Empiricist and Rationalist Approaches to Knowledge - Essay Example

Institution : xxxxxxxxxxx Title : Empiricist and Rationalist Approaches to Knowledge Tutor : xxxxxxxxxxx Course : xxxxxxxxxxx @2010 Introduction Empiricism is a knowledge theory that comes through a sense of experience. Empiricism stresses the role of evidence and experience, particularly sensory perception, in formation of ides, over the view of tradition or innate ideas. Rationalism refers to any view that appeal to reason as the source of justification or knowledge. It is a theory or method in which criterion of truth is not sensory but deductive and intellectual. The moderate rationalist position asserts that reason has priority over other means of attaining knowledge while a more extreme rationalist position asserts that reason is a distinctive course to knowledge. Rationalism vs. Empiricism Rationalism and empiricism started at the Age of Enlightenment which refers the period of guiding intellectual movement , known as The Enlightenment which supported reason as a way of developing an authoritative system of ethics, aesthetics, religion and government, which would permit human beings to acquire objective truth on the whole of actuality. The dispute between empiricism and rationalism concerns the degree to which individuals’ are dependent on sense of experience in the effort to attain knowledge. Rationalist assert that there are important ways through which our knowledge and concepts are attained independently of sense of experience while empiricists assert that sense experience acts as the definitive source of all knowledge and concepts ( Cottingham, 1998). Rationalists usually develop their approach to knowledge in two ways. Firstly, they claim that there are times when the content of our knowledge or concepts surpasses the information that experience acquired through sense can offer. Secondly, they construct explanations of the manner in which reason in one way or another offers the extra information about the natural world. According to Kenny, (2000), empiricists display complementary lines of thought. Firstly, they construct accounts of the way experience offers the information that rationalists quote. Secondly, empiricists attack the rationalists’ explanations of the way reason is a source of knowledge or concept. Rationalism as a school of thought started with Rene Descartes whose work started the Age of Reason, a duration that covers the whole of 17th century. Other significant thinkers of this period were Spinoza (1632-1677) and Leibniz (1646-1716). Basically, rationalists deemed that some knowledge may be attained via reason alone, implying that an individual can know the world through thinking about it. Thinking about the natural world logically allows an individual to structure an entire set or complete system of laws that give an explanation to everything. Rationalists believed that knowledge is to some extent like maths and that through thinking adequately about things, an individual can come to get knowledge of everything without having to really look at natural world. As a consequence, rationalists deemed in a priori knowledge, the knowledge that is attained before experience and does not depend on experience. During the Age of Reason, the work of Descartes affected other European thinkers including Rousseau, Paine and Voltaire. These thinkers challenged the notion of faith and religion as a means of understanding things and also believed that the reality might solely be reached via the application of reason. They asserted that church teachings and divine revelation were not legitimate sources of knowledge. Enlightenment philosophers also assaulted the authority of the monarchy and states to have superlative power over what was considered right or true (Benton, & Craib2001). Empiricism is not very much different from rationalism. Both empiricists and rationalists believe in the significance of reason. Both groups have scientists but empiricists deem that reason only is not adequate and that an individual needs to offer his reason with substance to work on which may only be attained through his senses. Empiricists believe that perception is that source of reason and all knowledge just functions on the evidence that perception offers. Thus, whereas rationalists believed that every knowledge was similar to maths and things could be known a priori or before experience, empiricists believed that every knowledge was more identical to science and that things could solely be known a posteriori implying through or after experience. Smith, (2003) argues that in order to understand the world, one is supposed to carry a sequence of experiments on it and then utilize reason to work out what the results obtained from the experiments mean. John Locke (1632- 1704) who was the initial British empiricist claimed that nothing may be known or understood before experience and that a baby was similar to a empty slate that required to be filled up with the information through experience. John Locke’s empiricist approach to knowledge is that a person is born without knowledge and one solely knows that things subsist if he experiences them himself. Locke asserts that knowledge is mental habits and defines knowledge as perception of the disagreement and agreement between ideas. He displays four means of apprehending the disagreement or agreement which are diversity or identity, relation, coexistence and real existence. They are not means of apprehending disagreement or agreement in itself, but they are means of knowing concerning ideas (Locke, 1997). Locke is overtly committed to subsistence of thoughts as objects of mind and as a means of knowledge. Ideas are the significant building block of Locke’s approach to knowledge. He asserts that ideas are objects of mind with which one thinks and through which one knows. Through diversity or identity