In any case. Tabula rasa. It's a fascinating notion, though one about which I'm insufficiently educated.
The Cliffs' notes summary of the thesis, as I posted in the baseball thread from Wikipedia, is as follows:
I am fascinated with the idea as laid out by Locke in his "Essay Concerning Human Understanding." Due to lack of time, I shall borrow a brief summary of the essay I found online, to jumpstart the discussion.Tabula rasa (Latin: scraped tablet or clean slate) refers to the epistemological thesis that individual human beings are born with no innate or built-in mental content, in a word, "blank", and that their entire resource of knowledge is built up gradually from their experiences and sensory perceptions of the outside world.
Proponents of tabula rasa favor "nurture" in the nature versus nurture debate. Modern genetic research finds that genes have a significant effect on personal characteristics. Some traits are more strongly influenced by experience, such as one's language, religion or some elements of sexual identity, and other traits are more strongly influenced by genes, such as IQ, alcoholism, or certain other elements of sexual identity.
What say you folks? Any merit to tabula rasa? And here's an interesting twist: is one's view of the tabula rasa notion modulated by one's status as an atheist, agnostic, or religious person? Are religious people more or less likely to receptive to the idea that we are "blank slates" at birth in any sense?Locke proposed to “enquire into the original certainty and extent of human knowledge.” In order to examine and investigate this more extensively, he began what is now known as his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Cranston, 1957). Locke begins this famous essay with a refutation of the doctrine that certain principles are innate. Instead, he suggests that certain principles have been thought to be innate only because men cannot remember when they first learned them. He believed that human beings are born in total ignorance, and that even our theoretical ideas of identity, quantity, and substance are derived from experience (Cranston, 1957). In other words, Locke thinks of the minds as a blank slate, or tabula rasa. Instead of knowledge being innate, Locke writes “all knowledge is founded on and ultimately derives itself from sense, or something analogous to it, which may be called sensation (Cranston, 1957).”
Sensation is the basis of Locke’s argument for knowledge not being innate, but another main point in his essay is ideas and perception. Locke believes that we not only have ideas in our mind, as is traditionally thought, but that we have ideas when we see, hear, smile, taste, or feel. Basically, Locke felt that ideas are interconnected with sensation. Locke defines an idea as “the object of the understanding, whether it is a notion, an entity, or an illusion.“ There are two types of ideas in Locke’s view: those ideas which are simple, that the mind receives passively and which are perceived immediately through either external or internal senses (thought), and complex ideas, which the mind produces by exercising its own powers.
Perception is an important part of the idea stemming from sensation model that Locke proposes. According to Locke, there are three different and distinct elements of perception: the observer, the idea, and the object the idea represents (Cranston, 1957). Locke says that knowledge is “nothing but the perception of the connection of and agreement or disagreement and repugnancy of any of our ideas.” He also believes that perception is a “species of understanding,” so that ideas are based upon perceptions and what we perceive is always an idea, distinct from a thing. Locke also believes that there are different types of knowledge, such as intuitive knowledge, demonstrative knowledge, and sensitive knowledge.
Locke proposes that one’s knowledge is sometimes intuitive, such as when the mind perceives the agreement or disagreement between ideas immediately without the influence or intervention of any other ideas. An interesting caveat of this is that Locke believed that people have intuitive knowledge of their own existence, “we perceive it so plainly… that it neither needs nor is capable of any proof (Cranston, 1957).” Knowledge can also be gained through the medium of other ideas that are proposed, which is considered demonstrative knowledge. The third type of knowledge that Locke proposes is called sensitive knowledge. This type of knowledge is that which is present before our senses at any given moment and at any given time (Cranston, 1957). Whatever falls short of these types of knowledge is not knowledge according to Locke, but in fact just faith or opinion, which seem to be inferior to knowledge and the understanding of ideas. Overall, Locke believes that our knowledge of the identity and diversity of ideas extends only as far as our ideas themselves; for our knowledge of their co-existence extends only a small amount due to the fact that knowledge of any necessary connection between primary and secondary qualities is unattainable.