Empiricism
Whenever a person chooses a side in the traditional debate between rationalism and empiricism, that person is necessarily making a statement about how much people should trust the evidence of their own senses. However, there are a number of instances in which I think that sensory evidence can be deceptive. While I think the allure of empiricism is undoubtedly seductive, for the precise reason that sensory experience can be so vivid, I think this is a limited worldview. I would like to advance my own preference for rationalism by looking at two basic objections to empiricism -- the presence of innate knowledge in the mind, and the potentially deceptive nature of the senses. The former, I hope, will show that rational processes and structures to a certain degree exist without need of sensory evidence -- that reason and logic are, to some extent, a thing apart from perception. The latter will call into question whether knowledge obtained through the senses is invariably or necessarily knowledge: the presence of all kinds of quirks of perception (from optical illusion to hallucination) suggests that an overwhelming faith in sensory evidence is unwise.
The first point that I would like to make against empiricism entails the presence of intellectual material that is seemingly hard-wired into the brain and thus clearly stands outside of mere sensory experience. This is an argument that was made by Socrates in Plato's dialogue Meno, although the Socratic argument is designed to support a philosophy of knowledge -- in which knowledge is constituted as a form of "unforgetting" or anamnesis -- that I do not think it necessary to endorse in order to make use of Socrates' premises. Socrates in the Meno takes an uneducated slave-boy and uses him to demonstrate that, without any prior mathematical education, the boy can arrive at a fairly advanced geometrical proof simply by following the inherent logic. Although Socrates' ultimate conclusion in the argument -- that the boy is actually remembering knowledge that was possessed in a previous lifetime -- it is not necessary to accept this conclusion in order to understand the revolutionary potential of the argument here. The Socratic emphasis on "this knowledge which he now has must he not either have acquired or always possessed" is an indication of the depth of rational thought (Plato 2008). The "previous lifetime" is actually probably the inherent structure of the brain: systems of pattern recognition and rational thought that do not rely on knowledge obtained through the senses.
I think that personally the better example for this is not the famous Socratic use of geometry, but the much more recent (if equally revolutionary) example of Noam Chomsky's linguistics. The most engaging immediate example I can think of is the rule referred to by linguists as the "expletive infix." Without knowing this descriptive terminology for the phenomenon, most people are familiar with what it is -- it is the insertion of an expletive (or swear-word) into another larger word for rhetorical effect. Familiar examples would include "abso-bloody-lutely" in England, or "in-fucking-credible" in America. However, what linguists who have followed Chomsky's lead have discovered is that we can ask a person: the position where the expletive falls when inserted follows a set of clear rules. If an English speaker is given a word -- "Monongahela," for example -- he or she will automatically know where to place the expletive ("Mononga-fuckin-hela") despite the fact that this grammatical rule has never been taught. Indeed, the rule itself has certain...
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