Rationalism

Rationalism

rationalists can define innate ideas as that which the content cannot be gained from experience; triggered instead
Experience as a trigger
1. E.g. Birds only need to hear a little of the song of their species before able to sing - far too little experience to learn from experience
2. Leibniz - veined marble
3. criticisms
  1. If experience is necessary trigger is it just saying that to have an innate idea is to have capacity to come to know idea?
    1. Would reduce all ideas to innate ideas
    2. E.g. have capacity to discover facts like height of mount everest - clearly not known innately
Innate knowledge of language
1. Chomsky: Knowledge of grammar is innate
  1. poverty of stimulus argument - children learn linguistic grammar accuracy so fast and from poor info - knowledge cant come from experience
    1. Children can construct and identify grammatically correct sentences
      1. 1) on the basis of far fewer examples than they can classify 2) many sentences are ungrammatical 3) many mistakes children make are not corrected
        example of 2) when speaking we say things like "the cat...look there- on the mat." - incomplete interrupted sentence
        So children have innate knowledge of language that is triggered from exposure
  2. Criticisms
    1. Argue that this is not knowledge, children would have to have beliefs about it. Ability knowledge
      1. could argue that innate ability generates innate knowledge
Plato thought our innate knowledge was knowledge of the forms (perfect ideas which exist independently of us)
1. Know 2 sticks are of equal length, have not gained idea of equality from experience but from form of equality
2. we recollect or remember out knowledge of the forms in apply concepts
  1. E.g. Socrates talks to slave boy about theorem in geometry - slave boy knows nothing but gets right answer in response to Socrates's questions
3. criticism: could argue answer gained through reasoning - but then still rationalism
Mathematical knowledge - example of synthetic a priori
1. 2+2 always=4
2. Empiricists agree, but think analytic a priori
  1. Could argue; how could mathematical discoveries then be made? can't discover if true by definition
3. Descartes could work out the size of the sun using maths - no sense experience needed
Ayers verification principle - criteria for meaningful statements
1. if a statement is analytic or empirically verifiable
  1. Criticisms: principle itself meaningful - not analytic and not empirically verifiable. meaningless
Capacity to grasp ideas purely intellectually and work with them is crucial in science - Leibniz
1. "A corpuscle hundreds of thousands times smaller than any bit of dust" - can imagine

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