![](/uploads/1/2/5/6/125621138/396222702.jpg)
Στη δυτική φιλοσοφία, η έκφραση tabula rasa είναι συνδεδεμένη με το ρεύμα του εμπειρισμού. Πρώτη φορά εμφανίστηκε στη λατινική μετάφραση του έργου του αριστοτέλη 'περὶ ψυχῆς' (λατινικά: De Anima ). Αν και ο όρος είναι κεντρικός στο ' δοκίμιο για την ανθρώπινη νόηση ' (1690) του άγγλου εμπειριστή τζων λοκ. Tabula rasa (Latin: 'scraped tablet', though often translated 'blank slate') is the notion that individual human beings are born 'blank' (with no built-in mental content), and that their identity is defined entirely by events after birth. However, two uses of the term in modern usage are fundamentally incongruent.
Tabula rasa, (Latin: “scraped tablet”—i.e., “clean slate”) in (theory of knowledge) and, a supposed condition that attribute to the human before ideas have been imprinted on it by the reaction of the to the external world of objects.Comparison of the mind to a blank writing tablet occurs in ’s De anima (4th century bce; On the Soul), and the as well as the (students at the, the school founded by Aristotle) subsequently argued for an original state of mental blankness. Both the Aristotelians and the, however, emphasized those faculties of the mind or that, having been only potential or inactive before receiving ideas from the senses, respond to the ideas by an process and convert them into knowledge.A new and revolutionary emphasis on the tabula rasa occurred late in the 17th century, when the English empiricist, in (1689), argued for the mind’s initial resemblance to “white paper, void of all characters,” with “all the materials of reason and knowledge” derived from experience. Locke did not believe, however, that the mind is literally blank or empty prior to experience, and almost no other empiricist has taken such an extreme position. Locke himself acknowledged an innate power of “reflection” (awareness of one’s own ideas, sensations, emotions, and so on) as a means of exploiting the materials given by experience as well as a limited realm of (nonexperiential) knowledge, which he nevertheless regarded as “trifling” and essentially empy of content (e.g., “soul is soul” and “every man is an animal”). The 18th-century Scottish empiricist held similar views.
Suitably qualified notions of the tabula rasa remained influential in British and subsequently Anglo-American through the mid-20th century.
Marler, in, 2008 1.17.5 The Role of Innate Knowledge in Song DevelopmentThe view of the brain as a tabula rasa, a blank slate, all too long a basis for the thinking of learning theorists, is patently absurd. Whatever the task, every brain brings to bear a set of neurally based predispositions, each with its own evolutionary and experiential history, about how to proceed most efficiently in dealing with a given set of learning problems. Some of these predispositions are generic and pan-specific, and others are highly singular and even species specific, as with the innate processes that the human infant brings to bear on the development of speech behavior and language. Such is the case with birdsong.The young bird embarks on the process of developing song armed with innate predispositions about how best to proceed.
![Tabula Rasa Tabula Rasa](/uploads/1/2/5/6/125621138/401978744.jpg)
Some are generic, such as the widely shared tendency of songbirds to sing tonal sounds, evident even when they render imitations of sounds that were not originally strictly tonal ( Nowicki et al., 1992). Others are species specific. When sparrows learn to sing, they favor conspecific song. They do so on the basis of not a single ethological sign stimulus but a range of song features. Naive young birds, recently fledged, are highly discriminating with regard to the song stimuli they find most potent, as revealed by their tendency to give more begging calls to them in response to playback ( Nelson and Marler, 1993).
By playing experimentally modified songs to young birds, innate responsiveness has been demonstrated to a range of conspecific song attributes. It is clear from their behavior that young birds possess extensive foreknowledge about the song of their species before they embark on the process of learning to sing. The evidence indicates that they know much more than you might guess solely on the basis of the songs that a male produces when raised in social isolation. They behave as though auditory experience that matches their innate knowledge is required before that knowledge can be fully brought to bear on song development ( Marler, 1984).One way to view song learning is as a process of validation by use of a subset of innate knowledge, drawn from a more extensive library encoded in the brain that details the rules for the singing behavior for each species ( Marler and Nelson, 1992). This innate library is shared by all species members. The species-universal rules encoded there are sufficiently flexible to provide almost infinite opportunities for differences in individual behavior as a function of personal experience, and yet firm enough to restrict the development of excessive divergence between individuals.There are analogies with the rules for orderly musical composition that each human culture possesses, encompassing the potential for an infinite number of different melodies ( Jackendoff, 1994). The genetic underpinnings of the immune system provide another parallel, with the major histocompatibility complex providing enough alleles for a vast number of possible combinations.
