Learning Lab
This lab allows you to look at the empirical research in psychology that bears upon debate between the Empiricists (Locke, Berkeley, and Hume) and the Rationalists (Descartes, Kant, Leibniz) over whether there are innate ideas (rationalists) or if all ideas come from experience (empiricists). Below is a brief discussion of innate ideas and the related concept of apriori ideas. After reading this brief summary, you should follow the links to the Locke reading where he argues against innate ideas and to the article of psychological research on children's learning. After reading the linked articles, go to beachboard and do the innate ideas quiz.
Innate Ideas:
Philosophers sometimes argue that the human mind possesses concepts from birth. Such concepts or ideas are referred to as innate concepts or ideas. Other philosophers deny the possibility of idea or concepts possessed from birth, arguing instead that people come to have all of their ideas or concepts as the result of experience. The theory has been advanced at various times in the history of philosophy to secure a basis for certainty when the validity or adequacy of the observed functioning of the mind was in question. Plato, for example, asserted the inadequacy of knowledge arrived at through sense experience; the world apparent to sense was only a temporal, changing approximation of an eternal, unchanging reality. The next important occurrence of a doctrine of innate ideas, not directly based on Plato, is in the work of René Descartes. Among the ideas Descartes took to be innate were the existence of the self: cogito ergo sum [I think, therefore I am], the existence of God, and some logical propositions like, from nothing comes nothing. John Locke, objecting that the doctrine encouraged dogmatism and laziness in thinking, advanced the classic attack on innate ideas. He argued that if certain ideas were innate they would be universally held and used, which is not the case. In contemporary discussion the question of innate resources of the mind has been the subject of dispute between behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner and linguistic theorist Noam Chomsky. Chomsky has pointed out that the learning of a language and linguistic performance cannot be adequately explained by the empirical behaviorist model.
A priori ideas:
A priori is a Latin phrase meaning "before" or "prior to". When applied to knowledge or ideas, the phrase indicates ideas that appear to be true or can be known true before - or regardless of - experience. All innate ideas would be a priori ideas, but not all a priori ideas are necessarily innate. For instance, we might not know the 200,000 + 250,000 = 450,000 innately. But we can come to know it independently of experiencing it.
Read the following article on how children learn and answer the questions in the quiz on beachboard.