the blank slate

we should never mock someone for not knowing something, because nobody is born with knowledge.

if you know something another person doesn’t, it only means you had a learning opportunity they haven’t had yet. saying “i can’t believe you didn’t know that” really amounts to saying “i can’t believe you didn’t live the same life i did.”

this idea follows from Locke’s strong empiricism. today most of us take it for granted that people learn through experience, but that wasn’t always the accepted view. Plato believed knowledge is a kind of recollection of things our souls knew before birth, and Descartes held that we are born with certain innate ideas, meaning ideas that exist in us without any experience.

Locke challenged this. he argued that if ideas were truly innate, everyone would share them, yet there are always people, such as young children and those with intellectual disabilities, who don’t hold those supposedly universal ideas. he added that even if some belief were found to be universal, that would only show it is common, not that it is inborn. instead, Locke proposed that the mind begins as a blank slate, like an empty page, and that experience is the pen that writes on it. everything we know begins with experience.

according to empiricism, all our ideas come from the environment around us. we don’t know things because of our race, gender, or biology, but because of what we’ve been exposed to and what we’ve learned. so laughing at someone for not knowing something is really just laughing at the life they’ve lived.