Leonard Peikoff said in Ideas in History: Objectivism’s Relation to the Past and the Future that instinct philosophically means innate ideas.
If instinct means innate ideas, does it means that animals have innate ideas?
Philosophy is the science studying the fundamental relationship between Man and existence. Trying to apply the concept of “instinct” to human beings implies that we have innate ideas.
Most animal species do not have ideas of any kind. They can have perceptions, associations, memories, feelings, and biologically determined behaviors, but not ideas.
The concept of “instinct” is useless and misleading when applied to humans. It is also of limited value when applied to other animals because it is a copout that shirks the task of achieving understanding of what mechanisms lead those animals to act as they do.
What do you have in mind when you say innate idea?
Philosophy and animals, two sets with no intersection.
It might be interesting to try to play “Concepts in a hat” with ‘animals’ and ‘philosophy’ as the concepts.
9 hours ago, gio said:
If instinct means innate ideas, does it means that animals have innate ideas?
The way to tackle this question is: as a biologist. E.g. what is an instinct, in manifestation? what is our hypothesis of the mechanism that gives rise to them? how are they distinguished from non-instinctual behaviors in non-humans?
On 2/4/2018 at 9:23 PM, Grames said:
Philosophy and animals, two sets with no intersection.
It might be interesting to try to play “Concepts in a hat” with ‘animals’ and ‘philosophy’ as the concepts.
And yet humans are animals too.
There is the tendency (probably a mistake) to exclude other animals from philosophical considerations even though it’s likely they perform many of the requisite actions of philosophy, e.g. accumulate knowledge about the reality of their environment, their place in it and accumulate a sense of identity. They may even have the advantage of not becoming distracted by the arbitrary.
If what we make vs what they make is any indication, then the man-made and other-animal-made are two sets that intersect in areas like agriculture, housing and tool making. These activities require thought, discipline and passing on experience, so the realm of philosophy may be more of a shared experience than we are willing to acknowledge.
When the topic of human instinct comes up, I think of this clip:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRXAphqI7aE
Is it instinct that kicks in at 14 months? Some combination of nature and nurture?
As opposed to:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAbAwgWyinQ
Nothing like the human “long childhood” for these critters. They hatch, and they “know” what they have to do, right away.