Epistemology is the study of the nature and scope of knowledge and justified belief. It analyzes the nature of knowledge and how it relates to similar notions such as truth, belief and justification.
It also deals with the means of production of knowledge, as well as skepticism about different knowledge claims. What is a rationalist person? If a person is rationalist, he believes in rationality. All humans are capable of rational thinking but most of us tend to believe in 'faith'. What is wrong with rationalism? Rationalism assumes that reason gives us all knowledge. Reason takes on a mysticism similar to that of the soul, whereby a body is unnecessary.
So it is part of the mind-body problem in Western philosophy, culture and thinking. Sensory knowledge is not perfect. What is moral empiricism? Moral empiricism: A rational learning approach to moral judgment. The main alternative, inspired by Chomskyan linguistics, suggests that moral distinctions derive from an innate moral grammar. Is the AIDS walk free? Empiricism is a theory that states that knowledge comes only or primarily from sensory experience. This theory emphasizes the role of the five senses in obtaining knowledge.
Empiricism rejects innate concepts or inborn knowledge. John Locke, one of the most famous empiricist stated that mind is a blank slate tabula rasa when we enter the world. According to this theory, it is only later, through the acquisition of experience that we gain knowledge and information. However, if knowledge comes only through experience, it is impossible for us to talk about something that we have not experienced.
This claim questions the validity of religious and ethical concepts; since these concepts cannot be observed or experienced, they were considered to be meaningless. Nevertheless, moderate empiricists accept that there are some phenomenon that cannot be explained through senses. John Lock was an eminent empiricist. Rationalism is a theory that states knowledge comes through reason, i. Experiences may trigger a process by which we bring this knowledge to consciousness, but these experiences do not provide us with the knowledge itself.
It has in some way been with us all along. According to some rationalists, we gained the knowledge in an earlier existence. According to others, God provided us with it at creation. Still others say it is part of our nature through natural selection. The more subjects included within the range of the thesis or the more controversial the claim to have knowledge in them, the more radical the form of rationalism.
Stronger and weaker understandings of warrant yield stronger and weaker versions of the thesis as well. Empiricists reject this thesis: Locke, for instance, dedicates the whole first book of the Essay to show that such knowlege, even if it existed, would be of little use to us. The third important thesis that is relevant to the distinction between rationalism and empiricism is the Innate Concept thesis. According to the Innate Concept thesis, some of our concepts are not gained from experience.
They are part of our rational nature in such a way that, while sense experiences may trigger a process by which they are brought to consciousness, experience does not provide the concepts or determine the information they contain. Some claim that the Innate Concept thesis is entailed by the Innate Knowledge Thesis; a particular instance of knowledge can only be innate if the concepts that are contained in the known proposition are also innate. Others, such as Carruthers, argue against this connection , pp.
The content and strength of the Innate Concept thesis varies with the concepts claimed to be innate. The more a concept seems removed from experience and the mental operations we can perform on experience the more plausibly it may be claimed to be innate.
Since we do not experience perfect triangles but do experience pains, our concept of the former is a more promising candidate for being innate than our concept of the latter.
To be a rationalist is to adopt at least one of them: either the Innate Knowledge thesis, regarding our presumed propositional innate knowledge, or the Innate Concept thesis, regarding our supposed innate knowledge of concepts.
Rationalists vary the strength of their view by adjusting their understanding of warrant. Some take warranted beliefs to be beyond even the slightest doubt and claim that intuition provide beliefs of this high epistemic status. Others interpret warrant more conservatively, say as belief beyond a reasonable doubt, and claim that intuition provide beliefs of that caliber.
Still another dimension of rationalism depends on how its proponents understand the connection between intuition, on the one hand, and truth, on the other. Some take intuition to be infallible, claiming that whatever we intuit must be true. Others allow for the possibility of false intuited propositions. Two other closely related theses are generally adopted by rationalists, although one can certainly be a rationalist without adopting either of them.