The imposition of limitations is important because it ensures that, however individualistic a bird’s singing behavior may be, it still conforms closely enough to species-universal rules that obstacles to communication with others are minimized.In addition to predispositions evident in the sensory phase of song memorization, others are manifest during motor development. The emergence of some species-specific basics in the song syntax of early-deafened males has already been noted. A bird tricked into learning heterospecific songs may only reject them in late stages of plastic song as species-specific syntax emerges ( Marler and Peters, 1989). When young sparrows were tutored using experimentally modified songs with abnormally high syllable repetition rates, they imitated the songs but reorganized them in invented patterns that conformed more closely to the temporal organization of their normal species song ( Podos, 1996). Again there is great flexibility in these motor predispositions, but even though songs with abnormal temporal organization can be taught, there is an underlying tendency to conform to species-specific norms.
The individual and population differences that characterize learned birdsongs are all-pervasive, but they rarely confuse experienced bird watchers in identifying the species responsible. With their genetic fitness at stake, the birds themselves are hardly likely to be any less perceptive. Smith demonstrated that inhibition of the MAPK signaling pathway enables maintenance of the pluripotency of ESCs from not only all stems of mice tested but also of rats. Better still, blocking MAPK in the mouse embryo reveals that all cells of the internal mass can become pluripotent, and not just a fraction of them. These findings led to a reinterpretation of the nature of ESCs, rather as cells identical to those of the early epiblast than as an artifact of in vitro manipulation.
ESCs represent a homogeneous population when the MAP/ERK signaling pathway is suppressed. When this pathway is active, the SCs become heterogeneous in terms of gene expression, even if differentiation can be prevented by the LIF. The MAPK/ERK signaling pathway could disrupt the ground state and cause a transition state. In this critical state, the cells are ready to differentiate or return to the ground state. The ground state, or “ tabula rasa” according to Austin Smith, followed by an intermediate state of pluripotency before commitment begins 1.3.2.2 The ground state of embryonic stem cells in humansA. Smith hypothesized that the molecular network, which forms the basis of pluripotency, is conserved in mammals. Nevertheless, unlike those of mice, human ESCs rely on the MAPK signaling pathway to continue to proliferate.
This difference is probably due to the fact that currently available human ESCs come from a more advanced stage in development. Given the variable quality of the material available and the lack of tools enabling measurement of the state of maturation of the blastocyst, and in particular that of the epiblast, this research nevertheless remains difficult.ESCs must first come out of this fundamental state to generate cells capable of committing to differentiation. The primed state can be considered as the state following the transition phase, in which several lineages will commit to specific progenitors, hence the idea of successive stages of pluripotency. Nick Goddard, in, 2012 Nature vs nurtureConceptualizing development has led to several polarized approaches and the nature/nurture or genetics/environment debate has a long history.The nurture argument was perhaps first articulated by John Locke in the seventeenth century.
He contended that at birth, children were blank slates ( tabula rasa) and that what they became was dependent on learning and experience. Therefore, their environment determines their development.In contrast, Jean Jacques Rousseau supported the nature argument, believing that development was an invariant sequence of Nature's plan and that all a child required was guidance.This argument has been repeated in various forms, more recently as the environment versus genetics debate. While there has been no clear resolution to the debate, at best it is reductionist. More recent research has focused on the interaction of genes and environment, giving rise to behavioural genetics. Of interest here, is how the genetic developmental plan is dependent on environmental factors (both protective and adverse) for its expression.
