  The modern debate about innateness really begins with Locke’s polemic against innate principles and innate ideas in the opening chapters of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, which happens to also be the founding document of modern Empiricism. The point of the polemic is to delegitimize innateness as a candidate explanation of our knowledge and understanding, and to thereby leave the field to the Empiricist account that is developed in the rest of the Essay. The thrust of Locke’s arguments is two-fold: first, that the facts Nativists cite in favor of their views are not facts at all; second, that even if the facts were granted for the sake of argument, Empiricist accounts are preferable, because they are simpler. The simplicity resides in the fact that both parties accept a role for experience in knowledge acquisition. Empiricists presume there is only experience; Nativists think there is experience plus innate principles and ideas. If we can account for knowledge without innate ideas, principles, and so on, the Empiricist wins. Given the logic of the situation as Locke understands it, the whole polemical negative attack on innateness is almost beside the point. The real epistemological prize he is after can only be won by providing a satisfactory positive innateness-free account of how knowledge is produced from experience. But Locke is probably right in thinking that his Empiricist doctrines will be more convincing if there is no Nativist alternative to challenge them.