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Single Idea 2601

[filed under theme 18. Thought / D. Concepts / 2. Origin of Concepts / c. Nativist concepts ]

Full Idea

The ideas of pains, colours, sounds etc. must be all the more innate if, on the occasion of certain corporeal motions, our mind is to be capable of representing them to itself, for there is no similarity between these ideas and the corporeal motions.

Gist of Idea

Qualia must be innate, because physical motions do not contain them

Source

René Descartes (Comments on a Certain Broadsheet [1644], p.365)

Book Ref

'The Philosophy of Mind', ed/tr. Beakley,B /Ludlow P [MIT 1992], p.365

A Reaction

Simple and brilliant! We know perfectly well that there is no redness zooming through the air from a tomato (or the air would be pink!). Redness occurs when the light arrives, so we add the redness, so it is innate.

The 15 ideas with the same theme [concepts as innate or native ingredients of minds]:

3631 A blind man may still contain the idea of colour [Descartes]
2273 The ideas of God and of my self are innate in me [Descartes]
2285 I can think of innumerable shapes I have never experienced [Descartes]
2286 The idea of a supremely perfect being is within me, like the basic concepts of mathematics [Descartes]
2601 Qualia must be innate, because physical motions do not contain them [Descartes]
2600 The mind's innate ideas are part of its capacity for thought [Descartes]
12471 Innate ideas are nothing, if they are in the mind but we are unaware of them [Locke]
8100 Where does the bird's idea of a nest come from? [Joubert]
6649 Chomsky now says concepts are basically innate, as well as syntax [Chomsky, by Lowe]
6650 Fodor is now less keen on the innateness of concepts [Fodor, by Lowe]
2492 Experience can't explain itself; the concepts needed must originate outside experience [Fodor]
11143 If concept-learning is hypothesis-testing, that needs innate concepts to get started [Fodor, by Margolis/Laurence]
12662 We have an innate capacity to form a concept, once we have grasped the stereotype [Fodor]
4997 It seems unlikely that most concepts are innate, if a theory must be understood to grasp them [Kirk,R]
18592 The concepts OBJECT or AGENT may be innate [Machery]