Postscript: I checked non-Cliff summaries, they're awful. NPCs. Only Cliff takes good notes.
Unlike Plato's diction, Locke's diction isn't completely unreadable, so I will occasionally take paragraphs from the original.
https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/e/an-essay-concerning-human-understanding/summary-and-analysis/book-i-innate-ideas
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/10615/10615-h/10615-h.htm
Although Locke's writing style is better, we quickly find he's just nowhere near as smart as Plato, who was himself B-tier for Athens. Locke's topics are not evocative and profound, but prosaic and parochial. Great men discuss ideas; Locke is distinctly average and regularly discusses events veiled as ideas.
There is nothing more commonly taken for granted than that there are certain PRINCIPLES, both SPECULATIVE and PRACTICAL, (for they speak of both), universally agreed upon by all mankind
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/10615/10615-h/10615-h.htm#chap1.02
Locke's observations had led him to believe that one of the most common sources of error and false pretension in his day was the generally accepted belief in innate ideas. "Self-evident truths," as they were frequently called, had constituted the basis or foundation for many of the popular doctrines proclaimed by scholars and were generally accepted as true by the masses of people who possessed neither the ability nor the inclination to think for themselves.
Rather a dense thicket here.
If you ask individuals, they will say there is no innate knowledge. However, in discussion, they certainly don't behave as if they believe it. It is still true that each tribe believes their high-status beliefs are universally correct. They believe every other tribe is merely a mistaken copy of themselves. "They hate us for our freedoms." Specifically they believe all men want material wealth and maybe prestige, and nothing else.
Meanwhile, Locke is wrong. There is indeed innate knowledge, and there must be. You can't learn how to learn if you don't already know. You have to be born with some rudimentary knowledge of logic, or it is impossible to acquire it.
Luckily evolution guarantees this. Illogical brains die. Given a random set of reasoning processes, the wrong ones will all perish, leaving only brains capable of rationality.
Given that Locke's inheritors still behave as if innate ideas are true, it didn't work. Locke failed. Or Locke succeeded: it is likely he merely objected to the current local [[universals]], but cloaked his objection in high-falutin language instead of owning up to the fact it was merely a petty dispute.
The fact that these so-called innate ideas could not be questioned gave to the persons who proclaimed them an unwarranted authority over the minds of others and frequently led to intolerance and persecution.
And there it is. Innate idea: tolerance. Locke will not tolerate you questioning the justification for tolerance, and neither will any of his descendants.
Note [intro Locke] was all about thinking for yourself, and yet the very first paragraph reiterates the Platonic/Aristotlean creed about the peasantry being unable to think for themselves. This is an example of the incoherencies the intro tried to abstractly explain away.
But at least a partial explanation for this fact can be seen in the way in which it was composed. The Essay was not the product of a continuous period of writing. It was produced a little at a time over a period of more than twenty years. Obviously, some changes and modifications were bound to take place as Locke gave added consideration to the questions that were involved.
Bafflegab. Technically all of that is true, but it's said precisely because it's irrelevant. The criticism is deliberately misunderstood, because correctly understood, there is no refutation. Locke is kinda full of shit.
This isn't some little oopsie Locke forgot to correct in later editions.
This source of error and false pretension, Locke believed, could be eliminated if it could be shown convincingly that innate ideas do not exist and that the proper use of one's natural faculties was sufficient to account for all the knowledge that anyone possesses.
Whether an idea is innate or not is in fact irrelevant. Either it replicates or doesn't. Either it's predictive or it isn't. Innate hypotheses are like any other hypothesis, in that they're hypotheses.
Trying to prove or disprove specifically innateness as an argument looks like special pleading.
I notice the [racism] epistemological shape. Murder is already illegal; it doesn't also need to be a [hate crime]. Nonpredictive ideas are already illogical. Also it's sufficiently obvious that "innate" ideas are not innate, but childhood indoctrination, due to the fact foreigners have different "innate" ideas.
[[Hate]] crimes exist to excuse non-[[hate]] murder. Disproving [[innate]] ideas is about blessing other fallacious cognition. Prestidigitator's trick: focus over here so you don't notice what I'm doing over there. Spend lots of time showing how X is wrong, to praise Y with faint damn. "Must not have been important, he didn't mention it. Must not have been wrong, he didn't criticize it."
One does have to admit Locke is an excellent liar, however. Sophistry = Sophistry++. All rhetoric is only sound on the surface, but Locke's rhetoric has layers and layers of camouflaging surfaces. Lots and lots of what he says is true, or would be true if certain tiny errors had not been made.
However, you can tell it is indeed rhetoric and Sophistry as all the errors point in the same direction: leftward. Locke prayed to Satan for guidance, and his prayer was answered.
That a thing cannot be what it is and what it is not at the same time is generally recognized as one of the laws of thought, or basic assumptions that are necessarily implied in all thinking. Locke reasons that if there is any principle that could properly be called innate, this one should qualify.
It would in fact be impossible to communicate at all with someone who didn't know this. "I paid you $10 for this." *hands over tenner* "No you didn't." "It's literally right there on the counter." "No it's not."
However, the fact of the matter is that there are comparatively few minds that have ever been aware of this principle at all.
Hey moron, they're just lying. Or, occasionally, mistaken. If they really didn't know it would look very very different.
Certainly the idea is not present in the minds of young children.
"I want cake." Okay, here's some cake. *hands oatmeal* "That's not cake!" "Yes it is." "Oh, well, I guess it is then. Yum! Sweet!"
lmao
Locke really was a very clever liar. By suggesting that children don't know this, he gives you an excuse for likewise not knowing this. Which you can conveniently use whenever politically expedient.
