tabula rasa: a standalone construct

Aristotle, in De anima (ca. 350 B.C.E.), gave an early and influential expression of the idea when he likened the intellect before it thinks to a writing tablet on which nothing yet stands written. Medieval Scholastic philosophers rendered that image in the Latin phrase tabula rasa, literally a scraped or erased tablet, and John Locke gave it its most influential modern statement in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), arguing that the mind is at first like white paper void of all characters and that every idea derives from experience through sensation and reflection. So framed, tabula rasa is the empiricist doctrine that human beings hold no innate ideas at birth and that all knowledge is built up from perception. As a factual cross-reference, the doctrine sits at the center of the long nature versus nurture debate, and Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate (2002) is a prominent modern critique that argues instead for substantial innate structure in the mind.[1][2][3]

Unit

A philosophical doctrine about the origin of ideas, holding the mind at birth to have no innate content

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Identified through textual and historical analysis of philosophical works; in the modern debate its empirical claims are tested by developmental, cognitive, and behavioral-genetic studies of what is innate versus learned