Meaning
A completely blank state; in philosophy and psychology, the notion that the mind begins empty and is written on entirely by experience. In everyday use it describes any fresh start or clean slate, as after a scandal, a bankruptcy, or a move to a new city. The phrase is formal-to-neutral, and its English currency owes much to debates about nature versus nurture. Bookish and formal, strongest in intellectual, psychological, and educational contexts. Regional use: General English (borrowed from Latin).
Origin
Latin for 'scraped tablet': tabula 'board, writing tablet' and rasa, 'smoothed, scraped', the past participle of radere 'to scrape', describing a wax tablet rubbed clean for reuse. The underlying metaphor is older: Aristotle compared the mind to an unwritten writing tablet in De Anima, and the idea passed through Stoic and medieval writers before becoming the Latin tag. English attestation dates from the 1530s (the OED's first citation, from 1535, is cited in the scholarly literature), but the phrase became famous through John Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), which argued against innate ideas - though Locke himself wrote of 'white paper, void of all characters' rather than using the Latin phrase.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- tabla rasa
- tabula rasas
- tabulae rasae
Usage Examples
- Enlightenment philosophers debated whether the infant mind is a tabula rasa or arrives equipped with innate ideas.
- After the failed merger, the board began its search for a new strategy from something close to tabula rasa.
- Wiping the laptop gave him a tabula rasa, so he reinstalled only the software he actually used.