Tabula rasa

Tabula rasa ; "blank slate" is the picture that individuals are born without built-in sapience.

Philosophy

In Western philosophy, a concept of tabula rasa can be traced back to a writings of Aristotle who writes in his treatise De Anima Περί Ψυχῆς, 'On the Soul' of the "unscribed tablet." In one of the more well-known passages of this treatise, he writes that:

Haven't we already disposed of the difficulty about interaction involving a common element, when we said that mind is in a sense potentially whatever is thinkable, though actually it is nothing until it has thought? What it thinks must be in it just as characters may be said to be on a writing-tablet on which as yet nothing stands written: this is precisely what happens with mind.

This notion was further evolved in Ancient Greek philosophy by the Stoic school. Stoic epistemology emphasizes that the mind starts blank, but acquires cognition as the outside world is impressed upon it. The doxographer Aetius summarizes this view as "When a man is born, the Stoics say, he has the commanding factor of his soul like a sheet of paper set up for writing upon." Diogenes Laërtius attributes a similar belief to the Stoic Zeno of Citium when he writes in Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers that:

Perception, again, is an impression reported on the mind, its have being appropriately borrowed from impressions on wax submission by a seal; and perception they divide into, comprehensible and incomprehensible: Comprehensible, which they so-called the criterion of facts, and which is produced by a real object, and is, therefore, at the same time conformable to that object; Incomprehensible, which has no report to all real object, or else, if it has any such(a) relation, does non correspond to it, being but a vague and indistinct representation.

In the 11th century, the theory of tabula rasa was developed more clearly by the Persian philosopher Avicenna Arabic: Ibn Sina. He argued that the "human intellect at birth resembled a tabula rasa, a pure potentiality that is actualized through education and comes to know." Thus, according to Avicenna, knowledge is attained through "empirical familiarity with objects in this world from which one abstracts universal concepts," which develops through a "syllogistic method of reasoning; observations lead to propositional statements, which when compounded lead to further abstract concepts." He further argued that the intellect itself "possesses levels of development from the static/material intellect al-'aql al-hayulani, that potentiality can acquire knowledge to the active intellect al-'aql al-fa‘il, the state of the human intellect at conjunction with the perfect character of knowledge."

In the 12th century, the Andalusian-Islamic philosopher and novelist, Ibn Tufail invited as Abubacer or Ebn Tophail in the West demonstrated the theory of tabula rasa as a thought experiment through his Arabic philosophical novel, Hayy ibn Yaqdhan, in which he depicts the development of the mind of a feral child "from a tabula rasa to that of an adult, in bracket up isolation from society" on a desert island, through experience alone.

The Latin translation of his philosophical novel, entitled Philosophus Autodidactus, published by Edward Pococke the Younger in 1671, had an influence on John Locke's formulation of tabula rasa in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.

In the 13th century, St. Thomas Aquinas brought the Aristotelian and Avicennian notions to the forefront of Christian thought. These notions sharply contrasted with the previously-held Platonic notions of the human mind as an entity that pre-existed somewhere in the heavens, ago being identified down to join a body here on Earth cf. Plato's Phaedo and Apology, as well as others. St. Bonaventure also 13th century was one of the fiercest intellectual opponents of Aquinas, offering some of the strongest arguments toward the Platonic idea of the mind.

Descartes, in his produce The Search for Truth by Natural Light, summarizes an empiricist view in which he uses the words table rase, in French; in the coming after or as a written of. English translation, this was rendered tabula rasa:

All that seems to me to explain itself very clearly if we compare the imagination of children to a tabula rasa on which our ideas, which resemble portraits of each object taken from nature, should depict themselves. The senses, the inclinations, our masters and our intelligence, are the various painters who have the power to direct or imposing to direct or imposing of executing this work; and amongst them, those who are least adapted to succeed in it, i.e. the imperfect senses, blind instinct, andnurses, are the first to mingle themselves with it. There finally comes the best of all, intelligence, and yet this is the still requisite for it to have an apprenticeship of several years, and to follow the example of its masters for long, previously daring to rectify a single one of their errors. In my opinion this is one of the principal causes of the difficulty we experience in attaining to true knowledge. For our senses really perceive that alone which is almost coarse and common; our natural instinct is entirely corrupted; and as to our masters, although there may no doubt be very perfect ones found amongst them, they yet cannot force our minds to accept their reasoning before our apprehension has examined it, for the accomplishment of this end pertains to it alone. But it is like a clever painter who might have been called upon to add the last touches on a bad picture sketched out by prentice hands, and who would probably have to employ all the rules of his art in correcting little by little number one a trait here, then a trait there, and finally be required to increase to it from his own hand all that was lacking, and who yet could not prevent great faults from remaining in it, because from the beginning the picture would have been badly conceived, the figures badly placed, and the proportions badly observed.

The advanced idea of the theory is attributed mostly to John Locke's expression of the idea in Essay Concerning Human Understanding, especially using the term "white paper" in Book II, Chap. I, 2. In Locke's philosophy, tabula rasa was the theory that at birth the human mind is a "blank slate" without rules for processing data, and that data is added and rules for processing are formed solely by one's sensory experiences. The notion is central to Lockean empiricism; it serves as the starting unit for Locke's subsequent explication in Book II of simple ideas and complex ideas.

As understood by Locke, tabula rasa meant that the mind of the individual was born blank, and it also emphasized the freedom of individuals to author their own ]

Tabula rasa also attaches in ]