tabula rasa
tabula rasaAlso known as the blank-slate or white-paper thesis, a name for the radically empiricist view of the mind and knowledge which inspired so-called associationism in psychology. According to John Locke, the contents of the mind are written on it by experience as if it were white paper, a view comparable with modern behaviourist theories which try to account for mental processes as a product of external stimulus and behavioural response. Steven Pinker (The Blank Slate, 2002) is the latest in a line of evolutionary psychologists and sociobiologists who have claimed that sociology has adopted a ‘Standard Social Science Model’ according to which human minds are tabula rasa subject only to social construction. In fact, sociological arguments are far more sophisticated and complex on this point, and the only...
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