Is The Mind A Tabula Rasa?

The claim that the human mind starts 'tabula rasa' is associated with the empiricist school of epistemology. Empiricists, such as Locke and Hume, assert that all substantive knowledge of the world derives from, and is dependent upon, sense experience. For this reason, it follows that our initial epistemological condition is 'tabula rasa' i.e. a blank slate, or 'white paper' as Locke describes it. This means that our minds have no content or innate ideas contained within them, as nativists contend, but rather are furnished with ideas and knowledge through experience. Thus the mind in its initial state could be described as an empty cabinet which is gradually filled through knowledge acquired through our senses. There is no knowledge prior to or independent of experience. In this way, the mind starts without concepts such as 'white' and 'cold'. These are gained by sense impression of , for example, originally seeing and feeling snow which are then stored in the mind as identical but faded copies of the original sense data. Locke gives more than one reason for adopting the tabula rasa position, one of which is that no idea is universal i.e. known by all 'minds' including children and 'idiots'.. For instance, we all have different concepts of beauty - and children and those with mental disability may have no concept of the abstract concept of beauty - and from this may conclude that it is relative to, and acquired by, factors such as cultural conditioning. Thus, since it follows that for an idea to be innate it would have to be universal (for it to be shared by only some human minds would make the concept of innateness oxymoronic!) and because universality is the only way we can meaningfully assess the characteristic of an idea as innate, there are no innate ideas. Here, Locke is working with a two-fold definition of innate ideas: first, they must be consciously known from birth and second, they must include both propositions and concepts (for example, 2+2=4 is a proposition or truth claim but it also contains a variety of concepts, such as number sequences and equality). In this way, it is apparent that no idea fits Locke's universal criterion for innateness. Even if babies have innate concepts such as those of rudimentary mathematics (which is still debatable), it cannot be argued that propositions are universal and thus innate, since they have no knowledge of specific mathematical propositions such as 2 + 2 = 4. Therefore, by his own definition and logic, Locke can conclude that there is no truth that everyone, including children and 'idiots', agree upon. For this reason, there can be no innate ideas and therefore, the mind must begin its journey tabula rasa.