1An absence of preconceived ideas or predetermined goals; a clean slate.

1. 1.1 The human mind, especially at birth, viewed as having no innate ideas.
   Example sentencesExamples

   • If not exactly a tabula rasa, I am comparatively ignorant of current scientific knowledge and epistemology.
   • Brains do not evolve and then function as a sort of tabula rasa, molded and formed by culture.
   • This objection notwithstanding, we seem to be somewhat intellectually path dependent, and not at all tabula rasa, at least not by the age of consent.
   • He is immediately answered by the female spectator who is obviously up-to-date with recent critical developments and the Lockean notion of tabula rasa.
   • They are all products of the false belief that we are born with empty minds, a tabula rasa.
   • Man is born a tabula rasa; he must learn and learn how to choose the ends that are proper for him, and the means which he must adopt to attain them.
   • The mind was a tabula rasa, asserted the British writer John Locke, a clean slate awaiting the imprint of sensory data.
   • In Marshall's novel the description of Avey's mind and body as a tabula rasa upon which a new history can be written clearly perpetuates the idea of the body as a site of unconstructed materiality upon which culture inscribes itself.
   • It was then, in the middle of the nineteenth century, that John Locke's tabula rasa, by then available for almost two centuries and well known to some, found a wide audience to instruct in the fundamentals of childhood.
   • But generally there is no contact prior the aggressive display… the victim is a tabula rasa.
   • The theory of tabula rasa that the mind is a blank tablet at birth, upon which all our experiences are then inscribed to make the story of our lives has been the subject of debate for centuries.
   • They championed the opposing view that the developing human brain is a tabula rasa.
   • Locke believed that we are born without innate knowledge, with an empty mind, a tabula rasa.
   • So, for Locke, the human mind was a tabula rasa, a blank slate upon which experience records itself as human knowledge.
   • If we presume that really young children are somehow just a tabula rasa, a blank slate that we can write on and form in our own image, then we're greatly misguided.
   • While we are all born with a certain genetic make-up, ultimately we are a society of learners, meaning that we are born tabula rasa and develop habits through imitation.
   • Between the utopian thinkers of the early 19th century and the modernist believers in the tabula rasa came an interlude dominated by those who thought piecemeal solutions possible.