Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Rationalism is often best understood against the foil of empiricism, for these two styles of philosophizing spring from very different philosophical impulses. Empiricists seek to know the way the world is. Their goal is to gather data, whether from controlled experiment or from hurly-burly experience, in order to produce a description of the world. The drift among them is away from the ideal of a single description of the world toward the acceptability of a multiplicity of descriptions, constrained only by pure pragmatics, to the point that whether there is one world, many worlds, or none at all answering to their describing makes no difference.By contrast, rationalists already know the way the world is. Recall Plato and his doctrine of learning as reminiscence, but also Descartes, who, in ruminating on the essence of material things, finds his discovery of the truth he discovers “not so much learning something new as remembering what I knew before” (Descartes 1985b: 44). Rationalists instead seek to know why the world must be the way it is. Their theories are thus prescriptive instead of descriptive. Descartes, in asserting that existence is inseparable from God, makes clear that the modal terms he employs are based in objective features of the world. “It is not that my thought makes it so, or imposes any necessity on anything.” (This sort of imposition by the mind would be what ... log in or subscribe to read full text