Augustine

I am not actually a rationalist, however, I find it hard to explain to others - mainly people that do not know much about philosophy - the basic premise of rationalism and help them understand it at the same time. I have the idea in my head, I just find it hard to relate it to other people. Can somebody help me with this problem? <img src="confused.gif" border="0">

ManM

Rationalism claims that knowledge can be attained without appeal to experience... Hopefully that helps.

WJ

Any of a variety of views emphasizing the role or importance of reason, usually including intuition, in contrast to sensory experience (including introspection), the feelings, or authority. Just as an extreme empiricist tries to base all our knowledge on experience, so an extreme rationalist tries to base it on reason. But whereas empiricism appears in the eighteenth century and again in the first half of the twentieth century, extreme rationalism has been considerably less popular. In fact it reached its peak in the brash days when philosophy itself was beginning, back in the ancient Greek world. Parmenides maintained that, whatever the senses might say, the very notion of change involved a contradiction, and so reason demanded that reality be entirely devoid of change. As usually interpreted he said the same about plurality too. His fellow citizen and near-contemporary Zeno of Elea supported him with a set of paradoxes, including the famous Achilles and the tortoise. (Zeno's paradoxes.) These two, together with a handful of followers (including to a certain extent, but only to a certain extent, Plato), represent the acme of extreme rationalism, and later rationalists have seldom been willing to dismiss the senses quite so single-mindedly. They perhaps have in mind the words the slightly later philosopher Democritus, by no means an extreme empiricist, gives to the senses to defend themselves against pure reason (fragment 125): 'Wretched mind, do you take your evidence from us and then overthrow us? Our overthrow is your own downfall!'

It is indeed hard to see how a being entirely devoid of any contact with the world through the senses could ever amass the materials needed to exercise its reason at all. How, for instance, could it acquire a language to express its thoughts in, and what sort of thoughts could it have if it had no language at all?

Rationalism, however, does not have to take an extreme form. It can content itself with claiming simply that some of our knowledge, though not all of it, can come to us otherwise than through the senses. This is quite compatible with saying that without some use of the senses we would not have any knowledge at all. Rationalism in fact can take two main forms, according as it claims that some of our propositional knowledge, i.e. knowledge of the truth of certain propositions, comes to us without coming through the senses, or claims that some of the materials from which our knowledge is constructed are present in the mind without coming through the senses. This latter will be the case if some of our concepts are a priori, where this just means 'prior to experience'. It might be, for instance, that concepts such as those of substance or causation are present with us from the beginning in the sense that, as Kant thought, we do not find out that the world contains substances and causes, but cannot help but see the world as composed of substances which have attributes and of events which are caused by other events. Having the concepts in this way, however, must be distinguished from having them explicitly, in the sense of having words for them or consciously thinking about them, as we are doing now. On the theory in question, small children and possibly even animals can do the former without its following that they can do the latter.

It is not surprising that, contrary to the claims of the extreme empiricist, we must bring some equipment with us if we want to know something about the world. If we could really start as blank tablets, then why don't ordinary blackboards, or at any rate photoreceptive camera-plates, know things about the world? On the other hand, it is only in a backhanded sense that we can be said to 'know' that the world contains substances and causes if the truth of the matter is that we can only know the world at all by treating it as though it did. A more substantive rationalism is that which says that we can know certain propositions to be true without deriving this knowledge from our senses, even if in some or all cases we must use our senses to get the concepts that are involved in the propositions: I may know without looking that whatever has a size has a shape, but only if I already have the concepts of size and shape, i.e. if I know what size and shape are.

Kant made, or at least brought into clear and explicit focus, a distinction between analytic and synthetic statements (or judgements in his case, as he was more concerned with the workings of the mind than with linguistic analysis). Even empiricists usually allow that we know analytic statements a priori, but they defuse this concession by adding that such knowledge hardly counts as knowledge in any meaty sense, since such statements do not say anything substantive about the world. Synthetic statements, however, do, and rationalism in its stronger versions is concerned to claim that some of them can be known a priori. The one about everything with size having shape would be a standard example, and others would be mathematical propositions, which empiricists usually try to treat as analytic, though without much success in the opinion of rationalists. In fact round the start of the twentieth century a sustained attempt was made by Frege and Russell to reduce mathematics to pure logic in their theory known as logicism; but it is now generally agreed, especially since Gödel's first incompleteness theorem in 1931, that this cannot be done.

