Rational And Empirical Knowledge

Rational and Empirical Knowledge

Should we base our knowledge of the world on empirical or rational knowledge?

According to the Merriam Webster Dictionary, knowledge is ‘the fact or conditionof knowing something with familiarity gained through experience or association’. We all have knowledge about things, however not all of us gain it by the same means or interpret it similarly. There aretwo ways of thinking which divides knowledge into two categories: rationalism and empiricism. These are called ‘schools of thought’. Rationalism is knowledge by acquaintance, meaning it is based onreason and not from experience. Empiricism is knowledge by description which is based only on the things that can be witnessed and experienced first hand. Each type of knowledge has its advantages anddisadvantages so it is of great importance to investigate and analyse each one in order to decide on which kind of knowledge it would be best to base your knowledge on.

Rationalism is a point ofview that considers that the main role in understanding the world and gaining knowledge is by reason, and not by experience. One key point in this school is that rationalists argue that knowledgegained without experience is much more reliable as it doesn’t come from peoples’ senses. They have found out various ways in which knowledge can be gained independently of sense experience. For instance,if we remote to the 4th century BC, we find that the Greek philosophers, Socrates and Plato, argued that our senses only permitted us to see one view of the world: the physical one, which wasconsidered less important than the internal view of the world which meant our souls (thoughts, feelings, emotions).

As a result, rationalists’ views of things are usually divided in two perceptions. Thefirst one, which has already been said, is that, in some cases the amount of knowledge obtained from reason is much better in quality and quantity than the content that can be obtained from sense...