Are There Innate Ideas?

Plato thought we were born with knowledge that had to be recollected — the Meno dialogue has Socrates extract a geometric proof from an uneducated slave boy by careful questioning, as evidence. Descartes thought the idea of God and the basic axioms of mathematics were innate. Locke spent the first hundred pages of his Essay arguing they are not — the mind is a blank slate. Modern cognitive science has revived the question: language acquisition, basic numerical sense, certain moral intuitions look hard to explain without something like innate structure.