Ontology and Epistemology
In Notebook 1 (and I assume in many other places), you bring up the well-known dispute between rationalists and empiricists, whether our knowledge of reality is carried out through the mind or through the senses.
This is a point that has been with me for some time. What room is there for dispute about this? It is clear that knowing reality is made up of both the mind and the senses. Is it possible that some people think that reality can be known only with the help of one of them? Let’s try to imagine a person who is endowed solely with sensory ability. What information can he extract from the multitude of tangibles that he produces (images, sounds, etc.)? After all, a camera is also capable of recording images and sounds, and it is not impossible to create (and apparently already exist) sensors that will also record and classify sensations of smell and taste. What information can those sensors extract from these tangibles, apart from their own existence?
The same applies to a person who is endowed solely with intellectual ability, with all that it entails. What is he able to absorb from existing reality without any tangible information on which to base his intellectual cognitions? Very little.
I don’t mean to say that in my understanding, knowledge of reality is necessarily achieved by both, but I don’t understand whether this was really the dispute that split philosophy into two streams? It sounds like a dispute over agendas in politics, and not a philosophical debate that is supposed to criticize and present discussions in which both sides face the critique of reason.
Hello (SOS is a serious topic :)).
In my opinion, it is clear that the perception of reality is made up of both and it is impossible to disagree with anything. But that is not your point (that a camera is incapable of understanding, etc.). In principle, it would be possible to think of a person who is different from a camera and capable of understanding, and yet his perceptions are only sensory data without interpretation and without the addition of thinking and mental processing. The difference between a person and a camera is not only that he can give an interpretation and process data (since a computerized camera can also do this), but that he can understand the product of his actions and she cannot. The camera also does not understand a specific event that it directly observed. It simply stores the data and that is it. But a person can understand such an event, and this too without mental processing (just for the sake of discussion. There is such processing there too). In general laws, there is of course the addition of reason beyond observations, and together they lead to the general law.
Indeed, David Hume, one of the prominent empiricists, grappled with this question a lot, as he understood that pure observation does not bring us to any general knowledge (like the laws of nature). At most, it gives us a concrete event that we observed. He understood that thinking is integrated into our process of knowledge. On the other hand, rationalists do not claim that knowledge is only in the mind, but that there are components of knowledge that are mind and not observation.
So what is the debate about? Empiricists claim that everything that is created in us beyond direct sensory data is only our subjective statement and not a recognition of the world itself. Thus, according to their theory, there is no causal relationship between events, but only a constant temporal sequence. Causal interpretation is not a recognition of the world but a formulation of the facts in our language.
In my opinion, this is nonsense, and I explained this in Totod in several ways (two carts, truth and instability, and more).
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