ABSTRACT
Is a newborn’s mind a blank slate? Or do we come into the world armed with knowledge? John Locke addressed these questions in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding. His answer was that all our knowledge is derived ultimately from the information we receive from the five senses. We come into this world knowing nothing whatsoever. Experience teaches us everything we know. This view is usually known as empiricism, in contrast to innatism (the theory that some of our knowl edge is inborn), and to rationalism (the contention that we can achieve knowledge of the world by the power of reason alone). There was lively debate about the origins of our knowledge when Locke was writing in the seventeenth century, and this has continued, in a somewhat altered form, to the present day.
