TABULA RASA ( A clash between nurture and nature )

JOHN LOCKE (1632-1704) 

What comes to  your  mind  when  you  hear  the  word “ Tabula Rasa”? Did you agree that humans doesn’t have knowledge since they was born? According to the dictionary, tabula rasa states that the mind in its hypothetical primary blank or empty state before receiving outside impressions. This philosopher stands firmly to his belief that human’s mind has no certain knowledge when they come out to this world. Based on him,“ No man’s knowledge can go beyond his experience”. A popular quotation that talks about how a man can gain knowledge from his proficiency. It was a well attended saying by a 17^th century Enlightenment thinker and famous empiricist of  his time. He was no other  than John Locke.

An English philosopher, physicist and a famous British empiricist named John Locke was born on August 29, 1632 at Wrington Somerset, England. He was widely known as one of  the most significant Enlightenment thinker of his time. Back then, his father  named also John  served as a lawyer and a military man during English civil war and his mother named Agnes Keene who is a housewife. His parents were both Puritans and he was raise that way. Also, his father’s allegiance to the English government gave him an opportunity to have an education. In 1647, he enrolled at Westminster School in London, where Locke earned the distinct honor of being named a King’s Scholar, a priviledge that went to only select number of boys and paved the way for Locke to attend Christ Church, Oxford in 1652. Long afflicted with delicate health, Locke died on October 28, 1704, in Essex, where he’d reside over the last decade of his life.

Locke’s works is connected to metaphysics which is the study of existence and epistemology which is the study of knowledge. He followed the ways and traditions of Francis Bacon and he had a contribution to the social contact theory. On the other hand, in his “Essay Concerning Human Understanding”  he advanced a theory as a blank page with knowledge and identity arised only from a certain experience. This theory is called Tabula rasa that refers to the epistemological idea that humans are born without any built in mental content and knowledge came from a definite events.

Tabula rasa is a Latin phrase often rendered as “blank slate”. He believed that a newborn man’s brain is like a “slates” which was used as a paper at his time, and nothing has yet been written on it. This theory favored the “nurture” side of the “nature versus nurture” debate when it comes to personality and emotional behavior. But according to my research, an infant’s brain had a transitional groundwork called “analysis by synthesis” which means the brain predicts motor movements that will required to create the sound of a speech. Also, based on what I have read, there are two kinds of knowledge; natural knowledge and experiential knowledge. The natural knowledge are acquired by a human since he was born.The mind who is responsible how we acts and reacts. However,experiential knowledge are things that we are about to learn. This knowledge came from our experience and it is not acquired by a person since he was born.

Therefore, John Locke’s tabula rasa theory states that the information of a man’s encephalon is complete at birth but receptive like a blank slate which knowledge was imprinted from experience. Also, people acquired knowledge from the objects that they can perceived. They started in simple ideas and then combined them into more coplex ones. In my own perception, humans are both influenced by the nature and nurture. We obtain some knowledge naturally and on the other hand, we can gather it by experience and to the people that sorrounds us. Tabula rasa is only a theory, which means it has not been proven yet and there’s no scientific basis on it. It’s up to us if we believe it or not.

References /Citations:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Locke

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tabula%20rasa

Essay Concerning Human Understanding : Hernnstein & Murray, 1994, p.311

http://www.age-of-the-sage.org/philosophy/john_locke_tabula_rasa.html

https://www.enotes.com/homework-help/one-who-most-associated-with-term-blank-slate-36767

http://mentalfloss.com/article/70105/10-amazing-facts-about-infant-brain