| .
Basic Concept: Scholasticism, Rationalism, and Empiricism: Epistemology and Three Western Systems of Reasoning In philosophy, the study of knowledge is called "epistemology." While various cultures will derive far different answers, the three essential questions of any culture's epistemology include the following: 1) What can I know?
The first question--"What can I know?"--addresses the categories of knowledge and their discrete definitions (concepts). The second question--"How do I know?"--explores the mechanisms or technologies for knowing anything. The third question--"How can I know if I know?"--considers the demonstration of a "grammar of truth." To frame it in a religious or theological context, by what capacity do we recognize "revelation" as "revelation"? Are we born with a mechanism that can evaluate "truth" as "truth"? How we answer these questions reflects, in part, how we derive conclusions in the process of reasoning. More to the point, how we answer these questions reflects the foundation of the premises that lie behind the conclusions. Three systems of reasoning dominate the world views developed in the western world. These three systems of thinking are scholasticism, rationalism, and empiricism. Scholasticism is any system of reasoning that derives conclusions from premises based upon faith. This faith, of course, is not necessarily religious. For example, a person who votes "straight lever" Republican or "straight lever" Democrat does so on the basis of various preconceptions and beliefs about his or her political party. Any person of a narrow religious persuasion who decides major issues in life on the basis of belief statements is equally scholastic in reasoning. In the tradition of the Christian Church (as it is in any religion), doctrinal statements are "truth" or "belief" statements which the parishioner is obliged to accept on the basis of faith. Christian scholasticism is a system of reasoning that premises all conclusions on the tenets (beliefs) of the Christian faith. While contemporary Christianity tends generally to accept reasoning derived from the senses, on issues of faith, the doctrines of faith are to be accepted as given and without question. Each denomination points to a set of beliefs outside of which lies heresy and non-belief. In the face of contradictions derived from other reasoning systems (i.e. rationalism and empiricism), the Church stands upon its dogma, ambiguity or no ambiguity. With the coming of the Enlightenment in Europe, however, a few courageous thinkers dared to ask questions and to publish findings that flew squarely in the face of Church doctrine. Here's an example of a scholastic dilemma within the Church. Joshua 10:12-14 records a prayer of Joshua commanding God to lengthen the day so that he and his followers might win a battle. The text records that the sun stopped and the day lengthened. In support of the conclusion that the sun, indeed, had stopped, the author of this passage notes emphatically that the event is recorded in the "Book of Jasher," implying, of course, that the "Book of Jasher" tells the truth. The argument can be framed as follows: 1) That the sun stood still is written
in the "Book of Jasher."
While the argument above is logical, the passage represents a singular problem for the Church of the Renaissance. For centuries the Church had held the old Aristotelian-Ptolemaic "Earth-centered" view of the universe in which everything was believed to revolve around the Earth, and this passage only confirms that point of view. Clearly, if the sun circles the Earth, the process for lengthening the day is, in fact, to "stop" the sun in its path around the Earth. The length of the day, however, is not determined by the rotation of the sun around the Earth, but rather, by the rotation of the Earth on its axis in relation to the sun. In fact, the movement of the sun is irrelevant. If this is the case, then the Church faces no small problem. The Church held that, as the unique revelation of God, the Bible is inerrant in any word or phrase. What we know today, however, about the process of determining the length of the day clearly contradicts Joshua's request of God: Joshua should have asked God to have stopped the rotation of the Earth in order to lengthen the day. The Church's position to this challenge was something similar to the "theory of catastrophism" to explain this and other "exceptions," proposing that while the sun may no longer revolve around the Earth, certainly that was the case when this particular passage was penned. Well, maybe . . . While it is easy to dismiss some of the Church's applications of "catastrophism" as simple foolishness today, it was not so easy for the Renaissance "natural philosophers," like Francis Bacon, who began to publish their findings "outside the box" of Church doctrine. All who did so faced severe censure and even death if the Church found their publications to be heretical. The case of Galileo and the condemnation of his astronomical publications had severe repercusions for other independent thinkers. Eventually, however, contradictions to observation and common sense like this forced Christian scholasticism to retreat in the face of a growing body of evidence contrary to certain positions of the Church, particularly those