empiricism vs rationalism

[granpa]

cut and paste from a website that I cant link to because I am new.



The dispute between rationalism and empiricism concerns the extent to which we are dependent upon sense experience in our effort to gain knowledge. Rationalists claim that there are significant ways in which our concepts and knowledge are gained independently of sense experience. Empiricists claim that sense experience is the ultimate source of all our concepts and knowledge.

The dispute between rationalism and empiricism takes places within epistemology, the branch of philosophy devoted to studying the nature, sources and limits of knowledge. The defining questions of epistemology include the following.

1. What is the nature of propositional knowledge, knowledge that a particular proposition about the world is true?
Knowing a particular proposition requires both that we believe it and that it be true, but it also clearly requires something more, something that distinguishes knowledge from a lucky guess. Let's call this additional element ‘warrant’. A good deal of philosophical work has been invested in trying to determine the nature of this additional element.

2. How can we gain knowledge?
We can form true beliefs just by making some lucky guesses. How we can gain warranted beliefs is unclear. Moreover, to know the world, we must think about it, and it is not clear how we gain the concepts we use in thought or what assurance, if any, we have that the ways in which we divide up the world using our concepts correspond to divisions that actually exist.

The Intuition/Deduction Thesis: Some propositions in a particular subject area, S, are knowable by us by intuition alone; still others are knowable by being deduced from intuited propositions

Intuition is a form of rational insight. Intellectually grasping a proposition, we just "see" it to be true in such a way as to form a true, warranted belief in it

The Indispensability of Reason Thesis: The knowledge we gain in subject area, S, by intuition and deduction, as well as the ideas and instances of knowledge in S that are innate to us, could not have been gained by us through sense experience

Perhaps most of all, rationalist defenders of the Intuition/Deduction thesis owe us an account of what intuition is and how it provides warranted true beliefs about the external world. What is it to intuit a proposition and how does that act of intuition support a warranted belief?

 

[elcapitan]

The website is: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rationalism-empiricism/
(you make links by pressing the "insert link" button; it's the button with a picture of the earth on it)

 

[billwald]

>We can form true beliefs just by making some lucky guesses.

OK, but how do we verify our lucky guesses?

 

[TeddyKGB]

Perhaps most of all, rationalist defenders of the Intuition/Deduction thesis owe us an account of what intuition is and how it provides warranted true beliefs about the external world. What is it to intuit a proposition and how does that act of intuition support a warranted belief?

I suppose it is possible to construct a weak evolutionary argument. Evolution, of course, can produce an intuition that is "good enough" or "better than the next guy's" but never foolproof.

One could conclude from such an argument that intuition would be trustworthy more often than not, and that trustworthiness would be correlated with degree of immediate danger to the individual, but hard numbers would be difficult to come by.

 

[granpa]

I suppose it is possible to construct a weak evolutionary argument. Evolution, of course, can produce an intuition that is "good enough" or "better than the next guy's" but never foolproof.

One could conclude from such an argument that intuition would be trustworthy more often than not, and that trustworthiness would be correlated with degree of immediate danger to the individual, but hard numbers would be difficult to come by.

i think the idea is that intuition is a sense like sight and hearing, just not an empirical sense. all senses can be misleading but if we are careful this does not seem to prevent us from using them to make correct judgements about the external world. intuition should be no different.

of course, the question becomes what is the sense of intuition sensing? and how does it allow us to convert uncertain beliefs into certain knowledge?

 

[TeddyKGB]

i think the idea is that intuition is a sense like sight and hearing, just not an empirical sense. all senses can be misleading but if we are careful this does not seem to prevent us from using them to make correct judgements about the external world. intuition should be no different.

I can go along with this. Senses have evolved to take advantage of information produced by physical and chemical processes, each with a different modality. Intuition's modality is patterns in nature.

of course, the question becomes what is the sense of intuition sensing? and how does it allow us to convert uncertain beliefs into certain knowledge?

Intuition strikes me as an inductive process: assume that nature operates according to certain regularities, then make predictions therefrom.

