Creator, Certainty and Inborn Knowledge

Rethinking Based on the Debate Between Descartes and Locke

DOI

10.2991/assehr.k.220105.027How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Inborn knowledge; Creator; Certainty

Abstract

The nature and source of knowledge has always been a classic topic in the history of philosophy. Descartes’s theory of innate knowledge opened the prelude to this discussion. Descartes believes that most of human knowledge is innate. Knowledge is driven by the characteristics of human thinking, but indirectly driven by the nature of specific events we may experience. On the contrary, empiricists such as John Locke criticizes that our knowledge is rarely innate and mainly comes from experience. The acquisition of knowledge is a long learning process. In this process, the two sources of experience are “feeling” and “reflection”. The mind receives various perceptions through feeling, by which we are familiar with external objects and have various concepts of perceptible nature. Through introspection, we produce other ideas by paying attention to the ideas previously provided by feeling. The concept derived from reflection is as clear as the concept derived from feeling. Based on this, this paper mainly considers the relationship between creator, certainty and inborn knowledge. At the same time, this paper absorbs the arguments of David Hume’s point of view and puts forward some new thoughts on innate knowledge. This paper holds that the certainty of knowledge is inseparable from inborn knowledge. The certainty of knowledge is the premise for us to recognize inborn knowledge. The existence of inborn knowledge makes it possible for us to further obtain the certainty of knowledge. This paper will be beneficial to the academic circles to further pay attention to and discuss the inborn knowledge.

Copyright

© 2022 The Authors. Published by Atlantis Press SARL.

Open Access

This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC license.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Shilong Ai
PY  - 2022
DA  - 2022/01/17
TI  - Creator, Certainty and Inborn Knowledge
BT  - Proceedings of the 2021 International Conference on Social Development and Media Communication (SDMC 2021)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 137
EP  - 141
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/assehr.k.220105.027
DO  - 10.2991/assehr.k.220105.027
ID  - Ai2022
ER  -