innate ideas

ideas that are held to be present in the mind prior to any experience. Innate ideas are usually taken to be those ideas that are so intuitively obvious as to require no proof, such as the axioms of geometry or the “contradiction principle” (X is not non-X) in logic. For René Descartes, who is often cited as the originator of the concept, innate ideas referred not so much to particular ideas as to the capacities and processes of rationality that allow such ideas to be immediately intuited as true. The notion of innate ideas later came under attack from John Locke and other thinkers in the empiricist tradition (see empiricism). Compare derived ideas.

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Psychology term of the day

March 9th 2025

moral masochism

in psychoanalytic theory, the unconscious need for punishment by authority figures caused by unconscious guilt arising from the repressed Oedipus complex. It is a nonsexual form of masochism.