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Roman tabula, or wax tablet, with stylus. Tabula rasa (/ ˈ t æ b j ə l ə ˈ r ɑː s ə,-z ə, ˈ r eɪ-/; Latin for "blank slate") is the idea of individuals being born empty of any built-in mental content, so that all knowledge comes from later perceptions or sensory experiences.
The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature is a best-selling 2002 book by the cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, in which the author makes a case against tabula rasa models in the social sciences, arguing that human behavior is substantially shaped by evolutionary psychological adaptations.
The view that humans acquire all or almost all their behavioral traits from "nurture" was termed tabula rasa ('blank tablet, slate') by John Locke in 1690. A blank slate view (sometimes termed blank-slatism) in human developmental psychology, which assumes that human behavioral traits develop almost exclusively from environmental influences ...
Locke's philosophy of mind is often cited as the origin of modern conceptions of personal identity and the psychology of self, figuring prominently in the work of later philosophers, such as Rousseau, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant. He postulated that, at birth, the mind was a blank slate, or tabula rasa.
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Historically, empiricism was associated with the "blank slate" concept (tabula rasa), according to which the human mind is "blank" at birth and develops its thoughts only through later experience. [5] Empiricism in the philosophy of science emphasizes evidence, especially as discovered in experiments.
Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker explored the limitations of such explanations in his 2002 book, The Blank Slate. He credited Brownmiller with documenting many historical injustices against women. But he cautioned that her pronouncements were rooted less in prehistory than in 20th-century ideological struggles.
Locke ends his attack upon innate ideas by suggesting that the mind is a tabula rasa or "blank slate", and that all ideas come from experience; all our knowledge is founded in sensory experience. Essentially, the same knowledge thought to be a priori by Leibniz is, according to Locke, the result of empirical knowledge, which has a lost origin ...