Analysis Of John Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

John Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) is often cited as the foundational document of the "blank slate" view. Locke was criticizing René Descartes' claim of an innate idea of God universal to humanity. Locke's view was harshly criticized in his own time. Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury complained that by denying the possibility of any innate ideas, Locke "threw all order and virtue out of the world", leading to total moral relativism. Locke's was not the predominant view in the 19th century, which on the contrary tended to focus on "instinct". Leda Cosmides and John Tooby noted that William James (1842–1910) argued that humans have more instincts than animals, and that greater freedom of action is the result of having more psychological instincts, not fewer.[10]

The question of "innate ideas" or "instincts" were of some importance in the discussion of free will in moral philosophy. In …show more content…
Franz Boas's The Mind of Primitive Man (1911) established a program that would dominate American anthropology for the next fifteen years. In this study he established that in any given population, biology, language, material and symbolic culture, are autonomous; that each is an equally important dimension of human nature, but that no one of these dimensions is reducible to another.

The tool of twin studies was developed after World War I as an experimental setup intended to exclude all confounders based on inherited behavioral traits. Such studies are designed to decompose the variability of a given trait in a given population into a genetic and an environmental