SEP — Rationalism vs. Empiricism (Markie & Folescu)

Peter Markie and M. Folescu, "Rationalism vs. Empiricism," Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. First published 19 August 2004, substantive revision 2 September 2021. T1: a peer-reviewed reference entry by specialists, the same class as sep-epistemology and sep-kant. It is the first source in the spoke that speaks for empiricism rather than mentioning it as the position someone else answers. Found by the 2026-10-06 quality cycle, aimed at growth edge 2.

The definitions, and why they move the line

The entry states the dispute as one about "the extent to which we are dependent upon experience" for our concepts and knowledge, and it relativises every thesis to a subject area S.

Three theses carry the rationalist side:

• Intuition/Deduction: some propositions in S are "knowable by us by intuition alone", and others can be deduced from them.
• Innate Knowledge: "We have knowledge of some truths in a particular subject area, S, as part of our nature."
• Innate Concept: "We have some of the concepts we employ in a particular subject area, S, as part of our rational nature."

The first one does not divide the camps. The authors say "scholars now mostly agree that most rationalists and empiricists abide by" it; empiricists accept intuition and deduction for "relations of the contents of our minds." So the line falls at innateness: "To be a rationalist is to adopt at least one of them." Two further theses are optional, Indispensability of Reason and Superiority of Reason, and the second comes in a Cartesian form (certainty) and a Platonic form (the objects known are better).

The Empiricism thesis: "We have no source of knowledge in S or for the concepts we use in S other than experience." It is a claim about where knowledge comes from if we have any. It does not promise that we do.

Locke and Hume

Locke is the paradigm and also the case that resists the label. He "argued that reason is on equal footing with experience" for some truths, morality the best known, and he accepts intuition and deduction for God's existence, mathematics and ethics. Book I of the Essay attacks innate knowledge with a dilemma: "No proposition can be said to be in the mind, which it never yet knew." Read narrowly, innateness meets counterexamples; read broadly, every truth we could ever learn counts as innate. The entry judges that this criticism "still stands", and notes that "Descartes and Locke have remarkably similar views on the nature of our ideas."

Hume splits propositions into relations of ideas and matters of fact, grounds morals in sentiment, and treats causation as "only presupposed to be holding true, in virtue of a particular habit of our minds." His test for any concept is "from what impression is that supposed idea derived?", and where an idea fails it, he accepts "a more limited view of the contents for those concepts." He also raises the missing shade of blue against his own theory and sets it aside.

Not a single quarrel

The entry's most useful claim for this spoke is structural. Relativised to subject areas, the two positions "need not conflict"; they "only conflict when formulated to cover the same subject." A person can be a rationalist about mathematics and an empiricist about physics. The authors go further and warn that the labels "can impede rather than advance our understanding": "Unless restricted to debates regarding the possibility of innate knowledge, this distinction is best left unused."

On Kant, the entry gives the setting rather than the solution. "A priori" is the name "since Kant" for knowledge justified apart from experience, and whether metaphysics is possible "hinges on how we resolve the rationalist/empiricist debate." It does not treat Kant's own way out; that is in sep-kant and critique-of-pure-reason.

What it does not give

No primary text. Locke's Essay and Hume's Enquiry are quoted inside the entry, so the spoke now holds empiricism at the survey level, as it held Kant before critique-of-pure-reason arrived. Berkeley is only mentioned as hard to place.

Related

empiricism · rationalism · epistemology · sep-epistemology · sep-kant · immanuel-kant · rene-descartes