An Analysis of Concepts for the Origins of Our Knowledge Set Forth by Socrates and Locke
In Socrates' discussion with Meno, he puts forth the idea that knowledge is innate. He is of the opinion that each of us has all the knowledge of the world because we have been reborn over and over again. In each life, we have gained knowledge and now the only thing we have to do is recall that knowledge. To prove his point, he takes one of Meno's slaves and puts forth a mathematical problem that the boy must solve. He uses the slave boy because he was not educated and would not know how to solve the problem through methods learned in a school setting. Socrates, through a series of questions, gets the boy to arrive at the correct answer. Because he never actually taught the boy the basic mathematical principles that he would have needed to solve the problem, Socrates says that this proves that the boy must have had that knowledge inside of him all along.
I am going to be quite honest and say that I was not the least bit convinced by Socrates’ argument or example and I take great pleasure in poking holes in this theory. Firstly, the boy does not live in a box. Yes it is true that he did not have access to a formal education like Meno or Socrates did but evidently he had basic mathematical skills. He knows numbers and in his day to day tasks, it is very likely that he would have, at some point, been exposed to the concept of basic mathematical operations such as adding, subtracting, etc. Perhaps he was present during other intellectual conversations Meno and his associates were having and picked up a few things. Secondly, Socrates had to mine for that answer from the boy. In much of the conversation with the servant boy, he answers his own questions and, in my opinion, he did actually teach the boy the concepts needed to solve the problem via the trial and error method. The third flaw, and what I believe is the biggest, is Socrates’ explanation that the soul is immortal and is never destroyed but only reborn. He tells Meno that our souls have seen and learned everything that we could possibly learn in previous lives and so now the only thing left to do is recall that information. I’d like to draw your attention to the fact that if we learned information in previous lives it is not innate. Even if it is true that we can recall information from those previous cycles, the point still remains that we had to, at some point, learn it. Socrates’ explanations of the origins of knowledge, though clever and thought provoking, are fatally flawed and leave us still searching for the true answer to the question.
Locke takes the discussion in a completely different direction and opposes the idea that we are born with knowledge. He instead seeks to convince readers that we gain knowledge through our experiences. He implies that the belief that the universal agreement on certain things by all human beings does not prove that the knowledge of these things is innate simply because there is nothing that every human being will agree on. He suggests that the possibility of other sources of our intellect have not been properly explored. Locke’s argument is that we are like an empty flash drive at birth. There is nothing there and there will be nothing until we import information via the things we experience or are taught.
I happen to agree with Locke on this theory. If we ask members of our classroom a question and listen to their answers we will always hear multiple view-points and opinions because we have all experienced things differently. Even if we ask what color something is, we get different answers based on persons’ perceptions of colors. Babies are not born knowing what is right and what is wrong and therefore we teach them. The presence of vastly different cultures, values, opinions and norms is proof that we are not born with a set of rules or guidelines on how some things are done. Even if we were to analyze several different parts of the US or even New York and compare the way that things are done, we realise that there is a large amount of variation. In my opinion, if we all came with the same factory settings, our societies would not necessarily be exactly the same, but would be more alike.