300 - Rationalism vs Empiricism - Summary and History Essay Example for Free

300 Rationalism vs Empiricism Summary and History set someWhat is reality re each(prenominal)y like? A current running through practically of the philosophical ideateing around the condemnation of Socrates and Plato was that thither is a difference between how the field appears and how it is. Our senses reveal one horizontal surface of reality but it is our top dogs that penetrate deeper. The world of appearances is a world in flux but underneath there must be a stable reality. For there is much that is unchanging. We recognise kinds of things badgers, daffodils, mountains and whilst members of these kinds be born, heighten and die, and differ from one another in ever so many ways, the kind-defining essence doesnt change. We see here the key rationalist appraisal that intimacy is a priori knowledge of necessary truths Plato said that kinds were defined by the transcendental forms. He presented a number of arguments for the existence of these things. Prior to our incarnation, our souls existed in the realm of forms where we learned roughly these essences. In our ter symmetricalnessrial state, we cannot recall what we know. Socrates considered himself a midwife to knowledge or else of a teacher, helping his interlocutors to unsay out what they dont know that they know.The example of Meno and the slave-boy shows this idea clearly. Like many philosophers, Plato was besides fascinated by mathematics. We be able to tap into a universe of truths that are non-sensible we do not see numbers and we do not see the perfect geometric forms. Once again, we see the difference between the powers of the brainiac and the powers of the senses. It was in the 17th century that the debate between the rationalists and the empiricists came to a head. Philosophers such as Descartes and Leibniz emphasised the power of campaign over the senses.Descartes argued that our senses were fallible and that we could not rule out the possibility of the demon deception hypothesis on the basis of sensory evidence alone. Descartes argued that he knew he existed, as a mind, on the basis of upbraiding alone when I think, I cannot spill to be aware of myself as existing as that judgement (cogito, ergo sum). Having proved that he exists, Descartes argued that God exists. Since God is no deceiver, he would not be possessed of accustomed us senses that systematically mis rent. solely let us not overemphasise the powers of the senses.Descartes argued that even with material things, it is dry land that exposes their essences. In his piece of wax reasoning, he argued that the senses merely reveal a succession of impressions it is reason that grasps the implicit in(p) and enduring substance as extended (and filled space). Plato and Descartes believed that we are born with concepts and knowledge. In Descartes case, there was a religious motive we are all born in the image of God. We discover more about the world primarily through metaphysical reflection . The philosopher Francis Bacon, an early empiricist, famously dismissed this rationalist approach to knowledge.He compared rationalists to spiders who spin mazy metaphysical systems out of their entrails. Empiricists get their hands dirty like bees rumpleing pollen, they gather knowledge about the world and only then reflect on it. Around the same metre as Bacon, many new discoveries were being made that shook the prevailing views of reality. The Earth was dethroned from its position at the centre of the universe by Copernicus. A new star (a supernova) was observed by Tycho Brahe in 1572 to that extent the heavens were supposed to be snipless and unchanging.Galileo discovered the moons of Jupiter again, everything clearly didnt revolve around the Earth. Later in the 17th century, scientist-philosophers such as Newton, Boyle, Gassendi and Huygens would revolutionise our understanding of reality. The original empiricist manifesto was written by put-on Locke. In his Essay Conc erning Human Understanding, he sought to show how a mind that was caisson at birth a tabula rasa or blank slate could come to be filled. His first targets were the innate concepts and knowledge (ideas) of the rationalists.There are no such things. There are no truths everyone agrees on. Many people fail to grasp the supposed metaphysical truths. Instead, our senses deliver ideas to us. We store them, abstract from them to form general ideas, and compound and miscellany them to generate new ideas. Like Lego bricks, we build the meagre sensory information into ever more complex structures. Even Leibniz fancy Locke was onto something here. He claimed that our minds were like blocks of marble that had to be carefully chiselled at to reveal the secluded structure (the innate truths).It is hard work and not everyone will end up well-chiselled. Hume took empiricism to its limit. Where Locke talked indifferently of ideas, Hume distinguished impressions and ideas. Impressions are the direct deliverances of the senses and are forceful and vivid in comparison to ideas, which are the copies our minds makes. (He also agreed with the Empiricist Berkeley that Lockes theory of general ideas was wrong. We do not abstract from particular ideas to a general idea but use a particular idea in a general way via a general name. )What about the precious necessary truths philosophy is supposed to study? Locke argued that once we have ideas in our mind, our mind will perceive the necessary connections between them e. g. that a triangle has internal angles that add to 180o? except where does the idea of necessity come from? Hume provided an answer. He distinguished statements into two categories those imparting relations of ideas (analyticalal) and those expressing matters of fact (synthetic). The analytic truths express mere definitions we simply are aware of an association between terms.The synthetic truths are the contingent truths. So what happens to interesting necessary truths, such as God exists or nothing exists without being caused to exist? Hume argued that if these werent analytic and they arent they arent necessary. We feel that they are necessary and this is all necessity is a psychological property. When we say that X caused Y, we think we have said something about the universe. We think we have seen an example of a law of nature (e. g. the irrigate in the bucket froze because it was cold exemplifies the law water freezes at 0oC).Science investigates these laws. Hume said that causation was all in the