How is plato a rationalist

Rationalists generally develop their view in two steps. First, they argue that there are cases where the content of our concepts or knowledge outstrips the information that sense experience can provide. Second, they construct accounts of how reason, in some form or other, provides that additional information about the external world. Most empiricists present complementary lines of thought. First, they develop accounts of how experience alone -- sense experience, reflective experience, or a combination of the two -- provides the information that rationalists cite, insofar as we have it in the first place.

Essay, 2. The distinction between rationalism and empiricism is not without problems. One of the main issues is that almost no author falls neatly into one camp or another: it has been argued that Descartes, for instance, who is commonly regarded as a representative rationalist at least with regard to metaphysics , had clear empiricist leanings primarily with regard to natural philosophy, where sense experience plays a crucial role, according to Clarke Conversely, Locke, who is thought to be a paradigmatic empiricist, argued that reason is on equal footing with experience, when it comes to the knowledge of certain things, most famously of moral truths Essay, 4.

In what follows, we clarify what this distinction has traditionally been taken to apply to, as well as point out its by now widely-recognized shortcomings. The dispute between rationalism and empiricism takes place primarily within epistemology, the branch of philosophy devoted to studying the nature, sources, and limits of knowledge.

We may find that there are category-specific conditions that must be satisfied for knowledge to occur and that it is easier or more difficult to shape certain questions and answers, depending on whether we focus on the external world or on the values. However, some of the defining questions of general epistemology include the following. What is the nature of propositional knowledge, knowledge that a particular proposition about the world, ourselves, morality, or beauty is true?

To know a proposition, we must believe it and it must be true, but something more is required, something that distinguishes knowledge from a lucky guess. A good deal of philosophical work has been invested in trying to determine the nature of warrant. We can form true beliefs just by making lucky guesses.

How to gain warranted beliefs is less clear. Moreover, to know the external world or anything about beauty, for instance, we must be able to think about the external world or about beauty, and it is unclear 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.

Some aspects of the external world, ourselves, or the moral and aesthetical values may be within the limits of our thought but beyond the limits of our knowledge; faced with competing descriptions of them, we cannot know which description is true. Some aspects of the external world, ourselves, or the moral and aesthetical values may even be beyond the limits of our thought, so that we cannot form intelligible descriptions of them, let alone know that a particular description is true.

The disagreement between rationalism and empiricism primarily concerns the second question, regarding the sources of our concepts and knowledge.

In some instances, the disagreement on this topic results in conflicting responses to the other questions as well. The disagrement may extend to incorporate the nature of warrant or where the limits of our thought and knowledge are. Our focus here will be on the competing rationalist and empiricist responses to the second question. There are three main theses that are usually seen as relevant for drawing the distinction between rationalism and empiricism, with a focus on the second question.

Intuition is a form of direct, immediate insight. Intuition has been likened to a sort of internal perception by most rationalists and empiricists alike. Deduction is a process in which we derive conclusions from intuited premises through valid arguments, ones in which the conclusion must be true if the premises are true.

We intuit, for example, that the number three is prime and that it is greater than two. We then deduce from this knowledge that there is a prime number greater than two. Intuition and deduction thus provide us with knowledge that is independent, for its justification, of experience. Several rationalists and empiricists take mathematics to be knowable by intuition and deduction.

Some place ethical truths in this category. Some include metaphysical claims, such as that God exists, we have free will, and our mind and body are distinct substances. The second thesis that is relevant to the distinction between rationalism and empiricism is the Innate Knowledge thesis.

It is just part of our nature. Experiences may trigger a process by which we bring this knowledge to consciousness, but these experiences do not provide us with the knowledge itself. It has in some way been with us all along. According to some rationalists, we gained the knowledge in an earlier existence. According to others, God provided us with it at creation. Still others say it is part of our nature through natural selection. The more subjects included within the range of the thesis or the more controversial the claim to have knowledge in them, the more radical the form of rationalism.

Stronger and weaker understandings of warrant yield stronger and weaker versions of the thesis as well. Empiricists reject this thesis: Locke, for instance, dedicates the whole first book of the Essay to show that such knowlege, even if it existed, would be of little use to us.

The third important thesis that is relevant to the distinction between rationalism and empiricism is the Innate Concept thesis. According to the Innate Concept thesis, some of our concepts are not gained from experience. They are part of our rational nature in such a way that, while sense experiences may trigger a process by which they are brought to consciousness, experience does not provide the concepts or determine the information they contain.

Some claim that the Innate Concept thesis is entailed by the Innate Knowledge Thesis; a particular instance of knowledge can only be innate if the concepts that are contained in the known proposition are also innate. Others, such as Carruthers, argue against this connection , pp.

The content and strength of the Innate Concept thesis varies with the concepts claimed to be innate. The more a concept seems removed from experience and the mental operations we can perform on experience the more plausibly it may be claimed to be innate.