Locke implies that one is able to perceive ideas through two ways, one identifies and then recognizes them, and one is capable to differentiate them from each other. Diversity is distinguishing that different ideas disagree with one another while identity is distinguishing that a thought concurs with itself. In regard to relation, Locke asserts that the mind may compare different ideas in numerous ways and attain disagreement or agreement in these comparisons. The disagreement or agreement of relations is restrained by one’s capability to ascertain intermediate thoughts with which to illustrate the agreement. This manner of apprehending disagreement or agreement offers the foundation of deduction. According to Carruthers, (2004) a deductive reasoning procedure precedes through getting pairwise concord between a series of steps that ultimately permits getting agreement amid the ending and starting points. Relation offers one a place in his system of knowing to validate his basic laws of inference. In regard to coexistence, Locke asserts that simple thoughts coexist within a subject and one’s thoughts of material comprise of collections of these coexisting complexes. By real existence Locke implies that one’s ideas are caused by exterior objects. Rene Descartes rationalist approach to knowledge is that in order to gain knowledge, people are supposed to study the nature reality and ask what it could imply to know about actuality. Descartes argue that in order to believe the truth, one must first know if his certainty itself is validated. In this perspective, Descartes provided a brief explanation of his personal experience with the correct approach to knowledge. He asserted that one must start by renouncing a belief that may be doubted, particularly the testimony of senses, then utilize the ideal certainty of one’s personal existence, which endures this doubt, as the basis for the demonstration of providential dependability of one’s senses generally. Descartes supposes that considerable knowledge of the natural world may be attained solely through using this epistemological procedure, the rationalism of relying on the mathematical model and eradicating the disruption of sensory information so as to pursue demonstrations of pure reason. In order to determine if our beliefs are justified, we must be capable to trace back to a belief, proposition or statement that can’t be doubted. So as to recognize a definitive principle of reality on which every other knowledge may be based, Descartes establishes scheme that defers our self assurance in whatever we have learnt, whatever our senses inform us and whatever we think is palpable (Janet, 2002). In order to verify if there is a thing we may know with assurance, we must first everything that we know. This radical doubt may not seem rational, and Descartes doesn’t imply that we actually must doubt everything, but he proposes that in order for individual to find out if there is a belief that can’t be doubted, he must temporarily act as if everything one knows is questionable and thus doubtful. Because experience through sense for instance, saying that the sugar tastes sweet or the suit is brown in colour is at times deceiving , Descartes affirms that a posteriori claim can not be used as the foundation for knowledge claims. One doesn’t know that what he experiences is true and is not certain of it and thus the best act to do is to doubt his senses. Similarly, one can’t be sure that he actually has a body or that his experience of the natural world in general may be trusted because one might be dreaming the entire thing. In addition, one cant even be certain that mathematical prepositions like 2+2=4or that a square usually has four sides are factual since some evil force may be deceiving on to think such a thing, when it is probable that even preposition that appear evident to us may themselves be actually false. But even if a demonic power deceives a person about all other beliefs, there is one belief that a person can’t be mistaken about, and that is what one is thinking. Descartes, (1998) argues that thinking confirms that one exists at least as thinking things or minds, in spite of whether one has a body or not. The body isn’t a fundamental portion of self since one can be doubtful of its subsistence in a manner that he can’t doubt the subsistence of the mind. Conclusion Empiricism is the notion that knowledge emerges from experience through the senses, and science flourishes via experiment and observation while rationalism as an theory to knowledge asserts that reason is the best way of attaining knowledge and exercise of reason, rather than authority, experience and spiritual revelation offers the principal foundation for knowledge. It can therefore be seen that Empiricists believed that perception is the only source of reason and knowledge functions on the proof that perception provides. In contrast, rationalists believe that all knowledge is attained after an experience and thus in order to understand the world one must conduct a series of experiment and use reason to analyse the results obtained. Bibliography Benton, T, & Craib, I, 2001, Philosophy of Social Science: The Philosophical Foundations of Social Thought, Palgrave Macmillan, New York. Smith, J, 2003, Social Science In Question, Sage < London. Locke, J, 1997, An essay on human understanding, Penguin Books, London. Descartes, R, 1998, Principles of philosophy, in Descartes: Selected philosophical writings, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Janet, B, 2002, Descartes’ method of doubt, Princeton University Press, Princeton. Carruthers, P, 2004, Human knowledge and Human nature, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Kenny, A, 2000, Rationalism, Empiricism and Idealism, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Cottingham, 1998, Rationalism, Paladin, London. Read More