QuestionsCan we be certain of anything?No innate ideas: the mind is born a blank page
Can we be certain of anything?Through experience, with care

No innate ideas: the mind is born a blank page

John Locke 1632 · 1704The mind is born a blank slate; power comes from consent.
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What it claims

There are no innate ideas or principles: the mind is at first like a blank page, which experience fills.

Why

If truths were imprinted on the mind, every mind would know them, yet children do not know even basic logical principles.

In short

"No innate ideas: the mind is born a blank page" is an argument by John Locke (Essay, I.2 and II.1) on the question "Can we be certain of anything?" (answer: through experience, with care). Its claim: There are no innate ideas or principles: the mind is at first like a blank page, which experience fills. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P3). AskPhilosophy presents 4 objections, 1 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

Essay, I.2 and II.1
Valid with an implicit premise

Descartes and many others thought that certain truths are engraved in the soul from birth, like the mark of a seal. Locke opens his Essay by attacking this idea: if a truth were written in us, everyone would know it, children included. They do not. So everything we know comes from experience.

P1If a truth were imprinted on the mind, every mind would perceive it: imprinting a truth on the soul can only mean making it perceived.
P2Yet children and "idiots" (in the sense of the time: people with an intellectual disability) have not the least thought of principles such as "whatever is, is" or "it is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be".
P3 · implicit premiseThese two logical principles are the best candidates for being innate: if even they are not known by all, no truth is.
P4All our ideas can be explained by experience: sensation (outer objects) and reflection (the mind observing its own operations).
Therefore there are no innate ideas or principles: the mind is at first like a blank page, which experience fills.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P3, the computer finds a case where children do not know the two logical principles, but some other truth is known by every mind: it could then be innate.
With P3 the argument is valid. Without it, it proves only one thing: these two principles are not innate. Some other truth (moral, or the idea of God) could still be. Locke deals with those cases separately (morality in the next chapter, God later), but the argument as given here rests on this generalisation. P4 is needed only for the second half of the conclusion: without it, we would have shown there are no innate ideas without saying where our ideas come from.
Analogy. If someone claims a book has been written in your head since birth, but nobody, not even you, can read a line of it, in what sense is it written? For Locke, an "innate" truth that nobody knows is only a way of speaking.

Objections

4

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

Objection anticipated by Locke attacks premise 1

These truths are in the mind without being perceived: what is innate is the capacity to know them.

Locke replies
Locke
If "innate" means "that the mind is capable of knowing", then every truth one ever learns is innate. The thesis then says nothing more than its opponents: nobody ever denied that the mind is capable of knowing.
Leibniz 1765 · attacks premise 1

The mind is not smooth marble but veined marble, in which the statue of Hercules is already traced. Innate truths are there as dispositions, not as actual thoughts. So there is no contradiction in their being in us without being perceived: it takes work to bring out the veins.

no reply
No reply possible: objection raised in 1765, after the author's death (1704).
Leibniz 1765 · attacks premise 4

Experience shows what happens, never what must happen. Yet we know that 2 + 2 = 4 is necessary, true everywhere and always. The senses are not enough to show this necessity: it comes from the mind itself.

no reply
No reply possible: objection raised in 1765, after the author's death (1704).
Noam Chomsky 1965 · attacks premise 4

Children learn their mother tongue very fast, from few and imperfect examples, and all of them follow rules nobody ever taught them. Experience alone is not enough: there must be an innate structure specific to language.

no reply
summary: their text is not yet in our corpus
No reply possible: objection raised in 1965, after the author's death (1704).