Why is plato a rationalist

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. No empirical lesson about how things are can warrant such knowledge of how they ought to be. Insofar as they maintain that our knowledge of necessary truths in mathematics or elsewhere by intuition and deduction is substantive knowledge of the external world, they owe us an account of this form of necessity.

Similarly, if rationalists claim that our knowledge in morals is knowledge of an objective form of obligation, they owe us an account of how objective values are part of a world of apparently valueless facts. What is it to intuit a proposition and how does that act of intuition support a warranted belief? One current approach to the issue involves an appeal to Phenomenal Conservatism Huemer , the principle that if it seems to one as if something is the case, then one is prima facie justified in believing that it is so.

This approach aims to demystify intuitions; they are but one more form of seeming-state along with ones we gain from sense perception, memory, and introspection. It does not, however, tell us all we need to know. Any intellectual faculty, whether it be sense perception, memory, introspection or intuition, provides us with warranted beliefs only if it is generally reliable.

The reliability of sense perception stems from the causal connection between how external objects are and how we experience them. What accounts for the reliability of our intuitions regarding the external world? Is our intuition of a particular true proposition the outcome of some causal interaction between ourselves and some aspect of the world? What aspect? What is the nature of this causal interaction? That the number three is prime does not appear to cause anything, let alone our intuition that it is prime.

As Michael Huemer , p. These issues are made all the more pressing by the classic empiricist response to the argument. The reply is generally credited to Hume and begins with a division of all true propositions into two categories. Intuition and deduction can provide us with knowledge of necessary truths such as those found in mathematics and logic, but such knowledge is not substantive knowledge of the external world. It is only knowledge of the relations of our own ideas.

If the rationalist appeals to our knowledge in metaphysics to support the argument, Hume denies that we have such knowledge. An updated version of this general empiricist reply, with an increased emphasis on language and the nature of meaning, is given in the twentieth-century by A. There is, then, no room for knowledge about the external world by intuition or deduction.

We cannot. This empiricist reply faces challenges of its own. Our knowledge of mathematics seems to be about something more than our own concepts. Our knowledge of moral judgments seems to concern not just how we feel or act but how we ought to behave. The general principles that provide a basis for the empiricist view, e. The Innate Knowledge thesis asserts that we have a priori knowledge, that is knowledge independent, for its justification, of sense experience, as part of our rational nature.

Experience may trigger our awareness of this knowledge, but it does not provide us with it. The knowledge is already there. Plato presents an early version of the Innate Knowledge thesis in the Meno as the doctrine of knowledge by recollection. The doctrine is motivated in part by a paradox that arises when we attempt to explain the nature of inquiry. How do we gain knowledge of a theorem in geometry? We inquire into the matter. Yet, knowledge by inquiry seems impossible Meno , 80d-e. We either already know the theorem at the start of our investigation or we do not.

If we already have the knowledge, there is no place for inquiry. Either way we cannot gain knowledge of the theorem by inquiry. Yet, we do know some theorems.

The doctrine of knowledge by recollection offers a solution. When we inquire into the truth of a theorem, we both do and do not already know it. Thus, learning the theorem allows us, in effect, to recall what we already know.

Plato famously illustrates the doctrine with an exchange between Socrates and a young slave, in which Socrates guides the slave from ignorance to mathematical knowledge. Since our knowledge is of abstract, eternal Forms, which clearly lie beyond our sensory experience, it is independent, for its justification, of experience. The metaphysical assumptions in the solution need justification. We are confident that we know certain propositions about the external world, but there seems to be no adequate explanation of how we gained this knowledge short of saying that it is innate.

Its content is beyond what we directly gain in experience, as well as what we can gain by performing mental operations on what experience provides. It does not seem to be based on an intuition or deduction. That it is innate in us appears to be the best explanation. Chomsky argues that the experiences available to language learners are far too sparse to account for their knowledge of their language.

To explain language acquisition, we must assume that learners have an innate knowledge of a universal grammar capturing the common deep structure of natural languages. They have a set of innate capacities or dispositions which enable and determine their language development. Chomsky gives us a theory of innate learning capacities or structures rather than a theory of innate knowledge.

His view does not support the Innate Knowledge thesis as rationalists have traditionally understood it.

