ABSTRACT
The philosophical and epistemological question of how our claims to knowledge can be justified is different from the psychological question how we in fact came to our knowledge. Some of it we may be born with, but this will only be innate knowledge if it could be justified, whether a priori, as above, or empirically, through experience, though innate empirical beliefs, whether true or not, are likely to be called instinctive, especially if they manifest themselves only in action rather than in conscious awareness. However, these philosophical and psychological questions have often been conflated, sometimes through confusion, but sometimes through the thought that the psychological question should properly replace the philosophical one, as in naturalized EPISTEMOLOGY (cf. NATURALISM). Also the way we acquire a belief, especially if we acquire it by reasoning or intuitive insight, may well coincide with the way we could justify it-but not always: we know that a belief we ‘acquire’ by its being innate may well be false (for more on this see INNATE). Kant, in particular, usually talks of our a priori, rather than innate knowledge, meaning knowledge which we cannot get by experience because only if we already have it can we make any sense of experience. Innate ideas or concepts are also often called a priori, and a proposition can be regarded as absolutely a priori if all the concepts in it are a priori e.g. ‘No proposition is both true and false’, and as relatively a priori if they are not, e.g. ‘Nothing can be simultaneously red and green all over’. ‘Relatively a priori’ could also apply to the everyday sense in which an empirical proposition is knowable independently of a given context, as when a detective says, ‘I haven’t yet found any clues, but I know a priori that money is a motive for murder’.
