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Thesis Locke was right that the mind starts without ideas, and the argument from the newborn’s hunger fails

Arvind Poojary Fellow
· 6 replies
Reason & experienceBuddhistIndianModern EuropeanEmpiricismNyayaRationalismG. W. LeibnizGautama (Akṣapāda)John LockePlato#blank-slate#innatism#nyaya#past-lives
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Where it stands

I'm biased towards Locke, I admit. But I came across an argument for innate knowledge from the Nyāya tradition that I had never seen, and I want to test my bias against it.

Locke's case in Book I of the Essay is that there are no innate ideas. If there were, everyone would assent to them, and children and people with serious cognitive disabilities do not. The mind begins, in his famous image, like white paper. What is innate is the capacity to receive and work on experience, not any content.

The opponents are old and distinguished. Plato's Meno has the slave boy "recollecting" geometry. Leibniz, answering Locke, compared the mind not to blank paper but to a block of marble with veins that already outline the statue.

The Nyāya argument is different and, I think, more empirical. The Nyāya Sūtra points to the newborn. A baby, hours old, seeks the breast, shows fear and shows joy. Desire, the argument runs, requires a prior cognition that the object brings satisfaction; the newborn has had no experience in this life; so the cognition must come from a previous one. The argument is used to support the existence of a self that persists across lives.

My thesis: the argument mistakes a capacity for a content. The newborn's seeking is an inherited reflex, explained by evolution, not a memory of anything. Locke's line between innate capacities and acquired ideas holds.

I'm sure someone here can make the Nyāya case better than I just did.

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6 replies

For the thesis 1

  1. Vikram Sethi

    For Fellow

    From the classroom, a vote for Locke on the narrow point. Nobody arrives knowing that seven plus five is twelve. They arrive able to learn it, some faster than others, and I've never seen anything I'd call recollection, much as I love the Meno. Capacities, yes, even rich ones. Ideas, no.

    Helpful · 1

Against the thesis 4

  1. Meera Kulkarni

    Against Fellow

    Let me try. The Nyāya point is not "babies have reflexes". It is that desire is a cognitive state with a structure: to want something is to take it as a means to satisfaction. A reflex, as you describe it, does not take anything as anything. If you say the newborn really desires the milk, you owe an account of where that "taking-as" came from. If you say she doesn't desire it, only moves towards it, you have given up describing her as a subject at all. "Instinct" names the gap; it doesn't fill it.

  2. Priya Raghavan

    Against Fellow

    Developmental science cuts against your neat line too. Infants only a few months old behave as though they expect objects to persist when hidden and as though they can tell small quantities apart. Researchers argue about how to describe this, but many think infants have some built-in representational structure, not just a capacity to learn. That isn't recollection from a past life, but it isn't white paper either. Leibniz's veined marble is closer to the data than Locke's paper.

    Helpful · 1
    1. Arvind Poojary

      Fellow

      Priya, that is the strongest objection and I accept it. The line between innate capacity and innate content is blurrier than Locke thought, and I'll grant infants come with structure that shapes what they can learn. Where I still disagree with the Nyāya is about the bearer. Evolution gives us an inheritance, a kind of species memory, without any individual having experienced anything before. The newborn inherits; she does not remember.

      Helpful · 3
  3. Govinda Prasad Upadhyaya

    Against Fellow

    And language. A child learns the meaning of "cow" by hearing it used, but to learn anything from hearing she must already treat sounds as standing for things. The Mīmāṃsakas held that the relation between words and meanings is not invented by any speaker. You don't have to accept their whole theory to see that the capacity to learn a language looks less like blank paper and more like a form waiting to be filled.

    Helpful · 2
  4. Nirmala Jayasekara

    Against Fellow

    The Buddhist position sits interestingly between the two of you. In the Abhidhamma, latent tendencies are carried in the stream of mind from one life to the next, but there is no enduring self that carries them. So the Buddhist agrees with the Nyāya that the newborn inherits from her own past, and agrees with Arvind that there is no persisting self doing the remembering. Arvind's "species memory" and the Abhidhamma's "stream" differ about where the inheritance lies, not about whether there is one.