However, even what I have called this 'more substantive' rationalism, which claims that we can know certain interesting truths a priori, does not escape a certain tension in its relations with the weaker rationalism which says that we have to treat the world in certain ways if we are to make sense of it. For when it comes to justifying these claims to know the world without looking at it, the rationalist is in danger of being driven to say simply that we cannot think coherently without accepting these propositions - which is rather weaker than claiming some special insight which definitely tells us that they are true. Would not such an insight be a sort of magic?

Be that as it may, the main form that rationalism has taken in the last few decades has been of the weaker kind, and connected, like so much of philosophy during that period, with language. It stems from Chomsky, who holds that certain grammatical structures are innate in our minds, so that all human languages share certain common features which make it possible for children to learn them. Other sorts of language may be spoken by, say, Martians, but our children could not learn them, nor their children ours.

An interesting recent development concerning the a priori is the claim by Kripke and Putnam that the a priori-empirical distinction does not coincide, as it has usually been thought to do, with the necessary-contingent distinction. Kripke claims that some propositions that are true only contingently can be known a priori (an example might be that the knower himself exists), while some propositions that are necessarily true can only be known empirically (an example here might be the chemical composition of some substance). This latter might sound rather strange: might not water, say, have turned out to have some structure different from H2O? Kripke and Putnam would agree that we might have found ourselves faced with a liquid that was wet and colourless, filled the oceans, and was good for making coffee with, i.e. had all the ordinary and easily observable properties of water, but which had a structure quite different from H2O. But such a liquid would not be water, because the word 'water' gets its meaning from its use to name the liquid we actually have around us, which is H2O. Of course we might have called the other stuff water had we come across it, but then the word 'water' would have had a different meaning from the one it actually has, because it would have acquired its meaning in a different way, i.e. by its relations to a different stuff. This doctrine, incidentally, that water is essentially H2O, i.e. would not be what it is unless it had the structure H2O, illustrates the essentialism whose recent revival has been pioneered by Kripke and Putnam among others, and which is itself in the spirit of rationalism rather than empiricism, even though our finding out that water is H2O relies on observation: the fact that things have essences at all is not something that observation can tell us.

Finally, rationalism, like empiricism, can refer either to the psychological genesis or to the philosophical justification of our knowledge; i.e. it can say either that we do in fact get some or all of our knowledge, or all of our knowledge in a certain sphere, from reason, or else that only to the extent that we do so can we properly claim to have knowledge. Again, as in the case of empiricism, we are bordering on naturalism, but rationalism has perhaps more usually been concerned with the genetic questions. When justification is at issue rationalism is usually concerned (as with Plato and to a lesser extent Aristotle) with distinguishing real or proper knowledge from lesser grades of cognition like true opinion, which are unstable and cannot be relied upon.

When contrasted with feeling or sentiment, especially in the eighteenth-century opponents of the 'moral sense' school, rationalism, often then called intuitionism, takes the form of an ethical doctrine claiming that we have a priori intuitions of moral truths. Ethical intuitionists vary in whether they treat such intuitions as isolated or as linked together in a rational system.

In the latter case logical reasoning is involved, and though no one would deny that ethical conclusions can be logically derived from premisses which include ethical premisses, the rationalist, defying one form of the naturalistic fallacy, will claim that they can be so derived sometimes from purely non-ethical premisses. It is in this sort of case that the ethical intuitions involved have the air of arising from reason, in parallel with logical intuitions, and so are thought to belong most appropriately under rationalism.

Rationalism can also oppose reason to authority, in particular to religious revelation, and the name has been used in this sense, especially since the end of the nineteenth century, though not usually in philosophy.

-----------from xrefer

Hope that helps some

Walrus