Genes can also influence the environment through reactive, evocative and proactive interactions. Plotkin, in, 2001 4.1 Current and Future ResearchSince the early 1980s there has been a remarkable advance in understanding the emergence of intelligence in the child. The findings are relatively uniform in supporting the existence of discrete intelligences ( s) that appear to be largely innate cognitive systems (Hirschfeld and Gelman 1994). The notion of human intelligence as a tabula rasa has been shown to be wrong. Furthermore, there is a move towards relating such individual cognitive skills to more basic mechanisms, for example showing the connections between language, gesture, and manual skills (Wilson 1998).
This conceptual marriage between viewing intelligence as a collective of specific, innate, cognitive devices, and yet relating it to more basic mechanisms like information processing and memory mechanisms (Deacon 1997), is likely to be the dominant form of research into human intelligence in the coming decades.It should be noted that lineages maintain many of the features of ancestral species. For this reason, human intelligence certainly comprises evolutionarily older forms of intelligence, such as associative learning because of the continuing need to be sensitive to conserved cause–effect relations, as well as more newly evolved forms of intelligence such as numerical and linguistic competence. Krishnagopal Dharani, in, 2015 Are There Memory Traces at Birth? (Memory Traces sans Memories)As explained in the above sections, the dendritic pleats are formed when an incoming sensory stimulus reaches the dendrites and these dendritic pleats give rise to memory traces.
This means that when there are no sensory stimuli there will be no memory traces. We can naturally presume that there are no memory traces (or dendritic pleats) at birth, because there are no sensory inputs yet, at least not many. Or in other words, the mind is a tabula rasa – a blank sheet – at birth. But this presumption can be contested in the following discussion.It appears that some basic memory traces are formed even at birth, even without any sensory experience.
This can be better understood if we take animals as an example. There are many animal species that give birth to their offspring in a fully developed state.
Many reptiles and a few birds hatch their eggs and as soon as the hatchlings come out they lead independent lives without being dependent on their parents for food, movement or predation. These are called precocial species (in contrast to altricial species, which are born ‘helpless’ and depend on their parents for variable periods). A common example of precocial species is the domestic duck – as soon as they are born they open their eyes and run in search of food, they can swim and they can identify their food by smell, identify their enemies, etc. These are all survival instincts that are formed prior to sensory experience.
![Tabula rasa john locke Tabula rasa john locke](/uploads/1/2/5/6/125621138/796604236.jpg)
A human child is essentially altricial, and thus has limited ability to help itself soon after birth. However, even human babies may have a store of memory traces at birth, as evidenced by some strange scientific reports that babies in the womb have REM sleep and dreams even before birth, and that intrauterine babies can enjoy music in the womb, etc!How are these memory traces possible without sensory stimuli?
These phenomena may be explained by considering that dendritic pleats are formed before birth with the help of genes. It has been shown that protein synthesis is essential for the formation of dendritic pleats (see above), thus it can be presumed that the genetic mechanism has already directed certain proteins to create these dendritic pleats, but without the necessity for prior sensory experience. This means that our brains were already preloaded with memory traces – the mind was never a tabula rasa but is already ‘smeared’ by basic memory traces even before we are born. Is REM sleep in the womb evidence of the formation of such new dendritic pleats and the consolidation of memory taking place? Goodman, in, 2001 3 AssumptionsThere are two overlapping sets of assumptions that need to be examined in order to explain the (often unconscious) different approaches that anthropologists have taken to the study of education.
The first set relates to whether the anthropologist's primary interest is in the way education systems structure the behavior of individuals or in the way individuals construct education systems. This dichotomy is often described as one between a focus on ‘structure’ or ‘agency.’The second set of assumptions relate to the ideas—held both by the researcher and the society being researched, though these may not be the same—about how the process of socialization actually operates. For example, in the case of socializing children, is the child a passive object waiting to be molded by society, or an already formed individual which just needs an environment in which it can naturally develop, or a person intent on pursuing its own interests and on whom society has to impose its will (see Jahoda and Lewis 1988)? Sometimes these distinctions are discussed in terms of the child as tabula rasa, the Apollonian child (the child as naturally good), and the Dionysian child (the child as innately wilful).Approaches which concentrate on how socialization systems—particularly formal education systems—help to construct, disseminate, and legitimate a commonly understood and accepted ritual and symbolic language and system of meaning within a society—thereby structuring the experience of individuals who are often presented as tabula rasa—are often described as Durkheimian or functionalist.
