Tabula rasa Tabula rasa

Tabula rasa (lat. "Clean board" ) is an expression that is used to denote the epistemological thesis that a separate human individual is born without innate or embedded mental content, that is, pure, its knowledge resource is fully built from experience and sensory perception of the external world .

Comparison of the mind with a wax-coated writing pad, which was used already in ancient Greece, appears in Aristotle’s work On the Soul ^[1] .

The ancient Romans in the figurative sense of the "tabula rasa" meant empty space, and the expression "to make something tabula rasa" - "to reduce something to nothing." In the literal sense - a clean, scraped board, that is, an empty board.

The idea that human intelligence at birth is a “clean board” is expressed, in particular, by Avicenna ^[2] .

The Latin phrase “tabula rasa” was widely known thanks to the English philosopher John Locke, who took the legacy of the preceding philosophical tradition and used this term to criticize the theory of innate ideas in his treatise “The Experience of the Human Mind” (1690) ^[