In Plato’s Meno, Plato argues that the mathematical knowledge people have is innate and when they learn something they are merely remembering it. Locke argues that ideas, including math, are not innate. I agree with Locke. In this essay, I will argue that Locke succeeds in showing that knowledge of this kind is not innate by showing that it is false that reason (or as Socrates says asking questions) discovers these ideas, and that clear and distinct ideas need to be settled in the mind before conclusions can be assented to. In Meno, Plato says, by using the slave boy as an example, that knowledge is not something learned but rather something gained. He says that when Socrates was asking the boy questions about geometry he was not teaching…show more content… Locke says, “But how can these men think the use of reason necessary to discover principles that are supposed innate when reason (if we may believe them) is nothing else but the faculty of deducing unknown truths from principles or propositions that are already known? […] So that to make reason discover those truths thus imprinted, is to say, that the use of reason discovers to a man what he knew before: and if men have those innate impressed truths originally, and before the use of reason, and yet are always ignorant of them till they come to the use of reason, it is in effect to say, that men know and know them not at the same time.” (1.2.9) Here he is saying that believing you need a reason to discover what you already know is nonsensical because reasoning, or Plato's method of asking questions, is figuring out what you do not know based on what you already know. Because of this saying that reason is needed to figure out innate ideas is tantamount to saying that men knows things and don’t know them at the same time. Because how can an idea be innate in any meaningful sense of the word if you are not aware of it? Why do you need to use reason to recall something you already know? If it is known to you then it should be something you have already grasped, not something that requires reason and questioning before you can grasp. Because of this, the concept of recollecting innate knowledge is