To be sure, even an infant may know that one object is not identical with another object
In other words, Locke was well aware that what he was saying was non-predictive. Didn't replicate. Then he produces some nonsense to prove you should believe it anyway.
If an idea of which we become aware at some later period is for that reason innate, then by the same logic we must conclude that all of the ideas which one acquires through the whole course of his life are innate.
Equivocation. Plato, at least, isn't prone to overt fallacies.
Imagine you assemble a wooden chair. You can't tell me how you assemble it, though.
Later, someone helps you explain, and now you can tell me how to assemble one myself.
Locke uses the idea that [I] don't know how to assemble the chair until it's explained to me to try to prove that [you] don't know how to assemble a chair until it's explained to [you]. Disgusting.
Now the principle of non-contradiction along with the other laws of thought are the presuppositions on which all thinking is based. If these are not innate, it would seem most reasonable to conclude that none of the ideas that are based upon them can be regarded as innate.
Locke has to use a fallacy to prove they're not innate. Locke himself believed the best argument for this was a fallacy. He's just lying to you. Politician, not political philosopher.
The steel man of this argument proves logic is indeed innate. Same way that if Locke had proven that 15/5=5, then correcting the error shows us that Locke was ontologically committed to the idea that 15/5=3.
To say that an idea is present in one's mind when he is not conscious of it is to speak nonsense, for, as Locke understands it, the mind and consciousness are synonymous terms.
lol. Nice innate idea you have there, Locke.
In this respect, he followed the teaching of Descartes
Question begging. Is knowledge necessarily conscious?
Actually, it is. However, it is not necessarily verbal. Locke here is specifically equating verbal consciousness with knowledge, which as it happens is often the opposite of the case. (Set 0 failure.) If you ask a truck driver how to drive a truck, they will normally tell you something that's flatly wrong, and you'll crash the truck if you try to follow it. If you ask a Christian what doctrines Christians believe it, you will rapidly conclude that he's not a Christian, because he doesn't follow any of them.
Question begging is used rhetorically to transmute an incredible false statement into a different, more credible false statement. A necessary step when employing the motte-and-bailey fallacy.
Again it is pointed out that if any principle or idea is innate, it must be present in the mind prior to any instruction or reflection upon it.
Bailey is above. The motte: it's true that an innate verbal idea must be verbally present in the mind before verbal reflection or verbal instruction.
In spaded language, it's obvious nonsense. How is an idea supposed to be [[innate]] before the infant learns to speak? Who buys this bullshit, rofl?
Locke is indeed an Enlightement materialist. They adore circular reasoning. "Ideas must be verbal, therefore, they can't be innate." Locke is not merely a good liar, he's a good comedian. Who sells this bullshit? Um, about that suppressed premise...
I do have to point out that while Locke is much less long-winded than Plato, he's still very long-winded. This time, it's not because he loves the sound of his own voice. It's because he can't be caught dead understanding his alleged ideas, because they're lies. He has to go well out of his way to avoid the spots where you can clearly see the fallacies, making the work many times longer than it would be if he could state this bullshit directly without autorefuting.
As with all Satanists, Locke comes off as narcissistic. If you don't immediately get that he's just lying, it sounds like he's talking about himself. "It's certainly the case that I don't know anything, innately or otherwise." "Non-contradiction must be known innately, and I didn't know it, which is why I can't go ten minutes without committing a fallacy." The narcissist projects and universalizes: statements about their fake adopted persona are worded as statements about everyone.
Keep that in mind. I won't keep mentioning it.
P.S. Mnemonic: motte-and-bailey is backwards. The moat goes on the outside, performing the function of the bailey. You find a bailiff in the central bastion or keep, called the motte. Presumably this corrupt backwardness is what makes it appealing as a label for Satanists and midwits such as Siskind. I may start calling it the keep-and-curtain fallacy.
Furthermore, ideas that are present prior to instruction should be more clear and distinct than those that appear later because they have had no opportunity to become corrupted by custom and false opinion.
"Verbal ideas that are present prior to learning language should be more clear and distinct."
"Verbal ideas [regardless of kind] have had no opportunity to become corrupted by custom or peer pressure." Locke went to great pains to avoid the numerous howling lacunae in his positions, and still couldn't avoid all of them.
That instances of [icongruities] can be found when one reads the entire book must be admitted by anyone who has read it with care.
Not exactly how I would put it. Don't exactly have to read the whole book. Often don't even need to know local context.
There were, however, in Locke's day many scholars of repute who defended the idea that the principles of right and wrong are implanted in the human mind by God, and hence they are innate rather than being derived from human experience.
This passage doesn't include the part where innate=>proof of truth, and as written Locke is just wrong.
Steelman: convert "God" to "Creator," in this case the creator is Darwinian evolution (Locke of course pre-dated Darwin). It turns out Locke's opponents were simply right. "He started it!" Children have innate ideas of cooperation and defection.
As it further happens, these ideas are more broadly correct than the ideas of a "well-adjusted" citizen, because taxation is wrong and thus no civilized bandit society can allow children to go unadjusted.
Saying Locke = Satanist isn't an ad hom, it's predictive. He's likely to lie, in particular likely to tell political lies. Similarly, innateness of a belief is, in fact, evidence that it's true. While it's not analytic proof, it's certainly better than the nonsense you get from enlightenment philosophers, for example, from Locke.
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