What is the difference between the cases? We can give that in the empirical case. We can describe ways in which we could find out whether the person was hallucinating or not based on our ability to monitor the brain of the animal in question and our visual impressions of the experimental set up. We can give a sketch, if not every detail, of a story which desribes how the brain interacts with the enviornment it finds itself in and generates representations of that environment.
But can you do the same for rationalism? To date no one has. How do we interact with it? No one knows. How could they? Now this would be a pressing concern if it were impossible for us to fully understand the world we live in except for the truth of rationalism.
We have good candidates for materialistic accounts of every disputed area. For instance, in the area I know most about, we have the mind-brain identity theory and the higher-order theory of consciousness. I do not mean to say that we know that they are true, but only that they are viable candidates.
For all we know right know they could be true. They have not been absolutely refuted by any a priori arguments, nor have they shown themselves to be inconsistent with the findings of science, quite the converse actually. The same is true for ethics. Again, none of these has been demonstrated to be correct. And, since there certainly are people who have insisted that nobody knows how we interact with anything, how can we know that we interact with it?
What would be the reason to think that non-euclidean geometries are not a priori? As the rest of the math, they are not done by any other means but a priori thought. In fact, many mathematical theorems found practical use, only after they being perfectly finished within the mathematics. So, it is not as if they were waiting for empirical confirmation. The issue was if this or that mathematical model was suited for this or that real world phenomenon. As for the question of abstract notions which are used in a priori reasoning as numbers, there is no need for a rationalist to seem them as objects of some kind.
To me, more it is about the possibility for real things to fall under those notions, not about those notions independently existing. So to say, a bunch of objects might be a pair, or a triplet. And whenever it is a pair, it is one and one more object. So, the a priori conclusion there, that whenever there is a pair, there is one and one more object, has nothing to do with special kinds of objects. That is at least how I see rationalism.
In practical sense, when those notions approach the categories we CAN approach in life, like space, time, movement, and so on, sure, empirical confirmation is best method, because as you pointed even rationalist can admit that our reason is fallible, and might oversee or misunderstand things.
But it does not follow that the only alternative to the Cartesian rationalist tradition is one which treats revision of intuition as an empirical matter. Hi Guys, thanks for the comments. Sorry I have been slow in getting back to you, gta sucked me back in for a minute…. An answer starts from the metaphysical assumption that the worldly fact that p would make the belief that p true.
The empirical justification of the belief is then to be found in its relationship to experiences that the worldly fact would cause. This is very brief…Still it is hard to say much more. This sounds about right to me. The claim is that even in this brief and sletchy form it is still light years ahead of anything that the rationalist has every come up with. The answer to your question is given by physics and biology. Sure it is not complete, there are many unanswered questions and debate still rages at the forefront.
All standard stuff. But still we can give quite a bit of detail about the cat, and the blackhole for that matter, using the empirical method of knowing sketched above. We interact with these physical objects just like all physical onjects interact, in ways described by physics, and biology. Can anything like this be done for non-physical eternal objects? This was supposed to be know on the basis of rational insight to be a necessary fact about reality.
So, the discovery of non-Euclidean geometry is a huge embarrasment. So, the question is not so much one of what it is that we know as you suggest , but rather what is the justification for what we know?
The problem is supposed to be the following. No such discriminatory method has ever been given. But the main and only motiviation for rationalism is the existence of rational insight and its pull on us.
So unless the rationalist has some kind of story to tell that makes their view at least as non-mysterious as the empirical onbe sketched above the fallibalism counts against them. Richard, I think the problem you raise for fallibilistic rationalism in your response to Colin, if legitimate, applies just as much to empiricism. Consider the following paraphrase:. No one, whether rationalist or empiricist, is in a position to leap outside of their own minds and directly compare their beliefs with reality.
If we grant we are nevertheless justified for whatever reason in trusting sense perception and empirical methods, why not grant the same concerning rational intuition? Brandon: Mathematics is neutral as between rationalism and empiricism. The rationalista nd the empiricist can agree about all of the truths of mathematics; what is at issue is whether they are necessary or contingent, universal or local, justified by experience or by reason…and the very fact that math is presupposed by physics is the basis of an argument for its empirical justification….
Thanks for the comment. True, there are issue about global skepticism, and I think those are real issues. But you cannot use rational intuition to correct rational intuition. Also, we are not using the empirical method in a circular way.
The argument is that when you have the two theories layed out side by side a plausible meta principle dictates that we go for the empirical. So, we are justified in accepting the empirical method, and not the rationalist method, because of their track records, both by their own standards and comparatively…. You are commenting using your WordPress. You are commenting using your Google account. You are commenting using your Twitter account. You are commenting using your Facebook account.
