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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 ...
Some European philosophers saw the book's impact on psychology as comparable to Isaac Newton's impact upon science. Voltaire wrote: [12] Just as a skilled anatomist explains the workings of the human body, so does Locke's Essay on the Human Understanding give the natural history of consciousness.… So many philosophers having written the ...
In psychology, the principal laws of association are contiguity, repetition, attention, pleasure-pain, and similarity. The basic laws were formulated by Aristotle in approximately 300 B.C. and by John Locke in the seventeenth century. Both philosophers taught that the mind at birth is a blank slate and that all knowledge has to be acquired by ...
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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Many philosophers have advanced the theory that the human mind is a "blank slate," capable of being molded by our upbringing, which includes social experiences. In working with patients, Carl Jung observed the development of repeated themes in different people's artwork, dreams and fantasies.