mind. We see one thing after another and when weve seen instances of a regularity enough, we develop the whim that one thing must be followed by the other. Hume, like Locke, emphasised how all we can be certain of are our impressions how the world seems. Scientists are really investigating how the world appears they can never be certain that the world really is the way it appears. So, empiricism seems to lead straight to scepticism about the immaterial world. Kant intented strongly to this.Science really is studying the external world and there really is an external world for it to investigate. Kant brought about a revolution in philosophy (he called it a Copernican revolution). He argued that the empiricists and rationalists were both proper(ip) and wrong. The Empiricists were right science requires the study of the world and the world is brought to us via the senses. The Rationalists were right our mind is not blank but contains structures that enable us to interpret the stream of data from the senses. We may liken the mind to a mould and the data to jelly one only has something structured by combining both.Or the mind is a computer with an operate system and the data is the input from the user. A computer with just an operating system is inert. A computer into which data is inputted but which has no operating system is just data it cannot be interpreted. Only when you combine both do you get something useful. Our minds contain the structures for space, time, objects and causation, for example. (In Kants terminology, space and time are the pure forms of intuition whereas the structures for objects and causation are pure concepts of the understanding.) This means that we experience a world of spatio-temporally hardened objects in which causation happens because this is how our minds make it appear. Does this mean that the world as such is all in the mind? Or is the mind somehow tuned to the structure of reality, so that our pre-programmed minds mirror the structures of reality? This is a very fractious question over which there is no agreement amongst experts. The Empiricist stricklement came back with a vengeance in the 20th century. Philosophers such as Bertrand Russell agreed with Hume that our knowledge begins with our knowledge of sense-data (classical empirical foundationalism).Armed with new discoveries in mathematics and logic, and backed by the successes of science, the logica l positivists argued that the only proper way to investigate the world was the scientific way. If I say p and p is synthetic and there is no objective, scientific way to support my claim that p, then my claim is meaningless. (This is the celebrated verification ruler). So, if it is true that there atoms, we should be able to image empirical sensory evidence of them. If it is true that nothing happens without being caused to happen, then we likewise need scientific evidence for this.We cannot discover whether it is true by pure reason. The Logical Positivist movement failed. There is much that seems meaningful that is not objectively verifiable by the senses, such as the occurrence of private sensations. The principle makes it impossible for general claims such as all mammals are warm-blooded to be true, as we cannot assure all of them. The very verification principle itself fails its own test The Logical Positivists responded by watering mastered their principle a meaningful claim is one we could gather some evidence for in principle and the principle itself is special exempt from this rule.But it was not enough. (* Then Quine argued that the fundamental division between analytic and synthetic sentences was incorrect. Analytic sentences cannot be false. But no sentence enjoys this privilege. As we learn more and more, truths we thought were beyond doubt are rejected. Once upon a time, we would have thought it analytic that no object can be in two places at once or that there is no hurrying velocity. Quantum physics and general relativity theory show that they are not true. Instead, we should have a wind vane of belief. At the centre are those sentences least likely to be revised our core beliefs.As we move out, we find those sentences that would be easier and easier to accept as false that would cause less and less disruption to the rest of what we believe. ) In the 1950s, Chomsky became famous for suggesting that we are not born as blank slates w hen it comes to language. We are born cunning the fundamental structures of human language. When we are young, we hear our mother tongue and use our knowledge of language to assemble up our language very quickly. (At 24 months, the average child understands 500-700 spoken communication at 36 months, kilobyte at 48 around 2500-3000 at 60 around 5000 words thats around 7 words a day between 3 and 6).More recently, studies have shown that children are born with brains structured to yield the world to behave in certain way. Very young children expect objects to persist over time not to disappear and reappear at two different places, for example. Is this a revival of rationalism? non according to many people. Rationalists argued that we had innate concepts and knowledge. By reflection, we can discover them and manipulate them to gain new knowledge. But our knowledge of language is altogether different. None of us can easily articulate the rules we follow in generating syntactically -correct English.(And certainly none of us at all can articulate the common structure rules to all human languages. ) Our brains are certainly pre-programmed, but only perhaps in the same way that a computer is pre-wired clearly something has to be there but nothing as advanced as software. So where are we today? No side is victorious this would be to grossly over-simplify the debate between the empiricists and the rationalists. We in spades have minds in some way ready to receive the world hardly surprising, perhaps, given the time it has taken for us to evolve.But when it comes to working out what is true? Few philosophers are rationalists in the old-fashioned way. There is no sharp division between metaphysics and science our study of reality cannot be do from the armchair alone. But our capacity to grasp abstract mathematical truths has always been difficult to explain from an empiricist perspective. We seem to have an access to a mathematical realm and a cognitive or intuiti ve access instead of a sensory one. You cant see numbers, after all, and it is not easy to say what we could see that would lead us to generate the ideas of numbers.