Tabula rasa
Etymology
Latin for “scraped tablet,” referring to a wax writing tablet smoothed clean for reuse. The image goes back to Aristotle, was developed by medieval thinkers, and became famous through John Locke’s 1689 argument that the mind at birth is “white paper, void of all characters.”
noun phrase · /TAB-yuh-luh RAH-suh/
The idea that the mind begins as a blank slate, with all knowledge and character written by experience.
What it names
Names one side of the oldest debate in psychology — how much of who we are is learned rather than inborn.
Example
The nature-versus-nurture debate is really an argument over how far the mind is a tabula rasa.
Related idea
Tabula rasa stresses nurture and experience; essentialism leans the other way, holding that things — and people — have fixed inner natures that shape what they become.