Q&A: Ontology and Epistemology
Ontology and Epistemology
Question
In Notebook 1 (and I assume in many other places as well), you bring the well-known dispute between the rationalists and the empiricists: whether our cognition of reality takes place through the intellect or through the senses.
This is a point that has been with me for some time: what room is there for a dispute about this? After all, it is obvious that our cognition of reality is made up of both intellect and senses. Is it possible that anyone thinks reality can be known only by means of one of them? Let us try to imagine a person endowed solely with sensory ability—what information could he derive from the array of sense-data he receives (images, sounds, etc.)? After all, a camera too can capture images and sounds, and it is not impossible to create (and presumably there already are) sensors that will detect and classify sensations of smell and taste as well. What information could such sensors derive from these sense-impressions other than their very existence?
The same applies to a person endowed solely with intellectual capacity in all its forms: what could he grasp from existing reality without any sensory information on which to perform his intellectual cognition? Very little.
I do not mean to say only that, in my understanding, cognition of reality necessarily takes place through both. I also do not understand whether this really was the dispute that split philosophy into two camps. It sounds like a dispute of political agendas, not a philosophical debate that is supposed to examine and present positions where both sides stand up to the critique of reason.
Answer
Hello,
in my opinion it is obvious that our perception of reality is composed of both, and it is impossible to dispute that. But not for your reason (that a camera cannot understand, etc.). In principle, one could imagine a person who differs from a camera and is capable of understanding, and yet whose perceptions are only sensory data, without interpretation and without the addition of thought and intellectual processing. The difference between a person and a camera is not only that he can interpret and process data (after all, a computerized camera can do that too), but that he can understand the product of his actions, whereas it cannot. The camera does not understand even a particular event that it observed directly. It simply stores the data, and that is all. But a person can understand such an event, and this too can be the case even without intellectual processing (just for the sake of the discussion; there too there is such processing). With general laws, of course, there is an addition of intellect beyond the observations, and together they lead to the general law.
And indeed, David Hume, one of the prominent empiricists, struggled a great deal with this question, because he understood that pure observation does not bring us to any general cognition at all (such as the laws of nature). At most, it gives us a concrete event that we observed. He understood that thought is integrated into our process of cognition. And on the other hand, the rationalists also do not claim that cognition is only through the intellect, but rather that there are components of cognition that are intellect and not observation.
So what is the argument about? The empiricists claim that everything formed in us beyond the direct sensory data is only a subjective statement of ours, not cognition of the world itself. Thus, in their view, there is no causal relation between events, only constant temporal succession. The causal interpretation is not cognition of the world but a formulation of the facts in our language.
In my opinion this is nonsense, and I explained it in my writings in several places (Two Carts, Truth and Stability, and others).