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Essay / The theory of Tabula Rasa, its key points and an argument in its favor
The term Tabula Rasa suggests that we are born as a "blank slate", implying that we are born without any form of conscious knowledge, and that we obtain our information through sensory experience of the world. In this essay I will argue for "Tablua Rasa", giving what I think are the strongest arguments, but also comparing them to the counter-arguments and explaining why they are wrong. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Empiricism is the main argument of Tabula Rasa. John Locke, a popular empiricist, tells us that we are born without any innate knowledge or concepts, but only with the innate ability to reason. Locke says that knowledge and ideas can only be acquired through sensory experience of the world. For example, we cannot have the idea of color (i.e. red) until we perceive it, hence why a person blind from birth cannot imagine what is color. Locke also argues that if innate knowledge existed, then it would be universal and all humans would possess it, but there is no evidence of universal knowledge. Therefore, according to Locke, we can infer that innate knowledge does not exist. Another famous empiricist was David Hume. Hume agreed with Locke on the basis that innate knowledge does not exist and that we acquire all ideas through sensory experience, but he disagreed on the capacity of the mind to reason. Hume argues that our minds are completely empty and that we acquire all ideas and concepts, even the ability to reason, through sensory experience of the world. Hume even says that our ideas that “things fall apart” were discovered at some point in our lives. Many proponents of innateness disagree with Hume, arguing that we can conjure up new ideas that we never conceived, for example the unicorn. We have never known a unicorn, yet we still have the idea of one. Hume responds by explaining that we have external and internal impressions of the world. The outer impression would be simple ideas such as smell, shape and taste, and the inner ideas being a combination of all our simple ideas, i.e. a unicorn. Hume argues that although we have never experienced a unicorn itself, we have experienced all the aspects and qualities that make it up, such as the white color or the horse-like structure. Overall, Hume tells us that we can combine our ideas of what we have already experienced to produce more complex and vivid concepts and ideas, but the aspects that make up these developed ideas must have already been experienced, again times, why blind people can't imagine color. , and deaf people can't imagine the sound. The main argument against Tabula Rasa is the concept of inatism. Conceptual innatism holds that we are born with certain ideas and concepts. Plato supported this claim, and in his writings "Meno", Socrates uses one of Meno's uneducated slaves to demonstrate that a person without any mathematical training can derive simple geometry and abstract principles, apparently supporting the claim of innateness. Another argument made by many innatists is that of instinct, claiming that animal instincts, such as why birds fly south in winter and why a baby breastfeeds, are not formed by experience and exist In.