by C. Spencer

Created on: May 30, 2008

Tabula rasa is the doctrine that the mind is devoid of mental content prior to experience. Among the early empiricists (those who believed that all knowledge was derived from experience), it was taken as a central thesis.

The doctrine may be motivated by the intuition that if a person had been raised in an environment other than the one she was actually raised in, the content of her mental states would be radically different. In other words, had one been nurtured differently, her beliefs, emotions, etc. would be different in quite important ways.

Recent theories in neurobiology and philosophy of mind challenge this intuition. There is significant evidence and convincing arguments in favor of the notion that the mind is pre-programmed in such a way that it can process various different types of information.

For example, some have argued that humans have a genetically endowed neurological structure, which allows us to recognize faces. Similarly, many people accept the notion that the mind has evolved in such a way that the human brain is now "pre-equipped," so to speak, to process verbal communication. One argument in favor of a view of this sort has been advanced by Noam Chomsky. Chomsky notes that it would surprising that human children would learn to grasp language and form grammatical sentences in such a strikingly short period of time with relatively little exposure to competent language users UNLESS it were the case that the mind was hardwired, so to speak, to process verbal language. Chomsky's view stands in stark contrast to the views of B.F. Skinner, who argued that language was entirely learned behavior (a view natural to those who favor the doctrine of tabula rasa).

The question to consider when contemplating whether the doctrine of tabula rasa is well-founded is this: Does acknowledgment of the fact that we have genetically endowed "hardware" of the aforementioned sort force us to admit that it is NOT the case that we are devoid of mental content prior to having experience?

I think the answer is "No."

Although I am writing as a lay person, it certainly seems possible that the brain is genetically endowed with a neurological structure that allows for the PROCESSING of information without it being the case that any such information is present prior to experience. If this is the case, then it seems there is some grounds for supposing that the doctrine of tabula rasa is well-founded.

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