Stu Taba's Rogue Messiah:The Philosophical Wanderer Chapter 4 (Pgs. 29-31)

                                                                     Chapter Four

            From a small seed a mighty trunk may grow.
                                                     Aeschylus

     In Chapter Six, author/teacher Morris shows how- without proof of evidence- it can still be rational to believe our most basic beliefs of life. In doing so, he adds to our thought processing tool-kit. But first, Morris outlines the foundations of knowledge held by the camps of empiricism , on the one hand, and rationalism on the other.
     In empiricism , "sense experience is the ultimate starting point for all of our knowledge." Without the "raw material" provided by the senses, "there would be no knowledge at all" The author notes the difficulty in identifying a single belief that was not first encountered by one of our senses: sight, hearing, touch, smell or taste. Therefore, it's "natural...to come to believe that the senses are the sole source and ultimate grounding of belief." (p. 68)
     I turn now to Get a Grip on Philosophy, by Neil Turnbull for a look at John Locke (1632-1704), the first empiricist philosopher of note. An "influential anti-Catholic involved in protestant politics,"  Locke gained attention in both epistemology and political philosophy. He believed that individuals were born without a priori- innate- knowledge; instead, he "viewed the mind of a newborn baby as being rather like a blank slate (tabula rasa) on which experience was to write its knowledgeable story." (p. 110)  Locke believed a thing's property was of primary (size, shape, material composition) or secondary (color, smell, beauty) quality. Primary Qualities are "objective properties inherent in a thing, and hence the true source of  scientific knowledge out that thing," while secondary qualities are "mere subjective appearances and hence...of no concern to an objectively oriented science." (p. 111)
     At any rate, the opposing view to Locke and the empiricists is that of rationalism, which holds that "the ultimate starting point for all knowledge is not the sense but reason." Rationalists believe that "without prior categories and principles supplied by reason, we couldn't organize and interpret our sense experience in any way. We would be faced with just one huge, undifferentiated, kaleidoscopic whirl of sensation, signifying nothing." (p.69)
     Rationalists claim we are born with "innate knowledge," that is, "fundamental concepts or categories in our minds ready for use." (p. 69)  Examples are "categories of space, of time, and of cause and effect." The principle of causation is not impressed upon our psyches by experience, contend rationalists, but a "prior mental disposition"that connects the process of cause and effect.
     The rationalist camp asserts "that at the foundations of our knowledge are propositions that are self-evident, or self-evidently." An example would be the following deductive syllogism:
                   1. All men are mortal.

                   2. Socrates is a man.

                   3. Therefore, Socrates is mortal.

The conclusion Socrates is mortal follows naturally from the application of the second proposition Socrates is a man to the first All men are mortal. Once the first two premises are recognized, it takes no further sense experience to deduce the conclusion.