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Books

Inborn Knowledge by Colin McGinn

Nick Everitt considers Colin McGinn’s arguments that we are born with some ideas.

The great majority of us can think of a very great many things: of shoes and ships and sealing wax, of houses and mountains, of pins and clouds and shadows, and so on. And the great majority of us know very many truths about the things we can think of: that unsupported bodies fall in air, that bread is nourishing, that fires produce ashes, that tables support teapots, and so on. About these twin capacities for thought and for knowledge we can raise the twin questions, ‘Where did all these ideas come from?’ and ‘Where did our knowledge of these truths originate?’

The philosophy of empiricism provides a distinctive answer to both these questions. Most boldly enunciated by John Locke in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), it claims that all our ideas come from experience, and so all our knowledge also comes from experience. Our senses give us ideas of external objects; and by internal experience we also come to have ideas of the operations of our own minds, such as doubting, willing, etc.

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