Since we do not experience perfect triangles but do experience pains, our concept of the former is a more promising candidate for being innate than our concept of the latter. To be a rationalist is to adopt at least one of them: either the Innate Knowledge thesis, regarding our presumed propositional innate knowledge, or the Innate Concept thesis, regarding our supposed innate knowledge of concepts. Rationalists vary the strength of their view by adjusting their understanding of warrant.

Some take warranted beliefs to be beyond even the slightest doubt and claim that intuition provide beliefs of this high epistemic status. Others interpret warrant more conservatively, say as belief beyond a reasonable doubt, and claim that intuition provide beliefs of that caliber. Still another dimension of rationalism depends on how its proponents understand the connection between intuition, on the one hand, and truth, on the other.

Some take intuition to be infallible, claiming that whatever we intuit must be true. Others allow for the possibility of false intuited propositions. Two other closely related theses are generally adopted by rationalists, although one can certainly be a rationalist without adopting either of them.

The first is that sense experience cannot provide what we gain from reason. How reason is superior needs explanation, and rationalists have offered different accounts. Another view, generally associated with Plato Republic ec , locates the superiority of a priori knowledge in the objects known. What we know by reason alone, a Platonic form, say, is superior in an important metaphysical way, e.

Most forms of rationalism involve notable commitments to other philosophical positions. One is a commitment to the denial of scepticism for at least some area of knowledge. If we claim to know some truths by intuition or deduction or to have some innate knowledge, we obviously reject scepticism with regard to those truths.

By contrast, empiricists reject the Innate Knowledge and Innate Concept theses. Insofar as we have knowledge in a subject, our knowledge is gained , not only triggered, by our experiences, be they sensorial or reflective. Experience is, thus, our only source of ideas. Moreover, they reject the corresponding version of the Superiority of Reason thesis.

Since reason alone does not give us any knowledge, it certainly does not give us superior knowledge. Empiricists need not reject the Indispensability of Reason thesis, but most of them do. The main characteristic of empiricism, however, is that it endorses a version of the following claim for some subject area:. To be clear, the Empiricism thesis does not entail that we have empirical knowledge.

It entails that knowledge can only be gained, if at all , by experience. Empiricists may assert, as some do for some subjects, that the rationalists are correct to claim that experience cannot give us knowledge. The conclusion they draw from this rationalist lesson is that we do not know at all. This is, indeed, Hume's position with regard to causation, which, he argues, is not actually known, but only presupposed to be holding true, in virtue of a particular habit of our minds.

We have stated the basic claims of rationalism and empiricism so that each is relative to a particular subject area. Rationalism and empiricism, so relativized, need not conflict.

We can be rationalists in mathematics or a particular area of mathematics and empiricists in all or some of the physical sciences. Rationalism and empiricism only conflict when formulated to cover the same subject. Then the debate, Rationalism vs. Empiricism, is joined. The fact that philosophers can be both rationalists and empiricists has implications for the classification schemes often employed in the history of philosophy, especially the one traditionally used to describe the Early Modern Period of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries leading up to Kant.

It is standard practice to group the philosophers of this period as either rationalists or empiricists and to suggest that those under one heading share a common agenda in opposition to those under the other. Such general classification schemes should only be adopted with great caution. The views of the individual philosophers are a lot more subtle and complex than the simple-minded classification suggests. See Loeb and Kenny for important discussions of this point. Descartes and Locke have remarkably similar views on the nature of our ideas, even though Descartes takes many to be innate, while Locke ties them all to experience.

Thus, Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz are mistakenly seen as applying a reason-centered epistemology to a common metaphysical agenda, with each trying to improve on the efforts of the one before, while Locke, Hume, and Reid are mistakenly seen as gradually rejecting those metaphysical claims, with each consciously trying to improve on the efforts of his predecessors.

One might claim, for example, that we can gain knowledge in a particular area by a form of Divine revelation or insight that is a product of neither reason nor sense experience. An important wrinkle for using this classification scheme in the history of philosophy is that it leaves out discussions of philosophical figures who did not focus their efforts on understanding whether innate knowledge is possible or even fruitful to have.

Philosophy in the early modern period, in particular, is a lot richer than this artificial, simplifying distinction makes it sound. This distinction, initially applied by Kant, is responsible for giving us a very restrictive philosophical canon, which does not take into account developments in the philosophy of emotions, philosophy of education, and even disputes in areas of philosophy considered more mainstream, like ethics and aesthetics. Unless restricted to debates regarding the possibility of innate knowledge, this distinction is best left unused.

The most interesting form of the debate occurs when we take the relevant subject to be truths about the external world, the world beyond our own minds. A full-fledged rationalist with regard to our knowledge of the external world holds that some external world truths are and must be innate and that this knowledge is superior to any that sense experience could ever provide.