The first is that sense experience cannot provide what we gain from reason. How reason is superior needs explanation, and rationalists have offered different accounts. Another view, generally associated with Plato Republic ec , locates the superiority of a priori knowledge in the objects known.
What we know by reason alone, a Platonic form, say, is superior in an important metaphysical way, e. Most forms of rationalism involve notable commitments to other philosophical positions. One is a commitment to the denial of scepticism for at least some area of knowledge. If we claim to know some truths by intuition or deduction or to have some innate knowledge, we obviously reject scepticism with regard to those truths.
By contrast, empiricists reject the Innate Knowledge and Innate Concept theses. Insofar as we have knowledge in a subject, our knowledge is gained , not only triggered, by our experiences, be they sensorial or reflective. Experience is, thus, our only source of ideas. Moreover, they reject the corresponding version of the Superiority of Reason thesis. Since reason alone does not give us any knowledge, it certainly does not give us superior knowledge. Empiricists need not reject the Indispensability of Reason thesis, but most of them do.
The main characteristic of empiricism, however, is that it endorses a version of the following claim for some subject area:. To be clear, the Empiricism thesis does not entail that we have empirical knowledge. It entails that knowledge can only be gained, if at all , by experience. Empiricists may assert, as some do for some subjects, that the rationalists are correct to claim that experience cannot give us knowledge.
The conclusion they draw from this rationalist lesson is that we do not know at all. This is, indeed, Hume's position with regard to causation, which, he argues, is not actually known, but only presupposed to be holding true, in virtue of a particular habit of our minds.
We have stated the basic claims of rationalism and empiricism so that each is relative to a particular subject area. Rationalism and empiricism, so relativized, need not conflict. We can be rationalists in mathematics or a particular area of mathematics and empiricists in all or some of the physical sciences.
Rationalism and empiricism only conflict when formulated to cover the same subject. Then the debate, Rationalism vs. Empiricism, is joined. The fact that philosophers can be both rationalists and empiricists has implications for the classification schemes often employed in the history of philosophy, especially the one traditionally used to describe the Early Modern Period of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries leading up to Kant.
It is standard practice to group the philosophers of this period as either rationalists or empiricists and to suggest that those under one heading share a common agenda in opposition to those under the other. Such general classification schemes should only be adopted with great caution. The views of the individual philosophers are a lot more subtle and complex than the simple-minded classification suggests.
See Loeb and Kenny for important discussions of this point. Descartes and Locke have remarkably similar views on the nature of our ideas, even though Descartes takes many to be innate, while Locke ties them all to experience. Thus, Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz are mistakenly seen as applying a reason-centered epistemology to a common metaphysical agenda, with each trying to improve on the efforts of the one before, while Locke, Hume, and Reid are mistakenly seen as gradually rejecting those metaphysical claims, with each consciously trying to improve on the efforts of his predecessors.
One might claim, for example, that we can gain knowledge in a particular area by a form of Divine revelation or insight that is a product of neither reason nor sense experience. An important wrinkle for using this classification scheme in the history of philosophy is that it leaves out discussions of philosophical figures who did not focus their efforts on understanding whether innate knowledge is possible or even fruitful to have.
Philosophy in the early modern period, in particular, is a lot richer than this artificial, simplifying distinction makes it sound. This distinction, initially applied by Kant, is responsible for giving us a very restrictive philosophical canon, which does not take into account developments in the philosophy of emotions, philosophy of education, and even disputes in areas of philosophy considered more mainstream, like ethics and aesthetics.
Unless restricted to debates regarding the possibility of innate knowledge, this distinction is best left unused. The most interesting form of the debate occurs when we take the relevant subject to be truths about the external world, the world beyond our own minds.
A full-fledged rationalist with regard to our knowledge of the external world holds that some external world truths are and must be innate and that this knowledge is superior to any that sense experience could ever provide. The full-fledged empiricist about our knowledge of the external world replies that, when it comes to the nature of the world beyond our own minds, experience is our sole source of information. Reason might inform us of the relations among our ideas, but those ideas themselves can only be gained, and any truths about the external reality they represent can only be known, on the basis of experience.
