Epistemology

Experience or Reason?

Does substantive knowledge ultimately depend on sense experience, or can reason provide it independently?

Positions

  1. Empiricism

    Sense experience is the ultimate source of substantive knowledge and concepts.

    Held by British Empiricism

  2. Rationalism

    Reason can provide substantive knowledge or concepts independently of sense experience.

    Held by Continental Rationalism

Methods used to investigate this question

  • Empirical Inquiry

    Empirical inquiry grounds and revises philosophical claims through observation, experience, and evidence about how the world or human cognition actually works.

    Open in Methods

  • Inductive Reasoning

    Inductive reasoning generalizes from observed cases to unobserved ones, or from a sample to a wider population, in a way that makes the conclusion likely without guaranteeing it.

    Open in Methods

Discussion

Before asking what we know, philosophy has to say where knowledge comes from. Empiricists ground it in sensory experience and deny any innate content; rationalists hold that reason and innate ideas reach truths the senses cannot supply. The dispute is not over which beliefs we happen to hold but over which source carries authority when experience and reason pull apart.

This is one of several questions once bundled together as "knowledge." A distinct question — whether space and time belong to things independently of human sensibility or are forms through which we experience them — is treated separately under Space, Time, and Experience, and how a belief becomes justified is a further question in its own right.

References