Epistemological Origins
Epistemological Origins
What causes human (and animal) knowledge? Is it nature or God? The classical empiricists thought it was nature acting on the senses (for most knowledge anyway) not God. The classic rationalists thought it was God acting miraculously on the soul (for some knowledge anyway) not nature. Either nature implants the knowledge via experience or God implants it by divine intervention. Nowadays we talk about nature and nurture, the senses or the genes, with no God mentioned. What is the correct answer? It is that nature implants all knowledge of all kinds, but not necessarily by means of the senses. The reason knowledge exists is that nature caused it to exist. In the most obvious cases we have empirical concepts instilled either by individual learning or by natural selection operating on ancestral organisms. In the latter case the knowledge is implanted by the usual biological mechanisms of inheritance, as organisms adjust to their environment—physical, psychological, social, etc. There is no innate knowledge not geared to facts about the world. This includes facts concerning what is traditionally assigned to the a priori—logic, mathematics, language, ethics.[1]We have knowledge of these things because of the things themselves (you don’t need to have knowledge of non-existent or nonsensical things). God plays no role and is not needed. In this sense all knowledge, a prioriand a posteriori, is derived from the natural real world, not from a supernatural source such as God. Whether innate or acquired, the knowledge derives from natural processes involving the objects of such knowledge—not from a separate reality called God. So, empiricism is right in its claim that we don’t need miraculous installation by a divine being and that all knowledge stems from the natural world—even if some is innate. But empiricism is not right that all knowledge has sensory sources encountered during the individual’s life-time. We could call the correct view “Empirical Rationalism” or “Empirical Nativism”, where “empirical” contrasts with “divine” or “supernatural”. The correct theory thus coincides with neither of the classic positions, as commonly understood. Even if all knowledge were innate, the correct view would still be a form of empiricism in the sense that all knowledge (of any consequence) comes from the non-divine natural world—though not all knowledge is acquired through the senses of the individual knower (we could consistently claim that it derives from ancestors’ senses via the genes). This view could be called “Nativist Empiricism”, contrasted with “Nativist Theism”. All knowledge is caused by the natural world, one way or another, but there is room for disagreement about what part of the natural world causes it—the individual organism’s present environment or its ancestral history. So, classic empiricism was basically right about the origins of knowledge, except for the small point that not all knowledge enters through the senses of the individual. Some knowledge enters the individual’s mind through a separate channel, though equally nature-dependent (where nature includes the subject matter of a priori knowledge).[2]
[1] I am assigning these facts to nature in the broadest sense—they are not part the supernatural world, even if they are different from other kinds of natural fact.
[2] I am looking here at the broader issues, historical and substantive, concerning the debate between empiricists and rationalists. Does knowledge originate in natural facts about the universe, independently of God, or does it arise from acts of God directed at human wellbeing and morality. The same kind of debate existed in the seventeenth century about the causes of motion: does it come from the laws of nature or from an act of God? Is it secular or supernatural? We have the same debate later on the origins of life: is it caused by natural processes in which God has no part or is it a result of divine action? We are less exercised by such questions as our predecessors, since the rise and success of science. The empiricism-rationalism debate was caught up in the same opposition: does knowledge need a divine explanation or can nature do all the work? From that perspective differences over nature and nurture are incidental.
“There is no innate knowledge not geared to facts about the world…. We have knowledge of these things because of the things themselves (you don’t need to have knowledge of non-existent or nonsensical things).”
I understand why we don’t need knowledge of non-existent things, such as unicorns. Since you say “need” rather than “have,” do you mean that it is possible that we have innate knowledge of unicorns even though we don’t need to?
Can you provide an example of a nonsensical but existent thing? Maybe I’m misreading the disjunction, and nonsensical things are non-existent. But, if they exist, then why don’t we need knowledge of them? We don’t “need” innate knowledge of existent things that are not nonsensical, such as elephants, if we’re able to perceive them.
It would be logically possible to possess “unicorn” innately, but biologically pointless. Nonsensical things don’t exist. We might well need the concept of elephant innately; perceiving them is not enough for having the concept.
Why are some philosophers so unwilling to countenance the idea of innate or a priori knowledge? Why do they think that all knowledge must have a partly external origin, requiring some encounter with the external world in order to be engendered, rather than already lurking within our genes already, requiring only to be triggered, drawn out or elicited by sensory experience? Why the strong prejudice against innate knowledge? Is this a special case of the prejudice toward admitting the reality of any phenomenon we are unable to get a strong conceptual grasp on, even though there are good reasons to think it exists?
That’s a good question with no clear answer. A superficial answer is that they want everything we know to be consciously known, so it’s a prejudice against the unconscious. A deeper answer is that innate knowledge is felt to be intrinsically puzzling: how does it get there, how is it represented in the mind/brain, and how does it have intentionality? It has to be knowledge about something, but what makes it about something? They thought that experience has intentionality built into consciousness. I think myself that both kinds of knowledge are mysterious, but they exist.