Descartess Notes Directed Against a Certain Program is definitely one of his livelier works. At 358, he discusses the programs article 12, which is about innateness. His reply is very revealing. The innateness of an idea (or of a bodily or medical trait) consists not in its presence of it at birth, but in the organisms potential to acquire it *under certain conditions*. (The conditions are not specified, but presumed to be specifiable; this refutes Lockes charge of vacuity.) The ideas so acquired go well beyond anything to be found in the stimulus. The latter does nothing more than provide the occasion for the activation of a concept. This is because the stimulus is always no more than a corporeal motion transmitted to the sensory organs and the brain. Each such motion is, moreover, particular, though the ideas it engenders are general. No complex, general idea can arise solely from mere transmissions of particular corporeal motions to the organs of sense. Innateness picks up the explanatory slack. Complex, general ideas are, moreover, nonpictorial and in no way sensory, though they arise as a response to the sensory pictures that even mules are said to enjoy. It turns out, by these criteria, that all general ideas and some particular ideas are innate. One worry one might have is that we cannot subject to empirical test the claim that some idea is innate unless we are told which conditions are sufficient to trigger it. If the sufficient conditions are those that empiricists would equally predict, then the traditional dispute between rationalists and empiricists is devoid of empirical content. Another worry is that the notion of triggering makes the acquisition of concepts appear to be a mechanical phenomenon. But the soul is, on Descartess view, essentially free and, being unextended and hence incorporeal, is not subject to causal laws. How can something that fits this description be, at the same time, a law-governed mechanism? If the response is that no such laws exist in the realm of the mental, then the worry resurfaces that Locke was correct in his charge of vacuity. For if there are no laws, then there cannot be sufficient conditions for the triggering of an innate idea. To not specify those conditions is one thing; to assert that they are not even in principle specifiable is quite another. Lockes challenge does not touch the former, but it is devastating against the latter.
Posted on: Thu, 07 Nov 2013 07:19:19 +0000