Page 75 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

more potent ideas, are innate because, were they not already in place, experience would have nothing to teach us, or there would be nothing that we could learn, at least within some wide domain. For example, Leibniz thought that certain logical ideas—in effect, those of truth and identity—were of this type.
1. The Traditional Problems: Descartes and Leibniz
Descartes's appeal to innate ideas stemmed from the following kinds of considerations. No-one has ever drawn or seen a perfect triangle. Rather, what we confront are at best only approximations to that ideal, which raises the question of why we detect that par- ticular pattern in the samples where we do, or why we view them as approximations to that ideal or indeed to anything. Experience does not teach us to choose that ideal, so the idea of a triangle is not acquired, which means it must be innate (weaker strength). Moreover, it takes the right constitution to see tri- angles where something quite nontriangular occurs in the brain.
By contrast, Leibniz's problems were of this nature: 'If I do not know already that no contradiction is true, then how can experience teach me, say, that a hawk is not a handsaw?' Granted, hawks fly, and handsaws do not. But perhaps that just means: hawks/handsaws fly and do not. If Leibniz is right about the problem and its solution, then there are innate ideas in the stronger sense.
Leibniz and his main opponent, Locke, agreed that the key issue was not over innate ideas, but rather over innate principles, i.e., knowledge that such-and- such. What one needed to know to learn about hawks and handsaws was that no contradiction is true. But Leibniz and Locke also agreed that there can be no knowledge that without the conceptual resources for formulating it. To know that no contradiction is true, one needs the idea of truth. Perhaps in having the latter, one just does know the former.
Innateideasthusplayedaroleinatheoryofinnate logical competence, which was their most important application from the seventeenth to the twentieth cen- turies. Some have thought logical competence, in Leibniz's sense, bogus. Their idea, in brief, is that the reason why any rational animal knows that no contradictions are true is that we could not recognize any animal as rational without crediting it with that knowledge. In seeing someone as rational, we must do him the further courtesy of seeing him as logical to that extent. We are forced so to interpret him. The 'competence' is thus all in the eye of the beholder; it points to no specific psychologically real internal organization. Even if this view were plausible (i.e., the logically competent reliably perform in quite concrete ways, which leaves room for that performance to be explained by something), it just pushes the problem to a new domain. We are forced to see rational animals
in 'such-and-such' a way. Again, one answer to what forces us is supplied by innate ideas.
2. Chomsky's Conception of Innate Ideas
The idea of innate ideas has been used in the twentieth century by Noam Chomsky. Like Leibniz, his main concern is with a specific competence; in Chomsky's case a linguistic, or syntactic, one. The idea is that one could not learn a language without being innately constituted to learn (by natural means) a specific type of language as opposed to others. The type is char- acterized by a certain set of principles, which, since they fix what humans are constituted to learn, are universal in human languages. At least for a time, Chomsky characterized this innate constitution, in one way among others, by ascribing knowledge of these principlesto the languagelearner. Bythe Locke- Leibniz principle, knowledge of principles requires the conceptual resources for formulating them. Hence, Chomsky concluded, we have innate grammatical ideas.
Chomskyan innate ideas may be seen as modified Leibnizian ones—modified enough to make their exis- tence a partly empirical question. It is not that the particular innate grammatical ideas that he would posit could not conceivably have been acquired, as with the ideas of truth and identity. Those gram- matical ideas could have been acquired, had we had suitable others to start with. But we must start some- where, with some innate ideas. The form of the claim is: in fact, we started here. Similarly, it is not incon- ceivable that we should have learned some language without the specific grammatical principles that we are supposed to know innately. We might have had innate knowledge of different principles. We would then have learned languages of different forms— different, that is, from those that are humanly poss- ible. What is not an empirical thesis is that learning language requires innate knowledge of grammatical principles. What is empirical is that we satisfy that requirementbyknowingthusandsoinnately.
3. TheIdea of Idea'
The 'innate ideas' debate in the seventeenthand eight- eenth centuries was deformed through entanglement with the 'idea' idea, from which it has not yet com- pletely disentangled itself. With that thesis, having an idea or a concept (of, say, licorice or a pentagon) consists in having a representation accessible to direct conscious inspection, and exhaustively specified by what one thus inspects; one starts having an idea sim- ultaneously with the onset of this awareness. To Locke, that notion made it seem much easier than it in fact is to show that there are no innate ideas: for every such representation, there must be an onset of awareness of it. If not, then we do not inspect it 'in consciousness,' so it does not determine the having of an idea at all.
Innate Ideas
53