I don't know whether anything can be properly characterized as "certain knowledge." It does seem, however, that induction is the only viable strategy; there are trillions of ways in which nature could be non-regular but only one in which it could be regular.

 

[granpa]

I can go along with this. Senses have evolved to take advantage of information produced by physical and chemical processes, each with a different modality. Intuition's modality is patterns in nature.

Intuition strikes me as an inductive process: assume that nature operates according to certain regularities, then make predictions therefrom.

I don't know whether anything can be properly characterized as "certain knowledge." It does seem, however, that induction is the only viable strategy; there are trillions of ways in which nature could be non-regular but only one in which it could be regular.

i tend to agree. but of course all our senses are involved in pattern recognition. we use our sight, for instance, to recognize objects and actions. i wonder if intuition is used in recognizing rules? thats just off the top of my head so dont hold me to that.

if by 'certain knowlegde' you mean absolutely certain/beyond ALL doubt then i would be forced to agree with you. i think one has to define 'certain knowledge' or just 'knowledge' as knowing beyond a reasonable doubt. in any event there seems to be a real psychological difference between believing and knowing (however it is defined). the question that this thread is about is 'what is the nature of that difference'?

an empiricist would presumably say that there is no such thing as 'knowing'. that everything is just a belief. a rationalist would say that that isnt true. that we can know and that doing so requires a psychological process that is non-empirical in nature. intuition or something similar to intuition is suggested a possibility.

it might make things clearer if i point out that i equate believing with 'fuzzy logic' and i equate 'knowing' with 'deductive logic'. in a fuzzy logic system a statement is neither true nor false nor in between. in stead there is a degree of belief in its truth. and the statement can be false even if one has total confidence in its truth.

in a deductive system the statement, if it is knowable, is either true or false.

 

[granpa]

from a thread discussing the same thing at sciforums:

Of 4 billion observed men, all of them were mortal, Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal
(at what point can you say "all men are mortal"? after observing 10? 10 billion?)
At what point have you compiled enough information to produce a reliable conclusion?

reply: how many circles do you have to observe to know that all circles are round? it seems to me that deducing that all men are mortal requires knowing the definition of 'man'. what makes a man a 'man'. what makes him tick.



but how do you know the definition? what if anything does that have to do with intuition.

 

[us38]

from a thread discussing the same thing at sciforums:

Of 4 billion observed men, all of them were mortal, Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal

From the observation of 4 billion people, it is rational to conclude that Socrates ws most likely mortal. The conclusion that he was mortal would most likely follow from some other test (such as, say, giving him hemlock tea and seeign if he dies).

(at what point can you say "all men are mortal"? after observing 10? 10 billion?)
At what point have you compiled enough information to produce a reliable conclusion?

That's mostly a statistics question. The maximum amount of uncertainty allowed determines how many sample must be taken to be under it.

reply: how many circles do you have to observe to know that all circles are round?

Technically, none. Circles are mathematical objects. Their roundness follows from their definition.

 

[granpa]

you just rephrased exactly what i just said. but you missed my point entirely. obviously we can always say whether it is probable or not. the question is when can we say for certain that all men are mortal? that requires something more. it seems to me that if we knew the definition of 'man' then we could say whether he is mortal or not. just as if we know the definition of 'circle' then we can say whether it is round or not.

we need to know what makes a man a 'man'. not just any one individual man. but all of them. what makes men in general 'men'?

this thread is specifically about the difference between knowing and believing. now i dont believe that all doubt can ever be removed form anything but if we limit ourselves to the realm of reasonable doubts then we can still speak of knowing beyond a doubt. of course, some people believe that everything is just a belief. that nothing can ever be known. if that is what you believe then you have nothing to contribute to this thread.

 

[granpa]

Rationalism - Religion-wiki

In epistemology and in its modern sense, rationalism is any view appealing to reason (Logos) as the source of the justification required to be able to rightly say that a fact is "known" to be true beyond a reasonable doubt. At issue is the fundamental source of human knowledge, and the proper techniques for verifying what we think we know (see Epistemology). Rationalism should not be confused with rationalization.

