ABSTRACT
Locke in his theory of Representative Perception says it is question able if we are born with any innate ideas. He believes such ideas are gradually fed to us entirely by our sense perception. What Locke is saying is that while we may not be born with innate ideas, we have the mechanism (sensory perception) to receive ideas. But surely that mechanism must have pre-existed at birth just as we are provided with all our senses but only to use them fully much later. In that sense we can conclude that sensory perception is innate. Another way to look at perception is in causal terms. Knowledge about perceived objects depends on causal inference, for example, we perceive fire from smoke or death from abject starvation. Grice offers two ways of looking at the Causal Theory of Perception. Firstly he says while appearance is ultimately the only guide to reality, what appears to be the case cannot be assumed to correspond with what is the case. Secondly perception is something to be judged primarily on its intrinsic merits and not merely as a part of a solution to a prior epistemological problem.'" In
Other words we cannot be said to be perceiving something when we are clearly influenced by some earlier experience - that according to Grice is pre-knowledge not perception.
