Rationalism In Critical Thinking

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Rationalists say that knowledge is based off reason and that without reason we wouldn’t be able to make to make anything from our senses and surroundings. Rationalists claim that we are born with several fundamental concepts or categories in our minds. These fundamental concepts are also called innate knowledge, for example, time or space. According to rationalism knowledge is based of self-evident truths. An example of a self-evident truth is that all bachelors are unmarried. This is simply true there is no reason or problem solving necessary to find out if this is true or not. A good way to understand rationalism is through math, rationalists say that you don’t need sense experience to know that that 2+2 is 4. Through reason alone you can determine this. René Descartes is a well known philosopher in the area of rationalism. He tried to prove that you can come up with truths without sensory experience. For instance, his famous "I think, therefore I am" is a conclusion reached a priori without sense experience and only using self-evident truths. The opposite of rationalism is empiricism, which is the theory that our knowledge comes from sense experience. Empiricists say that humans can only have knowledge that is a posteriori or based on experience. …show more content…
They claim that there are no such things as innate ideas and at birth the mind is like a blank slate that will be filled through our experiences. Empiricists claim that we create ideas through our experiences and have made two different categories for the ideas, simple ideas and complex ideas. Simple ideas are created through experiences, for example, by touching fire you learn that fire is hot. The second category is complex ideas which are created by the brain combining simple ideas. There are three ways that the brain combines ideas, compounding, relating, and abstracting. Before going in depth into these three categories it is important to understand two other ideas that John Locke proposed. These are primary and secondary qualities. Primary qualities describe an object itself such as size, shape, texture or mobility. Secondary qualities are like color, smell, taste, sound, and texture. The difference between qualities and ideas is that Ideas are in our minds, but qualities are the properties of physical which cause ideas in our minds. Compounding ideas is when simple ideas are combined into complex ideas of things. For example flying and pig would be combined into a flying pig. Relating ideas is when ideas are related to create a complex idea of relationship, for example, cause and effect or space and size. Abstracting ideas is when a complex idea is forms from multiple experiences, so multiple experiences with dogs will give you the idea of dogs. Kantian constructivism was as the name suggests started by Immanuel Kant. Kant kind of took a middle road between rationalism and empiricism. Kant thought that we can gain a lot of knowledge by experiencing the world around up but there were some concepts you have in your head that you couldn't have got by experiencing the world, but you also couldn't have just sat down and figured them out either. Take the concept of space for instance, as in distance between objects, you rely on that concept a lot during everyday life. Imagine a baby experiencing the world for the first time, they couldn't comprehend that that object is over there and I'm over

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