Rationalism is often incorrectly contrasted with empiricism. Taken very broadly these views are not mutually exclusive, since a philosopher can be both rationalist and empiricist.[1] The empiricist view holds that beliefs are only justified if they come to us through experience, either through the external senses or through such inner sensations as pain and gratification. But empiricism does not claim that those beliefs are known beyond a reasonable doubt and therefore does not conflict with rationalism. The distinction between rationalists and empiricists was drawn at a later period, and would not have been recognized by the philosophers involved.

Empiricism is certainly not wrong but, without rationalism, it is a shallow and incomplete world view. For example, in the purely empirical world view, a person is "just a pile of atoms" and it is, therefore, not morally wrong to use, abuse, or manipulate that "pile of atoms" to one's own ends. On the surface of it, this almost seems reasonable. After all, we are indeed made entirely of atoms (or some other units that can be modeled mathematically). It fails, however, to take into account the complex emergent phenomena that make a human being so much more than "just atoms". Atoms don't have thoughts, feelings, hopes, dreams, or aspirations but people do. These emergent phenomena may not be empirically observable but they are immediately perceptible to intuition. (Just as one can "hear" things that cannot be "seen").

Clearly, being "made of" something is not the same as "being" something. But what does it mean to "be" something? In the purely empirical world view names are just arbitrary labels (and morals are just arbitrary and ever changing social mores). Empirically, a cat is not a cat because it is a cat but because everyone agrees to call it a cat and if everyone called a certain dog a cat then that dog would be a cat. This is confusion.

Intuition is simply the brain using induction to determine the plausibility of certain possibilities. There is nothing magical about it. Intuition can't tell you whether a given idea is true or not, but if used properly, it does tell you whether that idea is reasonable or not. Occam's razor states that the most reasonable possibility tends to be the correct one. This is an important principle in understanding Russell's teapot and the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Lets look at a classic case of intuition: the feeling that something dangerous is hiding behind the shower curtain. We have all felt it. This would seem to be a perfect case of our intuition going completely nuts and giving us a ridiculous feeling that we know cant be right. But is it really?

People do indeed break into other people homes and rob them every day. If you were to come home while they were doing so they might quickly try to hide somewhere. The first places someone would think to try to hide would be under the bed or in the shower. A person who robs other people and then tries to hide is undoubtedly an irrational and therefore dangerous and unpredictable person.

So the possibility of a dangerous person hiding behind the shower curtain, though extremely unlikely, is nevertheless real. The consequences if it happened could be horrific therefore no matter how unlikely it is it is still a real danger that should be taken seriously.

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator divides people into 2 groups according to their perceiving functions. "Sensing" types corresponding to empiricists and "Intuition" types corresponding to rationalists.

 

[WisdomTree]

Scepticism for the win!

 

[Omnia sunt communia]

I don't really identify with either empiricism nor rationalism, though I'd claim that sensual impressions and mental abstractions are both necessary to produce knowledge. But I would add something that rationalists and empiricists tend to miss, that knowledge is always the result of social and practical activity.

Rationalists assume that reason itself can tell us something about the world, it can not. Not even the most sophisticated logic can tell us anything about how our statements correspond to the world. It's just about the relations between statements within the logical system.

On the other hand empiricism sees the world as a collection of unconnected appearances, ignores the role of theory in actively organizing and critically reorganizing the data provided by such appearances, and fails to identify theory's function as the attempt to represent in thought the essential relations generating the appearances.

I identify as a critical realist. I believe that the world exist independently of our perceptions and knowledge of it. I also hold that our knowledge of the world is fallible and theory-laden. Concepts of truth and falsity fail to provide a coherent view of the relationship between knowledge and its object. Nevertheless knowledge is not immune to empirical check, and its effectiveness in informing and explaining successful material practise is not mere accident. I also claim that science or the production of any kind of knowledge is a social practise. For better or worse (not just worse) the conditions and social relations of the production of knowledge influence its content. Knowledge is also largely - though not exlusively - linguistic, and the nature of language and the way we communicate are not incidental to what is known and communicated. Awareness of these relationships is vital in evaluating knowledge.