Reason Can Provide Us with New Knowledge About the World. to What Extent Do You Agree with This Statement?
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Reason can provide us with new knowledge about the world.
To what extent do you agree with this statement?
To create an opinion of this statement I must look at both the arguments. Empiricists would argue that this statement is false as they believe that all knowledge is posteriori, knowledge gained after sense experience as they believe that all our knolidge is gained from sense expierience in this world. However Rationalists would fully agree with this statement as they believe that we do hold knolidge innately before expierience, also known as Priori knolidge, and so by using this innate knolidge we can learn new things about the world. I am going to explore the evidence and problems posed with this rationalist theory.
G.E Moore argues morals, good and bad cannot be defined, and so they must be known intuitivly. He likens the good to the colour yellow because it is understandable, evaluational but cannot be defined, because both the colour yellow and good are self evident, and can only be known by intuition they are innate. This to me seems like a well reasoned logical explination on where we get morals from and how we understand and form the concepts that are good and bad, however Hume explains that morals agreeably cannot be based on sense expieriance but are from our emotions and inner faculties that are innate such as guilt and sympathy, this seems more explanitory and is also logical .
Although both of these philosophers are suggesting we have and use innate knolidge in the world, I believe that although Hume and Moore give convincing theorys on how we gain morals, and although we may innately have inner moral faculties, we would not feel sympathy or guilt if something within the world causes us to feel that emotion, even though we have the potential to feel these, we would need to feel them to have knolidge and truely understand them. so we are still gaining posteriori knolidge because its from feeling these different emotions and understanding why when we do bad things we feel guilt and why when we see something bad happening to someone we feel sympathy, that we gain morals. Therefore most can argue that reason dose not give us the knolidge of morals, we gain that from expieriance.
Rationalists would also argue that we are born with certain truths, knolidge, we know innately things such as simple maths and geometry, things such as our understanding of right angles, finding and explaining the hyperbolic and elliptic. Socrates also wanted to prove this so he