The blank slate

The metaphor of the tabula rasa or blank slate, generally attributed to the philosopher John Locke (1632–1704), represents the empiricist view of a human mind without innate ideas or programming, and moulded entirely from experience. The blank slate denied innate or ‘God-given’ talents, and placed all human beings equal at birth. For critics of empiricism, however, its egalitarian promise degenerated all to easily into tyranny. These comments made in 1924 by the founder of behaviorism, John B. Watson (cited by Pinker 2002: 19), for example, were offered as a critique of an unequal social order, but their overtones of social engineering have a chilling ring in the aftermath of twentieth-century totalitarianism:

‘Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I’ll guarantee you to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select – doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-in-chief, and yes, even beggarman and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, abilities, vocations and race of his ancestors.’