Posted: September 2nd, 2022

Rationalism and Empiricism: The Source of All Knowledge

Rationalism and Empiricism: The Source of All Knowledge
Rationalism and empiricism are two major schools of thought that cover the subject of epistemology. Both attempt to address the philosophical question of how ethical knowledge is acquired. While there have been numerous debates regarding which should be accorded more weight, there is a clear difference between empiricism and rationalism. Rationalism upholds that acquiring knowledge is a process that happens in our minds. Rationalists believe in innate ideas, reason, and deduction. Empiricism, on the other hand, argues that learning occurs through sensory perception and is entirely opposed to the idea of the innate experience.
Rationalism is the belief that reason is the main source of knowledge. Rationalists believe that a person possesses the innate ideas even before birth. Plato’s theory of forms best explains this idea that everyone has an innate knowledge of different forms, including mathematical objects and concepts like triangles, moral concepts like kindness and beauty, and even color, which are obtained before someone is physically born. Innate ideas best explain why some people are naturally better at some things than others, even if they have been exposed to the same environment.
According to rationalists, the five senses only give opinions but not reason. In his argument, Descartes attempts to describe this concept using the wax approach. He explains that when a candle is new, it possesses one shape, but once lit, it begins to lose shape and fragrance to form a completely different shape. To him, this shows that our senses can deceive us, and we should, therefore, not trust them completely.
Empiricism, on the other hand, believes that knowledge is only acquired through experience. Empiricists strongly oppose the idea of innate ideas questioning the lack of knowledge, including talking and walking in new a born. According to them, all knowledge is derived either from sensing using the five senses or through reasoning using the brain. Lock, another influential empiricist, believed having some form of experience enables a person first to form simple ideas which, when combined, develop into complex ideas.
Empiricism is considered a more logical theory of knowledge because it offers very little or no room for errors. Rationalism is subjective because it is so much dependent on a person’s deductive power, assuming that all people are capable of reasoning correctly. Rationalists ignore the possibility that the person thinking might irrational, which then affects their reasoning. Empiricism, on the other hand, gives room for people to test different theories and concepts based on actual science.

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