Descartes' Innatism

I'm working my way carefully through Fiona Cowie's book, WHAT'S WITHIN? NATIVISM RECONSIDERED (1999), a book I've only skimmed until now. I believe I've mentioned it here a time or two on the basis of the skimming and its reviews.

The book, which began life as a doctoral dissertation, is a look at Fodor and Chomsky in particular, and their revival of elements of classical rationalism, especially with regard to a priori ideas.

Today I'll focus on an early point, within Cowie's historical discussion. She asks: what exactly was the classical debate, the one featuring Descartes and Leibniz on one side, figures such as Hobbes and Locke on the other, really about? It is not easy to pin in down. The empiricists sometimes wrote as if the rationalists were saying that a baby comes into the world already knowing, say, what a triangle is, or what constitutes a prime number. Babies clearly don't. And the old rationalists denied this is what they meant.

Descartes wrote that he and others on his side of the dispute "simply mean that we have within ourselves the faculty of summoning up the idea" of a triangle, a prime, or a Perfect Being.

On the other hand Locke etc. weren't denying the tautology that we are capable of summoning up the ideas that we really have. We were then born with the possibility of knowing whatever we later came to know. That even stubborn Anglophones don't deny. Is that all the "faculty" within means?

Cowie argues for what she calls a "special faculties" interpretation of the dispute. What Descartes meant was that the acquisition of some of our ideas, particularly our geometrical ideas, were due to the activation of certain features in our minds. As is well known, he thought of "mind" in an intangible sense here, he wouldn't have said, "certain wiring configurations in the brain." Still, he saw the mind as divided into units, some with quite special/limited purposes. The modularity of the mind was critical to what he meant by innateness.

In his COMMENTS OF A CERTAIN BROADSHEET, Descartes makes what Cowie takes to be a revealing analogy. "This is the same sense as that in which we say that ... certain diseases such as gout or stones are innate" in certain families. People with a genetic disposition may have the faculty of contracting gout. This doesn't mean that they have gout as infants. Nor does it simply mean that gout is a possibility for humans. It means that there is a specific gout contracting ability -- that which as we in the 21st century would say is passed along by the genes of the families Descartes had in mind. The possession of this faculty makes it neither more nor less likely that the possessor will someday get the bubonic plague, or the flu.

So what Locke was really objecting to, when he objected to innatism, was the compartmentalization of the mind. He believed that "what's within" is a quite general learning capacity. When he spoke of the blank slate of our mind at birth we are to understand the singularity of that image as critical to it. It is all ONE slate, and the same chalk that writes geometrical demonstrations there is the chalk that generalizes about the behavior of squirrels, or contemplates whether there must be a First Mover. There is a learning faculty in the human mind, so to speak, there is no congeries of special faculties.

I find this a helpful clarification as to what that debate was about.

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