Inborn Knowledge: The Mystery Within

by Colin McGinn

An argument that nativism is true and important but mysterious, examining the particular case of ideas of sensible qualities. In this book, Colin McGinn presents a concise, clear, and compelling argument that the origins of knowledge are innate—that nativism, not empiricism, is correct in its theory of how concepts are acquired. McGinn considers the particular case of sensible qualities—ideas of color, shape, taste, and so on. He argues that these, which he once regarded as the strongest case for the empiricist position, are in fact not well explained by the empiricist account that they derive from interactions with external objects. Rather, he contends, ideas of sensible qualities offer the strongest case for the nativist position—that a large range of our knowledge is inborn, not acquired through the senses. Yet, McGinn cautions, how this can be is deeply problematic; we have no good theories about how innate knowledge is possible. Innate knowledge is a mystery, though a fact. McGinn describes the traditional debate between empiricism and nativism; offers an array of arguments against empiricism; constructs an argument in favor of nativism; and considers the philosophical consequences of adopting the nativist position, discussing perception, the mind–body problem, the unconscious, metaphysics, and epistemology.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction

137 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 2015

About the author

Colin McGinn is a British philosopher currently working at the University of Miami. McGinn has also held major teaching positions at Oxford University and Rutgers University. He is best known for his work in the philosophy of mind, though he has written on topics across the breadth of modern philosophy. Chief among his works intended for a general audience is the intellectual memoir The Making of a Philosopher: My Journey Through Twentieth-Century Philosophy (2002).

Colin McGinn was born in Blackpool, England in 1950. He enrolled in Manchester University to study psychology. However, by the time he received his degree in psychology from Manchester in 1971 (by writing a thesis focusing on the ideas of Noam Chomsky), he wanted to study philosophy as a postgraduate. By 1972, McGinn was admitted into Oxford University's B.Litt postgraduate programme, in hopes of eventually gaining entrance into Oxford's postgraduate B.Phil. programme.

McGinn quickly made the transition from psychology to philosophy during his first term at Oxford. After working zealously to make the transition, he was soon admitted into the B.Phil programme under the recommendation of his advisor, Michael R. Ayers. Shortly after entering the philosophy programme, he won the John Locke Prize in 1972. By 1974, McGinn received the B.Phil degree from Oxford, writing a thesis under the supervision of P.F. Strawson, which focused on the semantics of Donald Davidson.

In 1974, McGinn took his first philosophy position at University College London. In January 1980, he spent two semesters at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) as a visiting professor. Then, shortly after declining a job at University of Southern California, he succeeded Gareth Evans as Wilde Reader at Oxford University. In 1988, shortly after a visiting term at City University of New York (CUNY), McGinn received a job offer from Rutgers University. He accepted the offer from Rutgers, joining ranks with, among others, Jerry Fodor in the philosophy department. McGinn stayed at Rutgers until 2006, when he accepted a job offer from University of Miami as full time professor.

Although McGinn has written dozens of articles in philosophical logic, metaphysics, and the philosophy of language, he is best known for his work in the philosophy of mind. In his 1989 article "Can We Solve the Mind-Body Problem?", McGinn speculates that the human mind is innately incapable of comprehending itself entirely, and that this incapacity spawns the puzzles of consciousness that have preoccupied Western philosophy since Descartes. Thus, McGinn's answer to the hard problem of consciousness is that humans cannot find the answer. This position has been nicknamed the "New Mysterianism". The Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds in a Material World (2000) is a non-technical exposition of McGinn's theory.

Outside of philosophy, McGinn has written a novel entitled The Space Trap (1992). He was also featured prominently as an interviewee in Jonathon Miller's Brief History of Disbelief, a documentary miniseries about atheism's history. He discussed the philosophy of belief as well as his own beliefs as an atheist.

Reviews

[Jason Gordon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quite a good introduction to nativism -- if not dated (more on that later). The book starts out with outlining three hypothesis about where ideas come from (externally, internally, or from nowhere). The third hypothesis is dismissed off the bat and the rest of the chapter is used to formulate the first hypothesis -- now known as the empiricist hypothesis. McGinn makes a distinction between two sorts of empiricism: external empiricism and internal empiricism. External empiricism holds that ideas derive from external causes themselves, while internal empiricism holds that ideas derive from the subjective impressions caused in us irrespective of their external causes. The purpose of this distinction is to show that some forms of empiricism are compatible with nativism. So for example it is logically possible to be an empiricist about ideas while being a nativist about impressions. Such empiricism is not McGinn's concern because true empiricism entails a rejection of nativism (for him anyway). This is a very weird rule as it leads to straw-manning the empiricist camp -- particularly Locke and Hume. Locke and Hume, if you read them carefully, could not escape the pull of nativism as McGinn himself acknowledges. It would have been nice of him to analyze these contradictions, instead of mentioning them, laughing at the superficial absurdity and placing it aside. Exploring these contradictions would have led to the conclusion that to be a good empiricist about core ideas/knowledge requires being a good nativist. I must admit that it will be interesting re-reading this section in conjunction with Fodor's Hume Variations (where Fodor argues that Hume is a Cartesian).

The second chapter outlines the problems of external empiricism. The most interesting criticism in this section is the one where McGinn draws a parallel between external empiricism and creationism: 'Empiricism is accordingly a kind of separate creation theory of human knowledge: just as the creationism Darwin argued against held that each species was created separately from nothing by God, so empiricism maintains that each person must create his or her conceptual scheme from scratch.' I note the criticism because it sets the stage for the argument that nativism is consonant with good biology.

The third chapter is divided into two parts. The first part outlines what nativism is, while the second part presents an argument for mysterianism. The first section of this chapter is where we are introduced to McGinn's writing at its finest. Here, McGinn draws parallels between core/innate ideas and anatomical development to demonstrate that the nativist position is consonant with functional/evolutionary biology. For McGinn, nativism about ideas is a position you would want to adopt to avoid methodological dualism when placing the mind under the lens of naturalistic inquiry. Other gems include an explanation of why nativism is such a difficult position to accept. However, the first section of this chapter is quite dated. Nativists are now incorporating their ideas with the new trends of biology outlined in what Massimo Pigliucci calls The Extended Synthesis. Given that he name drops Chomsky, who is one of the nativists doing such work, I find it curious that these new developments are ignored by McGinn.

The section on nativist mysternianism is an exercise in stating and arguing the obvious. I understand that in certain cases the obvious needs to be stated, but here I'm not sure why it does need to be stated. The people who are sensible will agree and the fundamentalist philosophers of science won't even read it.

The last chapter talks about the philosophical implications of nativism. This was probably the weakest chapter of them all.

For what it's worth this is a good introductory outline of the nativist position despite the serious problems outlined above.