Such analyses have been particularly influential in the study of large-scale modern societies where it is impossible for all the individuals to know each other personally. Formal education systems have played a major role in the formation of the modern nation state; they have often been the main means though which a common language has been disseminated and a national identity constructed in a population. Through their interaction with the economic and religious elements of the social system, they have helped to develop a national work ethic and inculcate national spiritual values. The study of education, therefore, has clearly been important in the work of anthropologists of ethnicity and nationalism such as Benedict Anderson and Ernest Gellner.Marxist theories have also focused on the way in which education practices produce social beings but rather than seeing these as aids to social integration they have concentrated on how they maintain and reproduce social difference.
Marxist and neoMarxist approaches to the study of education largely replaced functionalist and Durkheimian approaches in the 1970s with studies of how class and ethnic inequalities were reproduced through the education system in the USA and UK. These studies showed how an education system can be systematically designed—by means of ‘linguistic codes’ or a ‘hidden curricula’—to provide differential educational experiences for different class, ethnic, and gender groups in a society. While the structural effects of class reproduction could be examined quantitatively, the actual mechanisms of the ‘black box’ (as it came to be called) of education could be discerned only through intensive qualitative research undertaken by ethnographers.Social action theorists have focused on how the individual actors in the educational setting help to construct or resist its formal structures. Unlike Durkheimians and Marxists, they do not see individuals in an education system as passive but as active participants in a process of ‘cultural production’. Where active participation supports the integrative or the social reproductive functions of education, the analyses of social action theorists overlap with those of Durkheimians and Marxists. As Willis ( 1977) showed in his account of working-class youth in the UK, for example, the subcultures of resistance formed by these youths to the middle-class curriculum often only served to recreate the class structure of the wider society. Social action theorists, however, generally suggest that there is a range of reactions to the learning process in any educational setting as well as a range of teaching styles.
In describing these, they often draw, implicitly at least, on Max Weber's concept of ‘ideal types.’Understanding the differences between the positions outlined above is important in the discipline of anthropology as anthropologists are generally themselves the main research tools. The assumptions on which anthropologists base their research effect not only what they look at but also the types of questions they ask and the conclusions they are likely to draw. EDWARD GOLDSON. KELLY, in, 2008 Single-Gene DisordersThe effects of single-gene abnormalities on development and behavior can be as powerful clinically as the effects of chromosomal disorders, whether the single-gene abnormality results from gene deletion, base pair mutation, or other genetic mechanisms.
For example, Lesch-Nyhan syndrome results from a mutation in the gene HGPRT and is associated with a phenotype of severe mental retardation and self-injurious behavior. The study of Lesch-Nyhan syndrome led to the first known usage of the term behavioral phenotype, referring to the concept that genetic differences can be associated with specific phenotypes of behavior. 9 This statement was one of the earliest and most powerful medical refutations of the concept of tabula rasa that had been championed by behavioral psychology in the first half of the 20th century.The etiology of the fragile X syndrome, another single-gene disorder, was elucidated more recently. The clinical syndrome was described in 1943, but the specific underlying genetic mechanism, an extended repeat of three base pairs (“triplet repeat”) on the X chromosome, was not discovered until 1991.
The triplet repeat mechanism of genetic disease had never been described in any condition before then, but it is now known to underlie not only the fragile X syndrome but also Huntington disease, myotonic dystrophy, several spinocerebellar ataxia syndromes, and other disorders. 10It is now appreciated that the fragile X syndrome is the most common single-gene etiology for mental retardation and the most common heritable cause of mental retardation. Down syndrome is the most common genetic etiology but is rarely transmitted vertically, whereas the fragile X syndrome is less common overall but typically results when a mother has a slightly expanded triplet repeat, known as a “premutation,” that expands into a “full mutation” in gamete formation. The phenomenon of triplet repeat expansion manifests itself clinically in the greater phenotypic severity of patients with a full mutation in comparison with patients with a shorter premutation. Research continues on the molecular implications and clinical correlates of the premutation in the fragile X syndrome, as well as on the full range of clinical manifestations associated with the full mutation.
