Question

Both Plato and Descartes are considered to be ‘rationalists’ and both Locke and Berkeley are considered to be ‘empiricists’. Explain in your own words what the epistemological doctrines of ‘rationalism’ and ‘empiricism’ are, and how these doctrines are illustrated by the work of the four philosophers mentioned. In what ways are these four philosophers NOT representatives of the epistemological doctrines with which they are usually identified?

Answer 1

The dispute between rationalism and empiricism takes place within the domain of epistemology. The word epistemology is derived from the Greek words ‘episteme’ and ‘logos’, the first meaning science and the second signifying a theoretical and critical study of something. Thus linguistically it means the theoretical study of science. In the area of philosophy, epistemology refers to the branch of philosophy devoted to studying the nature,
sources and limits of knowledge.

The dispute between rationalism and empiricism concerns the extent to which we are dependent upon sense experience in our effort to gain knowledge. Most empiricists and rationalists are mentalists. They are interested in the mind and they postulate a mind. What distinguishes them is the kind of mind they postulate.

The term empiricism comes from the Greek term empeirikos and its Latin equivalent empiricus that roughly mean ‘experience.’ According to the empiricists, experience plays an important role in our knowledge. Clearly there are many kinds of experiences like dreams, imagination and emotions. However it is sensory experiencethat the empiricists regard as being extremely significant in thegaining of knowledge. True knowledge according to the
empiricists can only be derived from and validated through sensory experience. Knowledge is understood to be based on the observation of facts. Because they see all knowledge as coming through the senses, empiricists reject the idea that the mind at birth is already furnished with knowledge. The empiricists claim that things can only be known a posteriori, i.e. after or through experience. They also believe that the ideas that come into our minds get associated with each other through influences like similarity, contrast and contiguity.

John Locke (1632-1704): John Locke was British empiricist, his most famous work being An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). Locke worked on Essay for 17 years and it was finally published when Locke was almost 60 years old. He went on to revise it several times and it eventually went into 5 editions. Essay was in part a protest against Descartes’ philosophy. Locke attacked, not Descartes’ mind-body dualism, but his notion of innate
ideas. Locke said that humans are not born with innate ideas of any kind, whether they are moral, theological, logical or mathematical. He supposed the mind at birth to be like a white paper or tabula rasadevoid of all characters, without any ideas. He said that all knowledge comes from experience. It is important to note that it is Locke’s insistence that all knowledge is ultimately derived from sensory experience that allows him to be labelled as an empiricist. However while Locke opposed the concept of innate ideas, he did believe in innate operations or faculties of the mind including perception, thinking and memory. He saw the operations of the mind as part of human nature and thus given before any experience. Locke also said that while simple ideas came passively to the mind through sensory experience, complex ideas arise as a result of the active combination of simple ideas by the mind.

George Berkley (1685-1753):In his opposition to materialism (which leads to the dismissal of God as all the world is seen as matter)Berkley concluded that all that exists are our ideas or perceptions and that in the absence of perception, objects do not exist. Yet when an object is not perceived by an individual, the object continues to exist because God perceives it. In effect he wrote “to be is to be perceived.” This position is known as subjective idealism. Berkely is best remembered for his ardent support of empiricism and making plain that ideas arise from a mixture of sensations that are combined through repetitive associations. He for instance said that we become aware of distance as the result of sensations arising from the movement of our eyes as objects move away from us or towards us. It’s well known that as an object moves towards an observer, the eyes converge and then diverge as the object recedes. Berkeley stood in opposition to Descartes’ view that distance perception and some other ideas were innate. He stood in agreement with Locke that all ideas are a result of experience.

Rationalism comes from the Latin word ratio which means to reason, think or reckon. Rationalists do not see sensory information as an adequate basis for knowledge. In contrast to the empiricists, the Rationalists claim that there are significant ways in which our concepts and knowledge are gained independently of sense experience. Essentially, rationalists believe that (some) knowledge can be acquired through reason alone or, to put it another way, we can come to know about the world by thinking about it. For instance the truth or invalidity of certain statements like“We cannot both exist and not exist at the same time” can be determined by applying rules of logic. Granted we need experience with language to understand the terms in these sentences. However we do not need sensory experience in the here and now to judge the truth of these statements. The rationalists agree that sensory information is often an important first step in attaining knowledge, but argue that the mind must actively transform this information in some way before knowledge is attained. Rationalism emphasizes a priori knowledge (already existing knowledge) while empiricists emphasize a posteriori knowledge.

Rene Descartes (1596-1650) is traditionally considered a rationalist because he promoted reason as the means of attaining scientific knowledge. He did reserve a crucial role for experience and sense data in his scientific work. Nevertheless one encounters in his major works an emphasis on innate ideas, a priori truths and a preference for deduction. Descartes advocated that the mind is not made of matter but rather is immaterial. In conceptualising the mind, Descartes found that certain ideas in the mind were experienced with such clarity and distinctiveness that they needed to be accepted as true and yet they had no counterparts in his personal experience. Descartes thought that such ideas were innate, that is, they were natural components of the mind. Descartes included among the innate ideas those of God and the axioms of geometry. Descartes nevertheless reserved a role for experience in scientific procedures. To be sure, he was conservative in his views of experiments because he realized that an experiment is only a special form of observation that can be poorly conceived and lead to misinformation. Clarke (1982) points out the Descartes was quick to reject the results of experiments that defy reason. At the same time, Descartes commended the appropriateness of ordinary experience as a foundation for physical science. Descartes trusted ordinary experience more than experiments and believed that the foundation for science is grounded in
simple observations of natural events followed by critical reflection by the mind. The role of experience in Descartes’ view was to provide material for the mind to reflect upon.