Indeed, such a theory, which places nativism at the level of mental capacities or structures enabling us to acquire certain types of knowledge rather than at the level of knoweldge we already posses, is akin to an empiricist take on the issue.

Locke and Reid, for instance, believe that the human mind is endowed with certain abilities that, when developed in the usual course of nature, will lead us to acquire useful knowledge of the external world. The main idea is that it is part of our biology to have a digestive system that, when fed the right kind of food, allows us to process the required nutrients to enable us to continue to live for a while. Similarly, it is part of our biology to have a mental architecture that, when fed the right kind of information and experiences, allows us to process that information and transform it into knowledge.

The knowledge itself is no more innate than the proccessed nutrients are. Peter Carruthers argues that we have innate knowledge of the principles of folk-psychology. Folk-psychology is a network of common-sense generalizations that hold independently of context or culture and concern the relationships of mental states to one another, to the environment and states of the body and to behavior , p.

It includes such beliefs as that pains tend to be caused by injury, that pains tend to prevent us from concentrating on tasks, and that perceptions are generally caused by the appropriate state of the environment. Carruthers notes the complexity of folk-psychology, along with its success in explaining our behavior and the fact that its explanations appeal to such unobservables as beliefs, desires, feelings, and thoughts. He argues that the complexity, universality, and depth of folk-psychological principles outstrips what experience can provide, especially to young children who by their fifth year already know a great many of them.

This knowledge is also not the result of intuition or deduction; folk-psychological generalizations are not seen to be true in an act of intellectual insight. Empiricists, and some rationalists, attack the Innate Knowledge thesis in two main ways.

First, they offer accounts of how sense experience or intuition and deduction provide the knowledge that is claimed to be innate.

Second, they directly criticize the Innate Knowledge thesis itself. Locke raises the issue of just what innate knowledge is. If the implication is that we all consciously have this knowledge, it is plainly false. Propositions often given as examples of innate knowledge, even such plausible candidates as the principle that the same thing cannot both be and not be, are not consciously accepted by children and those with severe cognitive limitations. Proponents of innate knowledge might respond that some knowledge is innate in that we have the capacity to have it.

That claim, while true, is of little interest, however. Locke thus challenges defenders of the Innate Knowledge thesis to present an account of innate knowledge that allows their position to be both true and interesting. A narrow interpretation of innateness faces counterexamples of rational individuals who do not meet its conditions.

A generous interpretation implies that all our knowledge, even that clearly provided by experience, is innate. Carruthers claims that our innate knowledge is determined through evolutionary selection p. Evolution has resulted in our being determined to know certain things e.

Experiences provide the occasion for our consciously believing the known propositions but not the basis for our knowledge of them p. The former have not yet reached the proper stage of development; the latter are persons in whom natural development has broken down pp. A serious problem for the Innate Knowledge thesis remains, however. We know a proposition only if it is true, we believe it and our belief is warranted. Their claim is even bolder: In at least some of these cases, our empirically triggered, but not empirically warranted, belief is nonetheless warranted and so known.

How can these beliefs be warranted if they do not gain their warrant from the experiences that cause us to have them or from intuition and deduction? Some rationalists think that a reliabilist account of warrant provides the answer. According to Reliabilism, beliefs are warranted if they are formed by a process that generally produces true beliefs rather than false ones.

The true beliefs that constitute our innate knowledge are warranted, then, because they are formed as the result of a reliable belief-forming process. He argues that natural selection results in the formation of some beliefs and is a truth-reliable process. An appeal to Reliabilism, or a similar causal theory of warrant, may well be the best way to develop the Innate Knowledge thesis.

Even so, some difficulties remain. First, reliabilist accounts of warrant are themselves quite controversial. Second, rationalists must give an account of innate knowledge that maintains and explains the distinction between innate knowledge and non-innate knowledge, and it is not clear that they will be able to do so within such an account of warrant. Suppose for the sake of argument that we have innate knowledge of some proposition, P.

What makes our knowledge that P innate? To sharpen the question, what difference between our knowledge that P and a clear case of non-innate knowledge, say our knowledge that something is red based on our current visual experience of a red table, makes the former innate and the latter not innate?

In each case, we have a true, warranted belief. In each case, presumably, our belief gains its warrant from the fact that it meets a particular causal condition, e. The insight behind the Innate Knowledge thesis seems to be that the difference between our innate and non-innate knowledge lies in the relation between our experience and our belief in each case.

