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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 notion of tabula rasa ("clean slate" or "blank tablet") connotes a view of the mind as an originally blank or empty recorder (Locke used the words "white paper") on which experience leaves marks. This denies that humans have innate ideas .
The term standard social science model (SSSM) was first introduced by John Tooby and Leda Cosmides in the 1992 edited volume The Adapted Mind. [1] They used SSSM as a reference to social science philosophies related to the blank slate, relativism, social constructionism, and cultural determinism.
Evolutionary psychology proposes that the human psychology consists primarily of psychological adaptations, [2] which is opposed by the tabula rasa or blank slate model of human psychology. Early behaviourists, like B.F. Skinner , tended to the blank slate model and argued that innate behaviors and instincts were few, some behaviourists ...
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 ...
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Blank slate is the epistemological thesis that individual human beings are born with no built-in mental content. Blank slate may also refer to: "Blank Slate" (The Outer Limits), a 1999 television episode; The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker, a 2002 psychology book; Blank Slate, a 2005 manga written and illustrated by Aya Kanno