. Since it refers to the action of external
bodies on the mind, it might be called the external sense.

The second source of our ideas is the perception of the operations which take place within one's
mind as it assimilates and interprets the materials that have been received through the senses. This
includes such processes as thinking, doubting, believing, knowing, willing, and all the various
activities of the mind of which we are conscious in understanding ourselves and the world about us.
Because this source is within the mind, it might be designated as the internal sense. Locke, however,
prefers to use the term reflection instead because he believes this will help to avoid confusion with
the external sense or sensation.

There are only two ways that a simple idea can find its way into a human mind: through sensation,
or by reflection. In sensation the mind turns outward to the world and receives ideas through the
faculties of sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste. In reflection the mind turns toward its own
operations, receiving such as ideas as "thinking," "willing," "believing," "doubting."

Locke claims that we can break all of our experiences down into their fundamental parts. If we see a
cat, for instance, we can break that sensation down into blackness, softness, shininess, a certain size,
a certain shape, etc. Fundamental bits, those that are "uncompounded, without parts," and cannot
be broken down any further, are the simple ideas.

Whereas Book I is intended to reject the doctrine of innate ideas proposed by Descartes and the
rationalists, Book II explains that every idea is derived from experience either by sensation—i.e.
direct sensory information—or reflection—i.e. "the perception of the operations of our own mind
within us, as it is employed about the ideas it has got."

Innatism- Descartes , Plato and Leibniz

Plato argues that if there are certain concepts that we know to be true but did not learn from
experience then it must be because we have an innate knowledge of it and this knowledge must
have been gained before birth. In Plato's Meno, he recalls a situation in which Socrates, his
mentor, questioned a slave boy about a geometry theorem. Though the slave boy had no
previous experience with geometry, he was able to generate the right responses to the questions
he was asked. Plato reasoned that this was possible as Socrates' questions sparked the innate
knowledge of math the boy had had from birth

Descartes conveys the idea that innate knowledge or ideas is something inborn such as one
would say, that a certain disease might be 'innate' to signify that a person might be at risk of
contracting such a disease. He suggests that something that is 'innate' is effectively present from
birth and while it may not reveal itself then, is more than likely to present itself later in life.
Descartes comparison of innate knowledge to an innate disease, whose symptoms may only
show up later in life, unless prohibited by a factor like age or puberty, suggests that if an event
occurs prohibiting someone from exhibiting an innate behaviour or knowledge, it doesn't mean
the knowledge did not exist at all but rather it wasn't expressed – they were not able to acquire
that knowledge. In other words, innate beliefs, ideas and knowledge require experiences to be
triggered or they may never be expressed. Experiences are not the source of knowledge as
proposed by John Locke, but catalysts to the uncovering of knowledge.

Leibniz suggested that we are born with certain innate ideas, the most identifiable of these being
mathematical truisms. The idea that 1 + 1 = 2 is evident to us without the necessity for empirical
evidence. Leibniz argues that empiricism can only show us that concepts are true in the present;
the observation of one apple and then another in one instance, and in that instance only, leads to
the conclusion that one and another equals two. However, the suggestion that one and another
will always equal two requires an innate idea, as that would be a suggestion of things
unwitnessed.
Leibniz called such concepts as mathematical truisms "necessary truths". Another example of
such may be the phrase, "what is, is" or "it is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be".
Leibniz argues that such truisms are universally assented to (acknowledged by all to be true);
this being the case, it must be due to their status as innate ideas. Often there are ideas that are
acknowledged as necessarily true but are not universally assented to. Leibniz would suggest that
this is simply because the person in question has not become aware of the innate idea, not
because they do not possess it. Leibniz argues that empirical evidence can serve to bring to the
surface certain principles that are already innately embedded in our minds. This is similar to
needing to hear only the first few notes in order to recall the rest of the melody.
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, attempts to explain in cognitive terms how we can develop knowledge
of systems which are said, by supporters of innatism, to be 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 supposedly could not be empirically derived: the environment
seems too poor, variable and indeterminate, according to Chomsky, to explain the extraordinary
ability to learn complex concepts possessed by very young children. Essentially, their accurate
grammatical knowledge cannot have originated from their experiences as their experiences are
not adequate.[2] 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. Chomsky states that the ability to
learn how to properly construct sentences or know which sentences are grammatically incorrect
is an ability gained from innate knowledge.
There are two ways in which animals can gain knowledge. The first of these two ways is learning.
This is when an animal gathers information about its surrounding environment and then proceeds
to use this information. For example, if an animal eats something that hurts its stomach, it has
learned not to eat this again. The second way that an animal can acquire knowledge is through
innate knowledge. This knowledge is genetically inherited. The animal automatically knows it
without any prior experience. An example of this is when a horse is born and can immediately
walk. The horse has not learned this behavior; it simply knows how to do it.[8] In some scenarios,
innate knowledge is more beneficial than learned knowledge. However, in other scenarios the
opposite is true.
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.
Concepts of evolution, empiricism, rationalism

