Tabula rasa is the theory that at birth the mind is blank and holds no knowledge, but when you are born you are considered to be the scribe due to experience and ideas. First mention of the idea of tabula rasa in Western society is implied rather than specifically written. Aristotle writes of the mind as a slate upon which nothing has been written, which greatly differs from Plato’s concept of the soul existing prior to arriving on the earth.
Thomas Aquinas picks up Aristotle’s tabula rasa theories in the 13th century, but it is not until the 17th century that the words tabula rasa are used by John Locke to express the idea that the mind when it enters the world is nothing and contains nothing. It is merely the blank slate upon which experience begins to “write” the person. As the person matures, he is able to begin to “write” himself, expressing the freedom of the individual to construct the soul. This freedom may be impaired by the way in which early experiences have shaped the person.
John Locke, an English philosopher, set out the principles of empiricism. He advanced the hypothesis that people learn primarily from external forces. Locke examined how people acquire ideas in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). He asserted that at birth the human mind is a blank slate, or tabula rasa, and empty of ideas. We acquire knowledge, he argued, from the information about the objects in the world that our senses bring to us. We begin with simple ideas and then combine them into more complex ones. However people believed to argue against it. people believed newborn babies were born with a brain that had nothing built-in so the newborn babies brain was thought of as a tabula rasa or blank slate. This theory purported that newborn babies start out knowing nothing and have to learn absolutely everything.
We know today