This debate concerning our knowledge of the external world will generally be our main focus in what follows. Several rationalists e. Empiricists e. The debate raises the issue of metaphysics as an area of knowledge.
Kant puts the driving assumption clearly:. The debate also extends into ethics. Some moral objectivists e. Since traditionally this thesis was thought to be rejected by empiricists and adopted only by rationalists, it is useful to become more familiar with it.
In a very narrow sense, only rationalists seem to adopt it. However, the current consensus is that most empiricists e. We can, they agree, know by intuition that our concept of God includes our concept of omniscience. Just by examining the concepts, we can intellectually grasp that the one includes the other. Rationalists, such as Descartes, have claimed that we can know by intuition and deduction that God exists and created the world, that our mind and body are distinct substances, and that the angles of a triangle equal two right angles, where all of these claims are truths about an external reality independent of our thought.
Rationalists and empiricists alike claim that certainty is required for scientia which is a type of absolute knowledge of the necessary connections that would explain why certain things are a certain way and that certainty about the external world is beyond what empirical evidence can provide. Empiricists seem happy to then conclude that the type of knowledge of the external world that we can aquire does not have this high degree of certainty and is, thus, not scientia.
This is because we can never be sure our sensory impressions are not part of a dream or a massive, demon orchestrated, deception. A rationalist like Descartes of the Meditations , claims that only intuition can provide the certainty needed for such knowledge. This line of argument is one of the least compelling in the rationalist arsenal. First, the assumption that knowledge requires certainty comes at a heavy cost, as it rules out so much of what we commonly take ourselves to know.
Second, as many contemporary rationalists accept, intuition is not always a source of certain knowledge. The possibility of a deceiver gives us a reason to doubt our intuitions as well as our empirical beliefs. For all we know, a deceiver might cause us to intuit false propositions, just as one might cause us to have perceptions of nonexistent objects. They are infallible, as God guarantees their truth.
Leibniz, in New Essays , tells us the following:. For our purposes here, we can relate it to the latter, however: We have substantive knowledge about the external world in mathematics, and what we know in that area, we know to be necessarily true. Experience cannot warrant beliefs about what is necessarily the case. Hence, experience cannot be the source of our knowledge. The best explanation of our knowledge is that we gain it by intuition and deduction.
Leibniz mentions logic, metaphysics, and morals as other areas in which our knowledge similarly outstrips what experience can provide. Judgments in logic and metaphysics involve forms of necessity beyond what experience can support. Judgments in morals involve a form of obligation or value that lies beyond experience, which only informs us about what is the case rather than about what ought to be. The strength of this argument varies with its examples of purported knowledge.
Insofar as we focus on controversial claims in metaphysics, e. Taken with regard to other areas, however, the argument clearly has legs. We know a great deal of mathematics, and what we know, we know to be necessarily true. None of our experiences warrants a belief in such necessity, and we do not seem to base our knowledge on any experiences. The warrant that provides us with knowledge arises from an intellectual grasp of the propositions which is clearly part of our learning.
Similarly, we seem to have such moral knowledge as that, all other things being equal, it is wrong to break a promise and that pleasure is intrinsically good. No empirical lesson about how things are can warrant such knowledge of how they ought to be. Insofar as they maintain that our knowledge of necessary truths in mathematics or elsewhere by intuition and deduction is substantive knowledge of the external world, they owe us an account of this form of necessity.
Empiricism teaches that we should not try to know substantive truths about God and the soul from reason. Instead, an empiricist would recommend two projects, namely, constructive and critical.
Constructive project centers on commentaries of religious texts. Critical projects aim at the elimination of what is said to have been known by the metaphysicians. In fact, the elimination process is based on experience.
Thus, it can be said that empiricism relies more on experience than pure reason. Rationalism is a philosophical standpoint that believes that opinions and actions should be based on reason rather than on religious beliefs or emotions.
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