11Single-gene disorders can be diagnosed only through directed testing, triggered by clinical suspicion, and cannot be detected through nonspecific tests such as karyotyping. The specific tests for a single-gene disorders range from metabolic testing of urine or serum to gene sequencing and to other molecular diagnostic assessment, such as the test commonly used to determine triplet repeat length in the fragile X syndrome. For neurofibromatosis type 1 and tuberous sclerosis, as well as for many other single-gene disorders, diagnoses are typically made clinically, with DNA testing reserved for confirmatory testing, prenatal diagnosis, or other uncommon situations. In most cases other than the fragile X syndrome, the diagnostic testing for single-gene disorders is directed by a genetic or metabolic specialist. Friese, in, 2001 2 Trace and MemoryThe relation between knowledge, image, and memory, thus, has a long intellectual tradition with a variety of different constellations. Already in the ancient ‘art of memory’ of Simonides or Cicero, remembrances of things as well as of words and concepts are seen as being inscribed in memory through sites and images ( notae) (Yates 1966).
Kant revives this connection when he links cognition to the notae, and relates intuition ( Anschauung) and knowledge to such inscription and annotation in the memory. Freud ( 2000 1925) similarly conceptualizes the psychical apparatus as a mystic writing-pad which—like a tabula rasa (which can be seen as passive as in Locke, or as active as in Hegel)—receives impressions and perceptions as well as stores them like memory.This long, often rewritten and interrupted tradition reaches from Plato's ‘wax tablets,’ into which the things we remember imprint themselves ( Theiatet), to Freud's ‘magic pad’ and to Derrida's concept of the trace: imprints, traces left in memory by the things and images released into narration by language. Remembrance and trace, concept and knowledge form the key components of this long and familiar story. St Augustine already referred to the pictoriality of this constellation, since for him the representing—in the sense of ‘making present’—of the past occurs when the remembrance that is stored in memory appears to view, and—as he adds—if these images were missing, nothing could be named at all (Saint Augustine 1912). Obviously, it is not the things themselves that have made their imprint on memory, but their traces. When things past are remembered, what is retrieved from memory are not things themselves, but only words, which represent the images of these things which are imprinted on the mind like traces.
It was already Aristotle who noted that it is not the thing which is imprinted into the anima to be conserved in the archive of memory, but its trace. Traces mark the possibility of remembrance of the disparate connections between them and, thus, of cognition and knowledge (Gawoll 1986/87/87, 1989).Those traces are neither image nor absence of image, they are the possibility of image. Ferraris ( 1996) develops—with the concept of trace—a perspective that undermines the conventional dualism of aesthetics and image, on the one hand, and logos and concept, on the other, while maintaining the possibility of thinking their difference. Imagination touches upon remembrance and temporality through retention and protention, but it does so not as the product of time, but as its possibility instead. This view implies that perception and reception become the same: They open towards the senses and to the intellect in a single, though divided moment. The opposition between intuition, image, logos, and concept is thus dissolved without denying the differences between these aspects. Davey, in, 1998 (iv) UCS expectancy biasesIt was mentioned in Section 1.13.2.1.4 (i) that human subjects will emit a fear CR to the first presentation of a CS if they have previously been informed that the CS is to be followed by an aversive UCS.
Thus, a UCS “expectancy” can be generated simply through verbal transmission of the contingencies. Life consists of regular discussion and transmission of contingencies relevant to daily living, so it is not unreasonable to suppose that individuals will develop beliefs and expectancies about what will happen when they encounter a conditioning episode. As a result, when they enter a conditioning episode, individuals are not tabula rasa but will hold beliefs and expectancies about what is likely to happen.An example of the associative biases that influence the formation of CS–UCS associations can be found in covariation assessment studies. Studies of covariation have pointed out that assessing whether two stimuli covary appears to be influenced by both situational information (i.e., current information about the contingency) and prior expectations or beliefs about the covariation (e.g., Alloy & Tabachnik, 1984; Crocker, 1981).
![](/uploads/1/2/5/6/125621138/396222702.jpg)