positions on the "nature of nature." Important scholastic thinkers of the Church include St. Augustine in the 5th century and 13th century Catholic thinker, St. Thomas Aquinas. An influential early Protestant scholastic was John Calvin whose "Institutes of the Christian Religion" helped much of the Church's scholastic reasoning after the Reformation. As it evolved, scholasticism was a process of reasoning designed to confirm belief, to put down heresy, and, after Martin Luther's protest in 1511, to resist the influence of the Reformation. With the advent of "natural philosophy" (science) as an academic discipline, scholastics within the Church felt challenged by more and more discoveries about the natural world and universe, and by rationalism and empiricism, two systems of reasoning which rejected the vagaries of scholasticism. In a real sense, rationalism is a system of reasoning with roots in Platonic philosophy of the 5th century B.C. Plato's "Great Chain of Being" theory hypothesized that everything in existence in the physical world is a product of a non-material "first cause" called God. Through "ideal forms"--patterns in the mind of God--everything is extruded into existence in the physical universe through the mind of God. In Plotinus's reconstruction of Plato's though in the Third Century A.D.--a system called "neo-Platonism" that was rejected by the early church as heresy--that full "Chain of Being" theory is elaborated: Those elements further removed in the creative "chain" lose more and more features or attributes of the pure God-head. Human beings, highest element in the creative chain within the physical universe, participate with God in the knowledge of "ideal forms," or categories of knowledge and the rules of the mind that conceptualize them. Similarly, rationalism, dating back to the writings of Rene Descartes in the 17th century, holds that the mind--not revelation, as for the scholastics--is the source of primary knowledge. Descartes' experiment with wax helped demonstrate "cause and effect" reasoning and knowledge of categories. Descartes examined a block of solid wax, noting in writing each of its physical properties. Then he melted the same over a burner and noted the properties of the liquid wax. Clearly, both were wax, but the identification of each was not to be found in the contrasting lists of features. Both were wax, but wherein was the concept "wax"? Only in the mind, of course! Rene Descartes had begun his "Discourse on the Method" (1637) by acknowledging the existence of God which kept him in good graces with the Church. Yet the essay strikes at the heart of scholastic reasoning of any kind. Descartes searches for a ground for knowledge, not faith. "What can I know?" he asks, and "How do we know?" What is the most fundamental fact? Had we been born without senses and the perceptions which arise from them, how would we know even that we are? Because we know that we can doubt our sense experience, the doubt itself implies the doubter. His answer rings down the centuries afterwards: "Cogito! Ergo sum!"--"I think! Therefore, I am." Many rationalists would come to question faith in all perceptions, acknowledging the possibility that all we perceive is a reconstruction of the mind--and perhaps even an imprecise reconstruction, at that. It was certainly possible, thought some, that we are born without a "grammar of truth" that can verify the accuracy of our perceptions. If that were the case, then "faith" in our perceptions was questionable. Such a possibility had deep implications for human ethics and religion. By what criterion of truth can we, with integrity, claim allegiance to any faith or religion, if we cannot discern one more "right" than any other? By the same problem, how can we determine any "right" from "wrong" action? The "dark side" of rationalism, then, holds that only the mind is real-- that we cannot rely on faith that our senses adequately represent the real world, that ultimately, what we think we perceive as the real world is, at best, but only possibly, an unreliable description of our world. Furthermore, it is conceivable that all our perceptions, interpretations, even sense of time and space, are nothing more than the fanciful operations of a quirky mind; in short, nothing short of a dream, and we, according to Mark Twain, the dream makers. More positively, some rationalists held that we are born with innate knowledge, particularly of right and wrong. Henry David Thoreau, one of the nineteenth-century New England transcendentalists, writes in "Civil Disobedience" of the innate "moral sense" by which all people know right from wrong. Others believed that all humans share certain social and behavioral concepts. Many of the colonial American "founding fathers" were Deists who, as rationalists, referenced, as an example, innate principles as justification for the "Declaration of Independence." "We hold these truths to be self-evident," they affirmed, as they outlined their case against George III and England. If the purpose of scholasticism is to equate faith and reason, the purpose of rationalism to define the relationship between the mind and the world, then the purpose of empiricism is to define the relationship between the senses and an external physical universe. For the empiricist, you