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 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 the
necessity for postulating innate ideas to explain the possibility of language.
tabula rasa, (Latin: “scraped tablet”—i.e., “clean slate”) in epistemology (theory of knowledge)
and psychology, a supposed condition that empiricists have attributed to the human mind before
ideas have been imprinted on it by the reaction of the senses to the external world of objects.
A new and revolutionary emphasis on the tabula rasa occurred late in the 17th century, when the
English empiricist John Locke, in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), argued for
the mind’s initial resemblance to “white paper, void of all characters,” with “all the materials of
reason and knowledge” derived from experience. Locke did not believe, however, that the mind
is literally blank or empty prior to experience, and almost no other empiricist has taken such an
extreme position. Locke himself acknowledged an innate power of “reflection” (awareness of
one’s own ideas, sensations, emotions, and so on) as a means of exploiting the materials given
by experience as well as a limited realm of a priori (nonexperiential) knowledge, which he
nevertheless regarded as “trifling” and essentially empty of content (e.g., “soul is soul” and “every
man is an animal”). The 18th-century Scottish empiricist David Hume held similar views. Suitably
qualified notions of the tabula rasa remained influential in British and subsequently Anglo-
American (analytic) philosophy through the mid-20th century.

Arguments-

How do you explain that Maths theorems are picked up by certain kids better than others?

Shakespeare was not even educated

Language acquisition- some kids are playing with words, language, others are struggling. Did
you need to know the distinctions between

How do you explain the right and left side etc.? creative/logical

Musical genius- Mozart

Driving- I took ages

What about fear? Isn’t it an innate idea?

How do you explain intuition/ instinct? You don’t instinctively like/dislike certain people?

Some people are evolved more- dreams, think about that. Dreams that are prophetic.

Mother’s instinct- no one teaches people how to be parents. You might become parents- will you
follow every single thing your own did?

Sexual desire- let’s not even go into Freud.

Hobbes and Locke

The natural state of mankind (the “state of nature”) is a state of war of one man against another, as
man is selfish and brutish.
The way out of the “state of nature” is a “social contract,” to be agreed upon by the people to be
governed and the government.

The ideal form that government should take is an absolute monarchy that has maximum authority,
subverting mankind’s natural state and creating societal order in the process

According to Locke, the natural condition of mankind is a “state of nature” characterized by human
freedom and equality. Locke’s “law of nature”—the obligation that created beings have to obey their
creator—constitutes the foundation of the “state of nature.” However, because some people violate
this law, governments are needed.

People voluntarily give government some of their power through a “social contract” in order to
protect their “natural rights” of life, liberty, and property.

If a government fails to protect the natural rights of its citizens or if it breaks the social contract, the
people are entitled to rebel against the government and create a new one.

Empiricism – sense, see, it makes sense to believe

Other idea may seem ridiculous but animals/humans- how does an animal who has never seen a
snake before? Jumps back

Human beings- how does one acquire ability to speak/express?

In linguistics- human mind has developed that they can acquire language, innate, inbuilt, evolution,
human beings have evolved. Baby knows the difference between harsh and stern tone. Ability of
language acquisition

Distinguish, recognise the mother.

Hobbes- human beings need a very strong government, strict supervision, because otherwise they
would fight and cut short their lives. Human nature- low view, selfish, driven by hope of death and
desire for personal gain.

Locke – state of nature – that has a law of nature to govern it- and that law is reason. Hobbes does
not believe in a pre existing state of reason. Natural state is brutish, at war. Locke says that reason
tells us not to cause harm to others life, freedom and property but transgression takes place