Understanding Empiricism and Rationalism

Perhaps one of the most important (and mind boggling) questions that philosophers have been trying to answer for centuries is regarding the origins of knowledge.

From where does knowledge begin? Has humanity been gifted this ‘knowledge’, or does its creation depend upon experience? Questions like these belong to the philosophical division of epistemology. Two main approaches to answering these questions — Empiricism and Rationalism, will be discussed in this blog.

Rationalists believe that knowledge is gained through the mental process of reason. On the other hand, empiricists believe that we gain knowledge through sense experience (touch, smell, sight, taste and hearing).

Even though these two approaches are similar in terms of their purpose, in that they both are concerned with how we gain the knowledge that we possess, their basic principle is in stark contrast, which makes the answers to each epistemological question completely different.

Empiricism

Believers of this faction claim that sense experience is the sole ultimate origin of all our knowledge. They say that our sense organs give us the necessary raw data about our surroundings and it is this perception that leads to the formation of our knowledge. The most staunch of the empiricists believe that sense perception is the most reliable source of knowledge, and also the sole factor that shapes all our beliefs.

Some of the most popular empiricists are John Locke, George Berkeley and David Hume. Although each of these prominent philosophers preached empiricism, they had very different opinions when it came to metaphysics.

Empiricists negated the existence of innate or a priori knowledge (Innate ideas are those ideas that we are born with). They claim that there is no kind of knowledge that can be acquired without first engaging in an experience. John Locke famously stated that our minds are nothing more than a blank state when we are born. It is only after we experience something that we gain knowledge. This is also known as the tabula rasa theory, with the Latin words tabula rasa meaning ‘clean slate’.

Induction, or the belief that very few things in life have a discoverable conclusive proof without any previous experience, is one of the main principles of empiricism. Deduction, when not dependent on empirical data, is acknowledged as impossible. For example, if a rock rolled into a river and made a splash with no one to see or hear it, how can we prove that rocks falling into a river produce a splashing sound?

It should be noted that empiricism is more concerned with the material world and real life experiences than the abstract non-physical world.

Rationalism

In stark contrast to the empiricists, rationalists claim that the origin of all knowledge is not sensory experience but pure reason. In support of their claim, they argue that we cannot possibly understand and categorize the sensory data that we derive from experience without first having some principles that we formulated using our capacity of reason. Thus, reason is the most reliable source of knowledge.

Die-hard rationalists claim that human knowledge, in its totality, is generated solely by innate ideas, and the beliefs generated using proper reasoning (along with their logical deductions).

The three main principles of rationalists are deduction, reason and innate ideas. Deduction refers to the application of concrete, established principles to arrive at a conclusion. A sound example of this is mathematics. Deduction, in no way, depends on sensory data. For example, to calculator the area of a rectangular park, all we need is the value of its length and breadth, and the knowledge of the formula a=l*b. Sensory experience is not involved or required in any way.

The innate idea theory states that humans are born with some ‘ready made’ or natural thoughts and moral principles, and knowledge of fundamental truths, which help us gain further knowledge. This is why we are capable of dealing with novel situations, and why there isn’t uniformity in the amount of ‘talent’ that people are ‘born’ with, regardless of their environment or exposure.

The third principle, reason, states that only the use of pure logic is required to arrive at any truth. Hence, it is reason, and not experience, that leads us to true conclusions. This reason draws from our innate ideas to deduce truths, without the aid of sensory data.

Some prominent philosophers that belonged to this faction are Plato, Baruch Spinoza, Rene Descartes and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. As with the popular empiricists, the views of these rationalists also differed a lot when it came to metaphysics. Also, what constituted as innate differed as per each. For Leibniz, it was all logical principles, for Descartes, it was God, infinity, perfection and self-existence. Plato believed that mathematical forms and moral principles are innate.

Also read — Understanding the concept of Epistemology