Tabula Rasa

Tabula rasa, Latin for blank slate, names John Locke's empiricist account of the mind in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689). Locke argues that the mind at birth is empty of ideas: there are no innate principles, no innate knowledge of God, no innate moral truths. All ideas come from one of two sources: sensation (the impressions of the external world) or reflection (the mind's awareness of its own operations).

The doctrine was developed against the rationalist tradition of innate ideas associated with Descartes and the seventeenth-century Cartesians. Leibniz wrote the New Essays on Human Understanding as a sustained reply, arguing that the mind has innate dispositional truths present as veins in marble. The tabula rasa framework shaped Hume's empiricism, Mill's psychology, and the broader Anglo-American tradition. The metaphor itself goes back to Aristotle's De Anima, but Locke gave it the canonical modern statement.

Locke's argument against innate ideas in Book I of the Essay proceeds by attacking what he takes to be the strongest candidates: principles like whatever is, is and parents, preserve your children. Locke holds that universal assent to such principles cannot be shown empirically, that even if it could it would not establish innateness, and that everything the doctrine of innate ideas was supposed to explain can be explained by experience together with the natural operations of the understanding.

The blank-slate metaphor has had significant uptake outside philosophy proper, particularly in twentieth-century psychology and social theory. The behaviorism of Watson and Skinner radicalized the empiricist commitment by treating the mind as essentially the pattern of conditioned responses experience produces. Recent work in cognitive science — Chomsky's universal grammar, evolutionary psychology more broadly — has revived elements of nativism and has pushed back against strong tabula rasa accounts of human cognition.