If I illuminate the color red with a red light, I perceive black. If I illuminate the color red with sunlight, I perceive red. The Song lyric is what it is regardless of how one hears it. Nor is it a valid claim about the stimulus. However that is not the same as perceiving the color red differently in different contexts. For instance high schooler's still sing about being "wrapped up like a douche" rather than "revved up like a deuce" as the song says. The argument that experience is infallible is of course true we easily mistake one stimulus for a different stimulus. The article is grossly wrong with the color argument. What is being mistakenly argued is that the notion of the tabula rasa is the ability of the brain to learn, when in fact the tabula rasa is a statement of pre-existing knowledge in the brain. Nor is it claiming that experience is fool-proof in what it learns. It is not claiming knowledge pre-exists within the brain, which is what Chomsky claims about an innate language understanding existing in the brain. Locke's claim is that "the act of learning something" only happens from environmental experience. This is not the same as stating the brain "contains" the language prior to learning. It has largely been proven that the brain contains genetic predisposition to learn language. The ability to learn, and the act of learning something, the acquired knowledge, are all three fundamentally different. Secondly, this is not the same claim as Locke is making.Ĭhomsky's unproven claim that language pre-exists in the mind before environmental exposure for learning language is not the same as Locke's claim that knowledge is only acquired through experience. You are asserting something as being definitive which is itself not widely accepted. It's a very subtle difference, but to me, it makes it a lot easier to understand natural variance between individuals, developmental defects, transformation of species into other species, and evolution and individual development in general. Genes do not have a blueprint for a universal human nature rather, human nature is what follows when DNA interacts with other molecules in a developmental cascade that is typical for humans. It is not that evolution has produced a universal human nature, it's rather that evolution has resulted in self-replicating machines that gain their properties through the developmental process of the very specific set of molecules interacting with each other in a very specific way. I recently read a very good point regarding "universal human nature" and evolution: that assumption of universal human nature invites essentialist thinking, and scientifical thinking should not fall into that trap. I agree with what you said, just want to add something.
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