The full-fledged empiricist about our knowledge of the external world replies that, when it comes to the nature of the world beyond our own minds, experience is our sole source of information. Reason might inform us of the relations among our ideas, but those ideas themselves can only be gained, and any truths about the external reality they represent can only be known, on the basis of experience.

This debate concerning our knowledge of the external world will generally be our main focus in what follows. Several rationalists e. Empiricists e. The debate raises the issue of metaphysics as an area of knowledge. Kant puts the driving assumption clearly:. The debate also extends into ethics. Some moral objectivists e.

Since traditionally this thesis was thought to be rejected by empiricists and adopted only by rationalists, it is useful to become more familiar with it.

In a very narrow sense, only rationalists seem to adopt it. However, the current consensus is that most empiricists e. We can, they agree, know by intuition that our concept of God includes our concept of omniscience. Just by examining the concepts, we can intellectually grasp that the one includes the other. Rationalists, such as Descartes, have claimed that we can know by intuition and deduction that God exists and created the world, that our mind and body are distinct substances, and that the angles of a triangle equal two right angles, where all of these claims are truths about an external reality independent of our thought.

Rationalists and empiricists alike claim that certainty is required for scientia which is a type of absolute knowledge of the necessary connections that would explain why certain things are a certain way and that certainty about the external world is beyond what empirical evidence can provide. Empiricists seem happy to then conclude that the type of knowledge of the external world that we can aquire does not have this high degree of certainty and is, thus, not scientia.

This is because we can never be sure our sensory impressions are not part of a dream or a massive, demon orchestrated, deception. A rationalist like Descartes of the Meditations , claims that only intuition can provide the certainty needed for such knowledge. This line of argument is one of the least compelling in the rationalist arsenal. First, the assumption that knowledge requires certainty comes at a heavy cost, as it rules out so much of what we commonly take ourselves to know.

Second, as many contemporary rationalists accept, intuition is not always a source of certain knowledge. The possibility of a deceiver gives us a reason to doubt our intuitions as well as our empirical beliefs.

For all we know, a deceiver might cause us to intuit false propositions, just as one might cause us to have perceptions of nonexistent objects. They are infallible, as God guarantees their truth. Leibniz, in New Essays , tells us the following:. For our purposes here, we can relate it to the latter, however: We have substantive knowledge about the external world in mathematics, and what we know in that area, we know to be necessarily true.

Experience cannot warrant beliefs about what is necessarily the case. Hence, experience cannot be the source of our knowledge. The best explanation of our knowledge is that we gain it by intuition and deduction. Leibniz mentions logic, metaphysics, and morals as other areas in which our knowledge similarly outstrips what experience can provide. Judgments in logic and metaphysics involve forms of necessity beyond what experience can support.

Judgments in morals involve a form of obligation or value that lies beyond experience, which only informs us about what is the case rather than about what ought to be.

The strength of this argument varies with its examples of purported knowledge. Insofar as we focus on controversial claims in metaphysics, e. Taken with regard to other areas, however, the argument clearly has legs. We know a great deal of mathematics, and what we know, we know to be necessarily true. None of our experiences warrants a belief in such necessity, and we do not seem to base our knowledge on any experiences. The warrant that provides us with knowledge arises from an intellectual grasp of the propositions which is clearly part of our learning.

Similarly, we seem to have such moral knowledge as that, all other things being equal, it is wrong to break a promise and that pleasure is intrinsically good. Interesting Things that Plato Wrote a ccording to Dr. Philosophy Games! They're ever so fun - really! Monty Python's Song about Philosophy. Philosophical Humor You don't say! Our community needs blood to help us all ; s chedule an appointment today!

My Curriculum Vitae. Dave Yount. All material on this page and links to my pages that I created are copyright - David J. Yount, All Rights Reserved. Search this site. Leibniz found that contingencies were impossible so he disregarded the senses because they were full of contingencies. Since human beings are rational animals, this functioning involves reason. His ideas encompassed that of early empiricism; reason came from a process he called induction, where a child learned as it grew through its sense perception.

Another philosopher who followed this was David Hume. To Hume all the contents of the mind were divided into impressions left by sense experience. These impressions are combined to create knowledge which can be divided into two parts: knowledge of relations of ideas and knowledge of matters of fact. He refuted that any other type of knowledge did not exist because it did not have solid reasonable evidence off of quantity or by experimental means.

Papineau 25, clip note. Is it better to be to right? Is it better to achieve practical results? Is it better to understand? All these questions make up the fundamentals of rationality and empiricism. Is life truly how Plato explained it? Is life full of lies and false perceptions where one must use reason to see beyond it? Or is life like that of Hume and Aristotle where only perception can give you the true insight into reason? Kant took these questions and composed a series of works that strove to quell the disparity between the two stations of thought.

Kant formulated a world where humans are confined to their perceptions; these perceptions are how we understand our world; and these perceptions are necessary for humans to understand their ability to reason. Without reason there would be no way to explain what we perceive and without perception, there would be no use to use reason for we would not have any questions.