Empiricism vs. Rationalism
 

In my Philosophy 12 class we have been covering the works of David Hume, John Locke, Rene Descartes, etc, and the subjects of Empiricism and Rationalism.

Empiricism - In a nutshell, Empiricism is the belief that all human knowledge comes from evidence of our 5 senses. For example, if you were deprived of a sense you wouldn't be able to gain any new knowledge from them. Take someone who has been blind from birth, later on you wouldn't be able to describe the look of, say, a pencil to him/her because without sight you wouldn't know what to make of what the other person is telling you.

Rationalism - Basically, Rationalism states that at least some human knowledge can be gained through reason and factual analysis rather than faith or dogma. For instance, one could say that:
All freshmen are jocks
Some jocks are band members
Therefore some freshmen are band members
This would be a valid way of gaining knowledge through reason.

The law of contradiction says that only either the statement or its contradiction can be true, not both, which brings me to my question. Which do you think is true? Personally, i believe Empiricism is the true answer. Why? Lets say for instance that the librarian(i am in a library right now) tells me there is a small dog sitting in a position behind this computer monitor right now just so that i can't see it. How do i know it is there? I can't see it so one of my senses is telling me the dog isn't there. I can't smell it, can't feel it, can't hear it, it isn't biting me or scratching me or anything like that, so how do i know it is there? Answer: I cannot know.

So yeah, which do you believe?

Law of contradiction = lies.

A lot of philosophy is taught in terms of extremes, but if you look at your own life, you in fact live in a state of balance between two extremes in almost all circumstances, unless of course you've taken it upon yourself to actively pursue one or the other.

Grey areas do exist, and they are for the win.

Technically, you can't know if the dorg's there unless you look.
you can't do any a priori reasoning to determine whether the dog is there. You have to look. It's just that simple. Almost all thought experiments are flawed in this way. You can't choose between the two based on a thought experiment.

That's actually not particularly good logic. Of course, it's just an example, and I think everyone will understand the idea.

In any case, empiricism as you describe it doesn't really account for internal reasoning. That said, such reasoning can only be done based on data that has been gained from our senses, so that knowledge doesn't really develop independantly. To use your own example; at some point you have to have learned that some freshmen are jocks and some jocks are band members. That can only be done by assimilating information through your senses.

I would say that your example for Rationalism is faulty. Just because some freshmen are jocks, and some jocks are band members, it does not logically follow that some freshmen are band members.

A less faulty example would be:
All freshmen are students,
John is a freshman.
Therefore, John is a student.

To be sure of your conclusion, draw a diagram.

A blind man can tell what someone looks like by feeling them, and even listening to the noises they make and the noises other things make by bouncing off of them. The deaf can still be great musicians because sound is a wave which can be felt in the skin, even without working ears. Even if neither is fully able to appreciate what a person looks like or a symphony sounds like, they are still capable of gaining vast amounts of information about them. Does it not stand to reason then that Empiricism must be the one which is incorrect? That is, if both cannot be true. After all, they are not completely contradictory, therefore, you cannot say without any doubt that only one must be right, and the other must be wrong.

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No no. See in the first case you are saying that there is some over lap between freshmen and jocks and some overlap between jocks and band members. However, there is nothing that guarenties that said jock freshman are also band members. It doesn't eliminate the possibilty of a freshman jock bandmember but it doesn't confirm it.

In the second one every single freshman has to be a student. Thus since John belongs to the subset of freshman he must be a student.

Also, Quantum mechanics really stresses the heck out of the law of contridictions. Really neither purely empirical or rational approaches will allow for complete understanding most of the time. You gather infromation then use logic. Additionally, sometimes you just have to settle for some uncertainty. If you know the person telling you the dog is there is very trust worthy and would not lie then you can be sure within a reasonable margin the dog is there. Accepting uncertainty just a fact of modern science.

No, if some freshmen are jocks, that means some percentage of jocks are freshmen. What percentage? Who knows? It could concievably be horrifically low. But consider 50% of jocks are freshmen, 50% are not. Statement A is then true.

Now consider, some jocks are band members. First we take the 50/50 split and label the freshmen half A and the non-freshman half B. If half B is 50% band members, then some jocks are band members. Statement B is true.

If some non-freshman jocks are band members, no freshmen band members have been established. Ergo, statement C is false. At least, according to this line of reasoning.

In the second one, 100% of freshmen are students. You have a body of 100, 200, 600,000 freshmen, all are students. Take any one freshmen, he is a student.

However, to reverse it and say John is a student, you cannot then assume that he is a freshman.

This is, essentially, the problem with Rationalism, that paralogisms are so easy to come upon. But there's more than that. It's that you need correct premesies for correct outcomes. And from where you derive correct premesies, you need Empiricism. (Actually, frankly, it's easy to get into that neither logic nor empiricism are true because our senses can be fooled and our logic false. But, this line of reasoning isn't really here for the purposes of this argument.)

For the purposes of this, we'll take an idea that can easily be disproven with (basic knowledge and) emperical analysis.

All freshmen are lions.
John is a freshman.
Therefore, John is a lion.

This is logically true, however, the premise is false. Not all freshmen are lions. If any freshmen are lions, it would be a suprise to me. However, from that proof, you cannot disprove that John is a lion. Theoretically, you could go back through other proofs, but looking at John would rather instantly disprove that he was a lion. And, in fact, the first posit.

So (assuming that you can't use neither) you need both.

Edit: Looks like Sithdarth got in first.

Sorry, i wrote it out wrong. It should have read All freshmen are jocks. I'll edit it in now.

And That's why I love logic so much...

I damn modern philosophy classes for attempting to teach us approaches to life lessons and inadvertently making us more absolutist. As if language, as a social construct, weren't absolutist enough in its syntax, we are constantly presented with 1:0 scenarios.

Reality is a mixture of both. They compliment each other, and you can not solely rely on either, which is why you feel a tug of war with this question. Ithink the important lesson is not to walk away with one, but trump the equation (think I Heart Huckabees) and come up with an even more logical blend.

Then again, there could be a secret pact among all philosophers, acknowledging this flaw, and agreeing that they will still present the scenario to us to see if we can spot it.

Now that I'm done with that, and I see...Dj Starchild beat me to it.

Perfect, and more succinct.

Well said, and important to recognise. I often find that this concept eludes people because they view it as an abstract argument, but it really is a linguistic one. Language is absolutist in a world of grey areas, an unfortunate paradox, since we are imperfect and can only approximate things to the most pragmatic and satisfactory degree. There are so many alleged paradoxes that boil down to affirmative and negative verbs and statements, and disingenuously cloak the real issue at hand.