and I live in an externally real world that exists outside our awareness of it but which is accessible, more or less accurately and completely, through our senses. To the whimsicalities and vagaries of both scholasticism and rationalism, the empiricists would merely laugh. The empiricist rejects "blind faith" in anything and scoffs at the notion of "innate knowledge." In his "Essay on Human Understanding" (1703), John Locke rejected all arguments for "innate" or "a priori" knowledge (knowledge acquired prior to birth). For him and the other early eighteenth-century empiricists, all knowledge is accessed through the senses. The mind is no benign factor but the reservoir of all types and levels of knowledge derived through the senses. In a sense, our whole world view is a factor of sense perception. Our minds are a "tabula raza"--or "blank slate"--on which our senses write the history and every evolving world view. "Empirical truth" is to be understood as a kind of "hard core" truth, a truth subject to tests and verifications. Five criteria define "empirical truth." Real--that is to say, empirical--truth is 1) definable, 2) demonstrable, 3) quantifiable, 4) replicable, and 5) perhaps (though not obligatory) applicable. That is to say, empirical truth can be 1) defined, 2) presented, 3) counted, 4) repeated, and (oh, happy day!) maybe even used for something! Emphasizing the arrogance of empirical confidence, the late twentieth-century British philosopher Bertrand Russell once noted that there are only three kinds of questions: "serious questions," "trivial questions," and "meaningless questions." "Serious questions," said Russell, are questions for which empirically derived answers can be found which will have a meaningful or valuable consequence to the enquirer. "Trivial questions" are those for which an empirical answer may be derived, the consequences of which, however, will be negligible. "All other questions," declared Russell, "are meaningless questions." In other words, there are no tests beyond the scope of empirically derived answers--answers derived through the senses. The effects of empiricism and empirical reasoning in Western First World nations are unmistakable. Empiricism is responsible for all our fast-food French fries and pop-up toast, and placed Neil Armstrong on the moon in 1969. Its advent as the dominant reasoning system dates to the late 15th and early 16th century with the finds of the so-called "natural philosophers." Wave after wave of discoveries about our physical world weakened the hard-held doctrines of the church which interpreted the physical universe. As late as the 1630's, Galileo could be held under house arrest for the publication of his treatise on planetary movements, but the church fathers were on the defensive from that point on and retreated into such anachronisms as the "Theory of Catastrophism." Such a simplistic notion held that the reason the world seems to be different from that described or implied in or interpreted from the divinely-inspired word of God was because all natural law had "shifted" somehow at some point since the writing of the questionable sections found within the books of the Holy Bible. The result was a widening rift between "people of faith" and "scientists" and their supporters, and great debates ranged back and forth over such issues as "creationism" vs. "evolution," "natural selection" and the "origin of the species," and miracles. So put upon by the strength and influence of empiricism was the church that by the end of the 19th century, church leaders themselves felt obliged to seek "empirical evidence" for religious truth, and various excursions were organized and funded to unearth "physical evidence" of a "historical Jesus." Empirical reasoning is sometimes referred to as "non-deductive reasoning," or "probability reasoning." It begins with an hypothesis--a hunch or guess about the nature of some phenomenon. Then, the observer begins to gather data related to the elements suspected to reflect a certain pattern or relationship. The observer takes notes, looks for evidence, then the hypothesis is revised or rejected and a new one is formulated to take its place. Again, the observer gathers evidence and analyzes it carefully. If the newer evidence supports the hypothesis, then the observer begins an exhaustive series of tests and retests in order to verify the hypothesis as a general rule rather than as an exception to some other explanation or interpretation. Based upon such recurring information, greater degree of likelihood or probability is established until the observer is comfortable in defining a general rule, or theory. Once empirical inquire became established
as a formal process of discovery in the natural sciences, it wasn't long
before the criteria were adopted in the growing fields of the life and
social sciences as well. So convinced was Franklin in his faith in
empirical criteria that he threw out the old medieval curriculum (deeply
rooted in scholasticism) when founding the academy that became the University
of Pennsylvania and adopted empirically-based studies as the core of his
new or so-called "modern curriculum" of studies. His core of studies
still dominates Western education today.
Rationalism
"Meditations
on First Philosophy" (1631)
 |