How John Locke Set the Stage for Cognitive Science: Innate Ideas, Perception, and the Origin of Concepts

The history of philosophy is a centuries-long conversation. Contemporaneous philosophers integrate and respond to each other’s views as well as those that came before. I like to imagine they’re all up in some Platonic heaven continuing the conversation in person.

John Locke was born eighteen years after Rene Descartes died. If Locke were to have a conversation with Descartes in Plato’s heaven, he might say something like this:

“Descartes, my friend; you say that all knowledge originates in our thinking, that we can know something only because we are able to identify that thing’s concept in thought. But you haven’t dug deep enough, for where do our concepts originate? Where do our so-called ‘intuitions of the mind’ come from? If you think this through, you’ll find that your rationalism is mistaken, since you’ll discover that all concepts, all intuitions of the mind, originate in our experiences!”

Not only did he influence the development of liberal democracy... Locke also laid a foundation for how contemporary cognitive science investigates the mind.