Akademik

Ideas that are inborn and not the product of experience. The controversy over their existence formed a major element in Locke's rejection of the philosophy of Descartes, and Locke was in turn attacked over the issue by Leibniz . The question was whether the mind is equipped with highly general concepts—God, freedom, immortality, substance—that can be known a priori to be applicable to the world, and that could therefore afford us clear and distinct knowledge unlike any that can be certified by experience. It thus formed a pivotal issue between rationalists and their empiricist opponents. The connection between innateness as such and any right to think of these ideas as yielding a distinct kind of knowledge was queried by Hume, but the need for a priori categories of the understanding through which experience is organized was again defended by Kant . In the 20th century the view that children carry with them an innate universal grammar, enabling them to pull off the remarkable feat of learning a first language, has been defended by Chomsky.