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Email required Address never made public. This is also true in many debates particularly when libertarians or christian fundamentalists are involved. Of course, highly skilled moderators can in some cases help to avoid this. Some of this reminds me of debates within statistics about frequentist vs. Bayesian frameworks. But anyone who has looked at the world will be able to tell you that frequentist statistical approaches rarely survive first contact with reality. The world is muddy, and Bayesian approaches at least capture some of that muddiness.
In fact, to my untrained eye, one could make the argument that the rationalists are simply failing to update their prior beliefs based on the empirical evidence. Given that we know A, B, and C, what approach is most likely to bring us to our goal? Given that we know A, B, and C, what weight should I assign to these two contradicting arguments? Someone smarter than me should work on this, please. Ugh, sorry. To save some people the trouble of looking it up, the difference between Bayesian and frequentist approaches to statistics can be crudely summarized as the difference between factoring in prior beliefs about the world when deciding how likely something is, vs.
As far as I have seen, rationalism requires you to realize that you are not rational no matter how hard you try.
Learning about cognitive biases does not make you immune to them, and frequently can make you more susceptible to them. Rationality means you must learn about cognitive failings and self-deception, and realize that fundamentally they are impossible to avoid on some level. It sounds obvious, but this goes for all your reasoning and motives as well.
There may be factors you are unaware of going into your reasoning and motives. Logic is not science. You can use logic and mathematics for empirical questions, but they are being used as tools. In the real world, things exist and we need to come up with labels. This gets the entire thing backwards since definitions in mathematics actually define things, but real world definitions describe things that already exist and are just an attempt at getting it right. The more I read the comments here, the more confused I am.
What is this article actually about? Is it about rationalism, or about rationality? They also fit your description, being founded by white male libertarians. But then, they have nothing to do with rationalism. So what other rationalist movement are you talking about?
Not a super-catchy label, though…. An empiricist? The philosophy of knowledge has progressed way beyond such a simplistic, false dichotomy. While we all have to start somewhere, and for many of us that means just finding the means to escape religions, there are better arguments for atheism that what ones usually runs into in the popular press.
People involved in the rash of modern date atheist organizations would be doing everyone a favor to learn them and see if they can use them effectively. Or rationalism and empiricism for that matter? Is it better? I do care about rational thinking, and I want to practice it as much as possible. You are pointing out a thing that I have noticed in communities that are about rationalism. Your point about how important collective effort, compared to individual effort, is to getting things right is insightful.
I definitely agree that no matter how hard I work at being a rational thinker, I will probably not be able to actually contribute to a more rational society as an individual. That low hanging fruit is long gone if it even existed to begin with. If you choose to judge feminism based on what it means and not on the beliefs of those who practice it, then you have to judge other beliefs by the same metric.
For example, if I wrote that. It says that the path to getting things right lies in improving the group, improving the thinking of the community as a whole. It focuses primarily on collective action. Personally, I consider myself both a feminist and a rationalist. Would a rationalist make these epistemic rationality memes? I tend to avoid highly argumentative people — e. One of the interesting quirks of the world is that some skills are broadly applicable, and some skills are unreasonably powerful.
Evaluating evidence is one of those. Information theory, probability theory, model-building are a few other ones. It can and does happen that you know things that another person does not, and that person — an expert in some topic — says something on that topic that is almost certainly an error for reasons you are very familiar with. But maybe it is? If you found this blog post convincing then you are very far from being either rational or empirical.
As Scott from SSC pointed out, the most famous rationalists were supreme experimentalists. Maybe Plato and maybe 19th century German idealists held something as close to that view as has ever historically occurred. Given that Ms.
If the shoe fits, wear it. By not providing any actual evidence, the post suddenly becomes unfalsifiable and anyone who protests is suddenly implicated as the very type of person the post is talking about. Zvan, herself, has had experience with.
That means the OP is evidence—evidence of Ms. Now, I suppose you could be arguing that the OP is, in large part, a fabrication that Ms. But if that is, indeed, your argument, you are arguing that Ms. Zvan lied about her personal experience. It is unclear why she would lie about her personal experience, but if you want to go there, hey, be my guest.
Or, apparently, one might not. After reading this intriguing post, I felt like there were a few misunderstandings about the definitions of Rationalism and Empiricism.
I do not think it was intended as a straw-man argument against Rationalism, although it does lead one to think Rationalism is far less reasonable than it is. The easiest way to distinguish between the two and grasp their fundamental meaning is to think of the two philosophies as a disagreement about epistemological starting points.
These axioms must, in principle, be assumed, and this is most likely where the controversy lies.
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