ABSTRACT
The idea that learning is not only active but creative has recently become popular. Its origins, however, can be traced back to Plato’s Meno and the view that in learning we discover what is already in us. Rousseau popularized the claim that learning is a process of active discovery, while Kant gave systematic expression to the claim that we can only know the world through the lens of pre-existing mental categories. However, none of these writers doubted our ability to distinguish objectively between truth and falsehood and, for them, discovery meant learning about objective truth. When Europeans discovered America, they found something that had existed beforehand, independently of themselves, they did not bring it into being.