Yet, exactly what is the nature of this containment relation between our experiences, on the one hand, and what we believe, on the other, that is missing in the one case but present in the other? The nature of the experience-belief relation seems quite similar in each. The causal relation between the experience that triggers our belief that P and our belief that P is contingent, as is the fact that the belief-forming process is reliable. 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. Every question we have today was presented through our perceptual experience. Philosophy has grown.

Though each philosopher above showed a division within their thought process that led to well formulated answers to reality, the combination of both empiricism and rationalism has turned the tides. This could be seen as a peaceful flow, as the Taoists would say; one would not be without the other and both are needed to be complete; too much of one leads to imbalance. These great philosophers taught the world how to think, and, through a series of adaptations, humankind now reasons by the utilization of both empirical and rational data.

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But what is meant by flexible and movable? Is it not that I imagine that the piece of wax, being round, is capable of becoming square, or of passing from a square into a triangular figure? Assuredly such is not the case, because I conceive that it admits of an infinity of similar changes; and I am, moreover, unable to compass this infinity by imagination, and consequently this conception which I have of the wax is not the product of the faculty of imagination.

But what now is this extension? Is it not also unknown? I must, therefore, admit that I cannot even comprehend by imagination what the piece of wax is, and that it is the mind alone which perceives it. I speak of one piece in particular; for as to wax in general, this is still more evident.

But what is the piece of wax that can be perceived only by the understanding or mind? It is certainly the same which I see, touch, imagine; and, in fine, it is the same which, from the beginning, I believed it to be. But and this it is of moment to observe the perception of it is neither an act of sight, of touch, nor of imagination, and never was either of these, though it might formerly seem so, but is simply an intuition inspectio of the mind, which may be imperfect and confused, as it formerly was, or very clear and distinct, as it is at present, according as the attention is more or less directed to the elements which it contains, and of which it is composed.

This brief passage demonstrates the inadequacy of both sensory impressions and imagination. His argument for innate ideas involves his overall classification of ideas as being one of three types: adventitious derived from the world outside us via sensation , factitious created by the imagination , and innate concepts that are clear and distinct truths.

They are eternal truths. A rationalist, in the Platonic tradition of innate ideas, Descartes believed that knowledge derives from ideas of the intellect, not from the senses. His argument for innate ideas involves his elimination of the possibility that clear and distinct ideas can be gained either through experience or imagination. Innate ideas have universal truth and are the only dependable source of knowledge.

Clear and distinct in our minds, innate ideas are universal truths. The idea of a triangle with its requisite properties, for example, can be perceived clearly and distinctly within the mind, without reference to a particular object in the world. Do you think that innate ideas are possible?

Putting it another way, do you think that we have ideas or knowledge not based on experience? This movement is characterized by its rejection of and response to tenets of rationalism such as innate ideas and knowledge based on anything a priori.

Francis Bacon, whose lifetime overlapped with that of Descartes, was an early figure in this movement. John Locke produced a comprehensive and influential philosophical work with his An Essay concerning Human Understanding in This work sets out to provide a comprehensive account of the mind and how humans acquire knowledge.

An important and primary part of his agenda is to dispute the foundations of the rationalist theory of knowledge, including the possibility that there could be innate ideas.

His intention is to thoroughly examine the process of understanding and acquisition of knowledge, to describe exactly how our minds work. Locke describes two distinct types of experience: 1 outer experience is acquired through our five senses and involves objects that exist in the world; and 2 inner experience is derived from mental acts such as reflection.

The latter are complicated. But all ideas, regardless of their complexity are constructed from combinations of simple ideas, the building blocks for everything we could possibly think. All ideas and all knowledge originate from experience. Our minds start off as blank slates. This excerpt from Book I, Chapter 1 of the Essay adds the additional important argument against the possibility of innate ideas, questioning the possibility of having ideas in your mind without knowing they are there.

For, first, it is evident, that all children and idiots have not the least apprehension or thought of them. And the want of that is enough to destroy that universal assent which must needs be the necessary concomitant of all innate truths: it seeming to me near a contradiction to say, that there are truths imprinted on the soul, which it perceives or understands not: imprinting, if it signify anything, being nothing else but the making certain truths to be perceived.