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Empiricism vs rationalism essay
Empiricism vs rationalism essay
Between rationalism and empiricism who do you think is right and why
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Empiricists and rationalists have proposed opposing theories of the acquisition of knowledge, which appear unable to coexist. Each theory holds its own strengths but does not demonstrate a strong argument in itself to the questions, “Is knowledge truly possible?” and “How is true knowledge obtained?”. Immanual Kant successfully merged the two philosophies and provided a convincing argument with his theory of empirical relativism, or what some may call constructivism. His theory bridges the gap between rationalism and empiricism and proves that empiricists and rationalists each present a piece of the full puzzle. In order to truly understand Kant’s epistemology, one must first review and understand both empiricism and rationalism on an impartial basis.
Empiricism
Empiricists claim that genuine knowledge comes from experience: a posteriori knowledge. It can be difficult to argue against this point. When asked to explain even the most simple of objects, such as an apple, each description proposed is one that is associated with a previous experience. One might describe an apple to be red, round, hard and sweet. Each of these characteristics are descriptions of prior experiences. If a child who had never tasted anything sweet was asked to describe the flavor of an apple, the child wound be unable to. Without experiencing what ‘sweet’ is, it is not possible to understand it. This is true for any characteristic. If a child were to ask the meaning of the word round, an adequate description would require a explanation of something the child is familiar with in order to understand the relation. For example, “a ball is round”.
Hume draws upon the idea of building knowledge from experiences and introduces the concept of ca...
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...efs of empiricists have explained that people use experiences to understand the world around them. Meanwhile, rationalists have explained that through reason the fundamentals of knowledge can be understood. Kant’s epistemological philosophy has revolutionized philosophy as we know it today. Kant showed that the mind, through its innate categories, constructs our experience along a space-time principle. Therefore, Kant’s theory that true knowledge is obtained by reasoning based upon previous sense experiences seems to adequately address the problems evident in the controversy between rationalism and empiricism.
Works Cited
Gale, T. (2006). Immanual Kant. World of Sociology. Retrieved from http://www.bookrags.com/biography/immanuel-kant-soc/
Lawhead, W. (2011). The philosophical journey, an interactive approach, fifth edition. New York: McGraw Hill.
Regardless of the disagreement between both schools of philosophy that Rene Descartes and David Hume founded, Descartes’s rationalism and Hume’s empiricism set the tone for skepticism regarding knowledge. Rene Descartes rationalism served to form a solid foundation for true knowledge. Although Descartes reaches an illogical conclusion, his rationalism was meant to solve life’s problem by trusting and using the mind. David Hume’s empiricism serves to be the true blueprint on how humans experience the mind. Hume’s empiricism shows that the world only observes the world through their own sense and that there are no a priori truths. For that reason it became clearer that David Hume’s empiricism explains and demonstrates that it is the better way
The debate between rationalist and empiricist philosophers looks at the nature of knowledge, and specifically, how we gain this knowledge. Rationalists and empiricists take opposite, and sometimes mutually exclusive, views on how knowledge is obtained.
Inquiries regarding the nature and acquisition of knowledge, coupled with the monumental question of whether human beings are capable of accruing knowledge–the philosophical study of epistemology–has roots buried in antiquity: Genesis, to be exact. Great thinkers of the Western tradition have both accepted and rejected components of Old Testament lore; Platonic and Aristotelian philosophers have indeed battled for centuries over the way in which reality is understood. Following Aristotle’s teachings, the empiricists and Enlightenment thinkers regarded the processing of sense and experiential data as the surest way to unlock truth. Plato’s adherents, however, figures such as Immanuel Kant, deemed the human intellect a leaky and misguiding faculty, not quite efficient in comprehending truth. John Milton and Margaret Cavendish, the reigning theological epistemologists of the 17th century, pondered the nature of divine reality, the role of human rationality in understanding God’s master plan, and the means by which that plan is (and should be) grasped by the human race.
Another belief of empiricists is that ideas are only acquired through experience, and not through innate ideas. Empiricists reject the concept of innate knowledge because, for example, if children had this knowledge, why do they not show it? Like why does a baby need to learn to walk or talk, why does he or she not have this knowledge at birth?
Empiricism by nature is the belief that there is no knowledge without experience. How can one know what something tastes like if they have never tasted it? For example, would someone know that an apple is red if they have never actually have seen one? Someone can tell you an apple is red, but, if you have never seen one, can you really be sure? One must first understand what empiricism is before one can assess its validity. Empiricism can be defined as the view that experience, especially of the senses, is the only source of knowledge (Free Dictionary). The existence of empiricism will be understood through an examination of the attack on innate ideas and the origin of ideas, filling the 'Tabula Rasa'; the objection
Hume distinguishes two categories into which “all the objects of human reason or enquiry” may be placed into: Relations of Ideas and Matters of Fact (15). In regards to matters of fact, cause and effect seems to be the main principle involved. It is clear that when we have a fact, it must have been inferred...
