Empiricism of the mind as tabula rasa
Explanation
John Locke, in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), raised a question as simple as it was decisive: where do the ideas that populate our minds come from? His answer inaugurated the British empiricist tradition: at birth the mind is like a blank sheet of paper, a tabula rasa with no innate contents. All our mental life ultimately proceeds from experience.
Locke distinguishes two sources of experience: sensation (the data we receive from the senses: colours, sounds, tastes) and reflection (the mind's observation of its own operations: doubting, comparing, willing). From the combination, association and abstraction of these primitive materials, all ideas arise, from the most concrete to the most subtle, such as substance, number or cause.
This thesis had enormous political and educational implications. If we all start from the same blank slate, the differences between individuals and between cultures are products of different experiences, not of innate talents or pre-ordained hierarchies. Lockean empiricism became one of the ideological foundations of Enlightenment liberalism and of modern projects of universal education.
Successors such as David Hume pushed empiricism to sceptical conclusions: if we know only impressions and ideas, what evidence do we have of causality, of substance or even of the self? Hume came to hold that the self is just a bundle of perceptions in flux, a thesis that reappears two thousand years after the Buddha and continues to resonate in contemporary debates on the illusory nature of the self.
Radical empiricism was criticised from Kant (who showed that certain structures —space, time, causality— must precede experience for it to be possible) to Chomsky (who argued for the existence of innate structures in language). Evolutionary psychology and genomics have shown that the human brain is by no means a blank sheet, but an organ with notable biases and predispositions.
Despite these corrections, the Lockean legacy endures: the idea that the specific content of an individual mind depends crucially on the experiential history of the organism, and that careful observation of one's own mental operations is a legitimate route to knowledge. Much of cognitive psychology, machine learning and developmental neuroscience operates on this empiricist intuition.
Strengths
- Empirical basis that connects with subsequent experimental psychology.
- Phenomenologically apt critique of the substantial self: introspection does not find it.
- Compatible with Buddhist traditions and contemporary theories of the illusory self.
- Allows learning and culture to be explained without positing innate contents.
Main critiques
- Nativism (Chomsky, evolutionary psychology) shows that many structures are innate.
- Hume himself acknowledged that his theory could not account for the unity of the self.
- Underestimates the constitutive role of the subject (Kantian critique).
- Associationist reductionism is insufficient to explain the productivity of thought.