Empiricists are the philosophers who believe that there is no natural,
or innate, knowledge. At birth, each
individual is born with a blank slate and from there each bit of information
they will ever know is learned. According
to empiricists, our senses are the ultimate source of all the information we
will ever know. And then there are
Rationalists, the philosophers who do believe in natural knowledge. Rationalists believe that there are ways
outside the senses for one to collect information.
The argument that seems the most
plausible to me is rationalism. Though a
great deal of our knowledge comes from our senses, I would argue greater than
fifty percent, there is still a percentage that comes from an outside source
that needs to be accounted for. For instance math, the understanding and
learning of numbers and how to work with them has nothing to do with our five
senses, yet we know how to do it. Another example of learning independently
from our senses is logic and reasoning, something that can be arguably taught
and understood but has nothing to do with see, hear, touch, smell, and
feel. A last argument I will use to show
how we can learn apart from our senses is our ability to know right and wrong. Being a moral and ethically correct is
obviously strived for and looked up upon, however again, has nothing to do with
the five senses. All of these examples
are proof that learning can take place outside the senses, thus proving that
rationalists have a more correct argument. None of these things can be derived
from experience because they aren’t things that just occur, in a way they’re
kind of man-made ideas.
A. Empiricism has more explanatory breadth than rationalism because
most ideas do come from our senses. A lot of our knowledge comes from our
senses as mammals down to the primal instincts, whether people notice and think
it or not.
B. Empiricism has more explanatory depth because there are more ideas
that you can learn from and go into details about.
C. Empiricism has more simplicity because it states that you learn
from your experiences and nothing more. There are no outside factors that
contribute to your knowledge which would complicate things.
D. Rationalism has more conservatism because it deals with things
such as math, logic, and reasoning which are things that we deal with every day
and learn at a very early age which makes it sometimes appear as common sense.
I disagree with you when you state that rationalism has more conservatism than empiricism. I would say that it is common sense that everyone is born with certain levels of feelings, emotions, and instincts. However, I do not believe that we are born knowing math, logic, and reasoning. I believe that it is irrational to say that a child with no life experiences or time in school understands math or science, for example. Topics such as math and science must be learned through experience. Our common sense beliefs line up more clearly with empiricism, in my opinion, because even though we are born with instincts, we are not born with knowledge or ideas.
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