Kant used understanding, the second faculty of the mind to explain causality. “As the understanding stands in need of categories for experience, reason contains in itself the source of ideas.”(76) The function of understanding is thinking, and thinking must use concepts to be an objective thought. The presence of this objective thought verifies its actuality. Therefore, causality, for Kant, was the way in which mind puts together experiences to understand them.
Rationalists would claim that knowledge comes from reason or ideas, while empiricists would answer that knowledge is derived from the senses or impressions. The difference between these two philosophical schools of thought, with respect to the distinction between ideas and impressions, can be examined in order to determine how these schools determine the source of knowledge. The distinguishing factor that determines the perspective on the foundation of knowledge is the concept of the divine.
The Transcendental Deductions of the pure concept of the understanding in Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, in its most general sense, explains how concepts relate a priori to objects in virtue of the fact that the power of knowing an object through representations is known as understanding. According to Kant, the foundation of all knowledge is the self, our own consciousness because without the self, experience is not possible. The purpose of this essay is to lay out Kant’s deduction of the pure concept of understanding and show how our concepts are not just empirical, but concepts a priori. We will walk through Kant’s argument and reasoning as he uncovers each layer of understanding, eventually leading up to the conclusion mentioned above.
Lawhead, William F. (2013). The Philosophical Journey, An Interactive Approach, 6th Ed. McGraw-Hill Education. New York .
Rationalism and empiricism have always been on opposite sides of the philosophic spectrum, Rene Descartes and David Hume are the best representative of each school of thought. Descartes’ rationalism posits that deduction, reason and thus innate ideas are the only way to get to true knowledge. Empiricism on the other hand, posits that by induction, and sense perception, we may find that there are in fact no innate ideas, but that truths must be carefully observed to be true.
Probably few philosophers influenced so decisively the development of epistemology as Kant. Without him it is not possible to describe the last two hundred years of the history of philosophy as well as contemporary philosophy in general. On the other "end of the line" one of the most influential contemporary American philosophers Richard Rorty proposes that we should abandon epistemology and Kantian picture of representation. In this paper I pose the question, whether Rorty is thorougly succesful in his abandomnent. I try to investigate the differences and similarities of Kantian and Rortyan thinking with the help of the epistemological notion of representationalism and of the antiepistemological notion of antirepresentationalism. If it is possible to find crucial overlapping areas of both thinking, then there arises a dilemma: either Kant himself is a "Rortyan", postepistemological thinker, and this would be a surprizing new idea about Kantian philosophy or Rorty succeeds not completely to overcome the structures of Kantian-epistemological thinking.
The importance of experience in education has always been the subject of philosophical debates. These debates between empiricists and rationalists have been going on for quite some time. Rationalists are of the view that knowledge acquired through senses is unreliable and learning can only be done through reasoning. On the other hand, empiricists believe knowledge is acquired through empirical impressions and concepts that cannot be learnt without being experienced (Evans, 1992, p. 35). This debate was however resolved by Kant who argues that both experience and rationality are necessary in learning. John Dewey was an American philosopher of the twentieth century and he also contributed to the debate on the learning process. In his book Experience and Education, Dewey (1938), he stated, “the belief that all genuine education comes about through experience does not mean that all experiences are genuinely or equally educative” (p. 25). This famous quote has been evaluated and referred to regularly in the debate on learning through experience.
Constructivism is a method that says students learn by building their schema by adding to their prior knowledge by the use of scaffolding (Rhinehart Neas). Because the students are basically teaching themselves new information, the teacher is there mainly for support and guidance for the students.
Among many teaching styles and learning theories, there is one that is becoming more popular, the constructivist theory. The constructivist theory focuses on the way a person learns, a constructivist believes that the person will learn better when he/she is actively engaged. The person acts or views objects and events in their environment, in the process, this person then understands and learns from the object or events(P. Johnson, 2004). When we encounter a certain experience in our life, we think back to other things that have occurred in our life and use that to tackle this experience. In a lot of cases, we are creators of our own knowledge. In a classroom, the constructivist theory encourages more hands-on assignments or real-world situations, such as, experiments in science and math real-world problem solving. A constructivist teacher constantly checks up on the student, asking them to reflect what they are learning from this activity. The teacher should be keeping track on how they approached similar situations and help them build on that. The students can actually learning how to learn in a well-planned classroom. Many people look at this learning style as a spiral, the student is constantly learning from each new experience and their ideas become more complex and develop stronger abilities to integrate this information(P. Johnson, 2004). An example of a constructivist classroom would be, the student is in science class and everyone is asking questions, although the teacher knows the answer, instead of just giving it to them, she attempts to get the students to think through their knowledge and try to come up with a logical answer. A problem with this method of learning is that people believe that it is excusing the role of...