Q&A: Molyneux’s Question
Molyneux’s Question
Question
John Locke presents in his book An Essay Concerning Human Understanding Molyneux’s question, which goes like this:
A person blind from birth knows how to distinguish between a cube and a sphere only by means of the sense of touch. A miracle happens and he can see again. The first thing he sees is those same cube and sphere that he had touched. Would he know how to say which is the sphere and which is the cube? The question is connected to whether our ideas are innate (the idea of a circle, for example), or whether one has to experience something in order to understand and know it.
John Locke and Molyneux argue that no, the person would not know how to say which is the sphere and which is the cube by means of sight alone. What do you think about this?
Thank you in advance.
Answer
I don’t know, but I don’t see a connection to the question of whether ideas are innate. This is a question about the synchronization between touch and sight.
Discussion on Answer
Correct.
It’s hard to distinguish between the claim that ideas are innate and the claim that we have an innate capacity to acquire them. I tend toward the second formulation. That capacity is intuition, or apprehension of ideas, which as I understand it is a cognitive faculty and not merely a thinking faculty.
It really is hard to distinguish. If so, the question that comes up for me in this context is: what does “a priori” mean? After all, we won’t be able to know anything without some initial observation of the world (as children, or as adults). True, once we’ve observed, say, a moral situation, we can judge it and say that it’s bad. The claim that it is bad is not derived from experience, but our ability to make that claim depends on being exposed, through experience, to some particular situation—for example, that someone stole something.
The solution that occurs to me is to say that the innate faculty, that is, intuition, is capable of operating a priori (“from the armchair”) only after we’ve been exposed to observations in the world related to the relevant domain (for example, things to which morality applies, or patterns/shapes to which geometry applies, and so on). We are exposed to a priori ideas through a posteriori observations first.
I’ve written in my books that a posteriori, in the accepted sense, does not include intellectual contemplation of ideas. If you want to include that too, then indeed everything is a posteriori.
Is the reason you don’t have an opinion that the question is empirical?
And also, I can see why there’s no connection to the question of the innateness of ideas. But since I already brought it up, a question I’ve been carrying around for quite some time is whether we really do have such innate ideas. I seem to remember that you wrote, regarding mathematical statements for example, that they are indeed a priori and innate, but in order for us to formulate them to ourselves in our minds we need to experience the world first (for example, to connect sticks or draw shapes). If that’s so, then in what sense are the ideas innate? We could say that we have a capacity to learn things, but not necessarily knowledge that already exists in us beforehand. I’d be glad for your explanation on this matter, and if there’s an article or book that clarifies it, I’d be happy for a reference.