Do we have innate ideas Social Sciences Term Paper (Term Paper Sample)

Do We Have Innate Ideas?
Innateness is a concept stating that we, human, are born with some built-in ideas, prior knowledge that is used through our life, and that knowledge does not require experience to be gained. The controversy begins with a major question: are we, human, born with inner and prior ideas, concepts, or knowledge? Or we are born as a blank mind without any prior information and gain our knowledge through experience. The main two teams of this controversy are nativists, the ones who support the ideas of innate, and empiricists, the other team who argues against prior knowledge and support the idea that we get our ideas through experience. The importance of this question answer is lying in its contribution to answer some debatable questions in religion, morality, and epistemology. The debate had started a way long ago, with two of pre-socratic philosophers, Empedocles and Anaxagoras. Empedocles thought that our minds shape the world around us and that is because our minds came preloaded with some information about the world. Anaxagoras, on the other hand, thought the contrary, that the world is mainly the one who forms the human mind. Then came Socrates, he believed in pre-existence, that before we came to this life, we were exposed to all knowledge, and he used this to argue for the immortality of the soul, Plato stated that in Phaedo dialogue. The concept of innateness established when Plato, at first, came up with it and stated that human are born with some inner knowledge, that is something existing in all human, and all learning is recollection. He explained the concept using Socrates’ slave boy dialogue, that socrates, with only logical thinking procedures, helped an uneducated slave boy with no prior experience or knowledge of geometry to solve a geometrical problem. The boy figures out the solution, though he had no prior knowledge of the subject. The first philosopher to reject the idea of innateness was Aristotle, Plato’s student, he argued that human knowledge is gained through perception of the world, not born with human. Aristotle's argument had dominated the western philosophy and ended the controversy for around two thousand years. But in the seventeenth century, Renes Descartes start the controversy again, he distinguished between what human senses receive and how our mind processes these data and perceives it. Descartes concluded that we, human, have abstract ideas of the physical world around us, and those abstract ideas help the mind to perceive and understand the object the way he does. Another nativist that contributed to the idea of innateness was Leibniz, he suggested that some of our innate may be unconscious, and it may not be realized as thoughts and ideas but rather a way of reasoning. On the other hand, empiricists starts to fight back for their beliefs and attacking the nativists in every occasion. Two of the most important empiricists in the modern world were John Locke and David Hume. Locke thought that nativism is not necessary and that nativists argue for things that is not existed and have no solid proof in the real world, it is all speculations to Locke. He argued that if there were innate ideas; that human came to this life pre-loaded, we would be aware of them and there would be no need for that controversy. Hume also concluded that we collect the result of our experiences of the world and use them as a guide in futuristic events. The idea has been a critical controversy through centuries between western philosophers, some believed in, introducing arguments and defend innateness, and some denied, fighting back the arguments introduced by nativists. The concept is, in its essence and by intuition, felt to be true, but philosophy does not consider something to be true just because it is felt to be so. So introducing some logical arguments and ideas, in this case, might help. In the following paragraphs, two main aspects of human knowledge will be examined. The first aspect is conscience, and I will try to prove that it is something that could be considered as innate. The second one is language and the urge of human to have a tool to ease the communication between them, and the main essence behind this urge.