Tabula rasa is the doctrine that the human mind at birth contains no innate ideas or principles — a blank slate that experience writes on — most associated with John Locke's 1689 Essay Concerning Human Understanding.
tabula-rasa
The empiricist doctrine that the human mind at birth contains no innate ideas or principles, originating with Aristotle and given its canonical modern statement by Locke in 1689.
Definition
Tabula rasa (Latin for scraped tablet, the wax tablet ready to receive writing) is the doctrine that the human mind at birth contains no innate ideas or principles and that all knowledge derives from experience. The term enters the philosophical tradition through the Latin translation of Aristotle's De Anima III.4, where Aristotle compares the intellect to a writing tablet on which nothing is yet written. The doctrine became the foundational commitment of the empiricist tradition through John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) and continues to organize contemporary debates in psychology, linguistics, and the philosophy of mind.
The problem it answers
Why does the empiricist tradition begin where it does? The substantive philosophical question of how human cognition acquires its content depends on whether some content is present in the mind prior to experience. If the mind contains innate ideas (Platonist Forms recollected from a prior existence; Cartesian clear and distinct ideas implanted by God; Leibnizian dispositions waiting to be activated), then the empiricist program of grounding knowledge in experience is undermined from the start. If the mind is a blank slate, then experience is the only source of cognitive content.
Aristotle's origin
Aristotle's De Anima III.4 compares the intellect (nous) to a writing tablet on which nothing is actually written but on which writing can occur. The passage distinguishes the potential intellect (which can receive any intelligible form) from the actual intellect (which is in act when it actually grasps a form). The potential intellect is not a positive blank that contents fill; it is a capacity for receiving forms that has no actual content prior to receiving them.
The Aristotelian doctrine is not the empiricist tabula rasa in the later Lockean sense. Aristotle holds that the intellect actively abstracts universals from particulars (the active intellect of De Anima III.5), a position that requires positive cognitive powers the bare-slate metaphor cannot capture. The Aristotelian doctrine is closer to a moderate empiricism that grants the mind active powers while denying that it contains innate contents.
Locke's formulation
Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) Book I gives the canonical modern statement. Locke spends Book I attacking the doctrine of innate ideas (which he attributes to the Cartesians and to Lord Herbert of Cherbury). The arguments are several. (1) Children and idiots do not display the alleged innate ideas, so they cannot be universally present. (2) The alleged innate principles (the laws of logic, moral principles) are not self-evident in the way claimed; reasonable people dispute them. (3) Even if some ideas were innate, the doctrine would do no explanatory work that could not be done equally well by appeal to the natural capacities of the mind.
Book II develops the positive account. The mind has two sources of ideas: sensation (the outward senses report on the external world) and reflection (the mind observes its own operations). All ideas, simple and complex, derive from these two sources. The complex ideas are constructed by combination, comparison, and abstraction from the simple ideas given in sensation and reflection.
The Lockean account is more radical than the Aristotelian. Where Aristotle had granted the intellect active powers of abstraction, Locke treats the mind as passive in receiving simple ideas. Active operations enter only in the construction of complex ideas from simple constituents.
The Leibnizian critique
Leibniz's New Essays on Human Understanding (composed 1704, published posthumously 1765) is the major early modern response to Locke. Leibniz proposes a modified rationalism that grants Locke's point that no actual innate ideas are present at birth but holds that the mind contains innate dispositions or tendencies that prefigure the ideas that experience will later activate. Nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses — except the intellect itself, in the Leibnizian modification of the empiricist slogan.
The Leibnizian framework preserves something of the empiricist insight (experience is needed to activate any actual ideas) while preserving something of the rationalist insight (the structures of cognition are not products of experience but conditions of any possible experience). The framework anticipates Kant's transcendental synthesis a generation later.
Common confusions
Tabula rasa is not the doctrine that the mind is empty. The empiricist mind has innate capacities (for perception, for memory, for combination, for abstraction) even if it has no innate contents. The slate is blank with respect to what is written on it, not with respect to the slate itself.
Tabula rasa is not behaviorism. The behaviorist program of the early twentieth century (Watson, Skinner) attempted to explain all behavior as conditioned response to environmental stimuli, denying the role of internal mental states. The classical empiricist tabula rasa is compatible with rich internal mental states; what it denies is that those states have content prior to experience.
Tabula rasa is not refuted by contemporary cognitive science. The contemporary debates in linguistics (Chomsky's argument for an innate language faculty), in developmental psychology, and in evolutionary psychology have complicated the empiricist position, but the strong claim that none of the contemporary evidence supports the empiricist program is itself contested. The contemporary position is best described as a revision of the classical empiricist framework rather than its outright refutation.
Contemporary engagement
The doctrine continues to organize contemporary debate. Noam Chomsky's argument for an innate language faculty in Syntactic Structures (1957) and Cartesian Linguistics (1966) attacked the empiricist position from linguistics. Jerry Fodor's The Modularity of Mind (1983) extended the attack through cognitive science. Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate (2002) gave the major popular synthesis of the contemporary anti-empiricist position. Defenders of empiricist positions in contemporary work include the connectionist tradition in computational cognitive science and the recent work in radical empiricism through Jesse Prinz (The Conscious Brain, 2012) and others.
The contemporary developmental psychology literature on infant cognition (especially the work of Renee Baillargeon, Elizabeth Spelke, and Susan Carey) provides empirical substrate for these debates.
Place in the wiki
Tabula rasa is the foundational doctrine of the empiricist tradition's account of cognitive content and one of the most-discussed doctrines in the philosophy of mind. It is the principal source for the empiricist program of grounding knowledge in experience and the focal point of the continuing debate between empiricist and rationalist accounts of cognition.
Further reading
- Locke — the canonical modern formulator
- Aristotle — the originator of the De Anima III.4 wax-tablet image
- Empiricism — the tradition the doctrine grounds
- Belief Systems — the broader concept the empiricist account of cognitive acquisition helps articulate
- Cogito — the rationalist alternative that Locke opposed
- Essay Concerning Human Understanding — Locke's canonical work
The empiricist doctrine that the human mind at birth contains no innate ideas. The foundational commitment of the empiricist program from Aristotle through Locke to the contemporary debate.