Knowledge and justification
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Rationalism and empiricism; the Discourse on the Method
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Returning to our current enquiry, if empiricism is the thesis then rationalism is the anti-thesis. In its most general form, rationalism denies empiricism. It maintains (1) that there is knowledge and (2) that knowledge is not obtained from sense-experience alone. Rationalism encompasses a very wide range of beliefs – one of the most extreme forms of rationalism was proposed by Descartes. He first attempted to demonstrate that sense-experience could not be the basis of knowledge. The following passage indicates what he held to be the foundation of knowledge. Descartes: Discourse on the Method: I decided to reject as false all the reasons that I had previously accepted has having been demonstrated to be truth. I did this firstly because our senses sometimes deceive us, so it is possible that nothing is exactly what we imagine it to be, and secondly because some men deceive themselves by making errors in their reasonings, committing paralogisms even in the simplest cases of geometric proof, and I realized that I was as much prone to make errors as anyone else. Likewise, since any thought or idea that we can have while awake can occur to us in our sleep, I resolved to take everything that ever entered into my mind as containing no more truth than the illusions of my dreams. Nonetheless, immediately after forming this idea I observed that even when I thought that everything was false, it was nonetheless essential that the "I" who is the subject of this thought is something, and so I concluded that I think, therefore I am was absolutely certain and incapable of being overturned as a truth by even the most extravagant skeptical propositions. I concluded that I could without any doubt whatsoever accept this statement as the first principle of Philosophy that I had been looking for.
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Contents of
Knowledge and justification
1 The distinction between knowledge and belief
2 Unsound, invalid, possible world and fallacy
3 Counterexample, exposing a fallacy
4 Belief and doubt
5 Believing that and knowing that
6 Knowledge and certainty - the tripartite definition of knowledge
7 True, justified belief
8 Plato: The Theaetetus
9 Plato: Forms
10 The possibility of scepticism and categories of belief
11 Global scepticism
12 The Argument from Authority
13 Valid argument, inference and justification
14 Chain of deductive inferences, self-evident truths
15 Sense experience, empiricism
16 The dialectic method, thesis and antithesis
17 Rationalism and empiricism; the Discourse on the Method
18 The Cogito, Reason and Rational Insight
19 Bertrand Russell, Acquaintance
20 Universals, Forms
21 Scepticism, Existentialism and Faith
22 The evil genius argument
23 Existentialism
24 Soren Kierkegaard - Fear and Trembling - the Absurd
25 Foundation for Knowledge
26 Theory of Knowledge, Epistemology and Metaphysics
27 Rationalism, Mathematics and Logic, Innateness
28 Innate Ideas
29 The a priori
30 Truth by convention, Hume and the Method of Doubt
31 Hume and the distinction between belief and knowledge
32 Hume and the definition of belief
33 Truth as a logical operator on sentences
34 The correspondence theory of truth
35 Wittgenstein: On Certainty
36 Wittgenstein and the coherence theory of truth
37 William James and Pragmatism
38 W.V.O. Quine, pragmatism and the Two Dogmas of Empiricism
39 Postivism and pragmatism
40 Pragmatism and utilitarianism
41 Pragmatism and religiion
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