Rationalism vs. Empiricism

This tends to cause problems with referer-refereant confusion. And people are not very good at spotting intrinsic or assumed knowledge. I learnt quite a lot about this from a guy who was trying to apply computational linguistics to chemistry papers; it turns out that even in this highly artificial environment the reader needs to infer things about chemicals mentioned from their pre-existing (socially constructed) knowledge.

Descartes was willing to please the authorities with rationalist-religious smoke, and very proud of smoking them, too - until he too had to flee to Holland when his empiricism was no longer tolerated. So no, he was not "deeply religious." His codification of empirical methodology (which uses the word analysis in the title) was important to science and the philosophy of science but doesn't promote rationalism, quite the contrary. He did make key contributions to empirical science and mathematics.

Leibnitz didn't create science or do experimental science per se, he was curious about binary numbers and created better notation for calculus (but these are tools not scientific discoveries). His contributions to science are vaguer - he sowed about as much confusion as light. I haven't looked at his biography in a long time, but I have lectured about him at a conference at Harvard.

I certainly agree that scientists tend to be poor philosophers - it's not the same task. Heisenberg's book is just one recent example of that. Descartes and Galileo are exceptions, particularly with regard to codifying what the scientific method was.

While reason could be complementary, that's NOT what Rationalism is, and it's not what the humanists I keep encountering say or write, either - it may be the position they would retreat to if pressed, but it's absolutely not what they say.

Reason has so often been the refuge of the enemies of empiricism. That it shouldn't be this way is true, but careful you don't fall into a "No true Scotsman argument," here; since the complementary view is not an accurate look either at history or of much of academia now, in my experience.

Too-quickly assuming complentarity (as de facto true or worse logically true) is precisely how many people fall into the trap of conflating the two very distinct things.

Reason and the rationalization that preceded it aren't necessary for a single organism to make decisions. It's only when communicating that persuasion and justification come into play.

Logic and math can be thought of as a particularly rigorous form of rationalization that's intended to be universally useful and persuasive, by stripping away unnecessary dependencies on time, place, and community. But local decision-making doesn't need this; it can and usually does cheat using unjustifiable heuristics.

All the theories of divided self, all the theories of divided behavior as automatic and/or conditioned responses, all the theories of humans as inherently irrational, etc lie outside of both of these approaches.

Essentially, these are approaches that hew closely to the mainline of Western Philosophy. They may see each other as "ancient enemies" but that's because they only imagine slight variations on their positions.

There is no measure of the accuracy of knowledge about what correct "reasoning" is without empirical observation of minds and their physical makeup (e.g. psychology, neuroscience). How do you know you or the whole of humanity isn't mentally "color-blind," so to speak, without empiricism? You can't.

Rationalism pits reason against empiricism. Empiricism says that observation is necessary to build a firm foundation of reason.

Do you think a deaf, blind person, with no feeling, and no awareness of their own body would grow up to be able to make reasoned arguments? Of course not. Why not? Because they had no sense experience.

Good empiricists go further and acknowledge that their reasoning is only as good as their sensory organs, including and especially their brain with all of its cognitive quirks.

A good empiricist will acknowledge, for example, that "healthy" "normal" human minds are terrible at solving certain moral problems while "unhealthy" "psychopathic" minds are demonstrably better. This flies in the face of the rationalist argument that healthy humans are fundamentally rational creatures.

And seem both cases seem unlikely, it seems that empiricism and rationalism are more complimentary (AND) than XOR.

Whether I axiomatically start with Rationalism, Empiricism, or some combination of the two I always end with, at the very best, Solipsism (via the Simulation argument), and more so these days just pure philosophical Skepticism. "I think therefore I am" is only true if "I think" is true, and to say that "I think" is to take as a given that I exist, which is begging the question. We might be able to say that "thought exists" (and therefore a thinker must exist, etc) but this is premised on "truth exists", since "thought exists" is meaningless without veracity, and to say "truth exists" is to continues to beg the question in two possible ways: First truth requires a mind in order to be known which is what we're trying to get at in the first place. Or, if that set of reasoning is too shaky for you then: "truth exists" requires truth in order to be true.

I do not think it is useful to stay there, so when I approach the world I have a sort of base understanding that I'm taking certain things which may not be true (my own reason) as true for expediency because the alternative is to cease thinking. But just as arithmetic (the basis of nearly all of mathematics) isn't logically proved unless you assume the Zermelo-Frankel continuum I do the same with my understanding of existence.

That's why I'm in favor of real-world-ism.

In the real world and actual practice we are Rational, Empiricist and Pragmatist in various degrees, not one or the other. We can also be totally irrational or visionary or whatever.