An Assessment of John Locke’s Critique of the Innate and a Priori Knowledge

An assessment of John Locke’s critique of the innate and a priori knowledge

John Locke rebuts the ideas of rationalism put forward by Descartes and Plato and outlines the ideas of Empiricism in his ‘Essay concerning human understanding’ . The main thrust of his argument refuting innate ideas can be summed up in three sentences:

“If, in fact, there are any innate principles, then everyone would assent to them. There are no principles that everyone assents to. Therefore, there are no innate principles.”

These ideas directly disagree with those of Plato and Descartes, amongst others (like Spinoza). First he puts foreword a philosophically superior argument against Plato’s theory of Forms. He begins that If this theory were true and an innate form was conceived - it follows that all humans should ascend to the same conceptual form, which is not the case (as for example one says “dog” different people think of different breeds). This is logically sound and defeats the theory of forms.

Another argument Locke uses against Descartes a priori is the idea of sensation and awareness of knowledge. Locke postulates that the idea of a priori is fatuous as how can one possess knowledge and not have awareness of that knowledge itself or it’s existence. Again this a very valid argument, for instance, imagine an eskimo who has lived in complete isolation from the world outside his community - and then asking him what a banana tastes like. He is even provided with a real banana on the condition he cannot eat it. There is no way through any way but rational and experience can this eskimo acquire this knowledge.

Another idea is used to support this claim (which comes at odds with Leibniz), and that is the nature of mathematics, Going on to say that if math is an innate idea (of which all rationalists claim) both children and ‘idiots’ should be able to deal with mathematical problems of the same complexity that are undertaken by mathematics professors - as math is an innate concept which should produce knowledge in animi. Obviously this is not the case - however there is a