"All the objects of human reason or inquiry may naturally be divided into two kinds, to wit, "Relations of Ideas," and "Matters of Fact." Of the first are the sciences of Geometry, Algebra, and Arithmetic, and, in short, every affirmation which is either intuitively or demonstratively certain.

Rationalists generally develop their view in two ways. First, they argue that there are cases where the content of our concepts or knowledge outstrips the information that sense experience can provide. Second, they constuct accounts of how reason in some form or other provides that additional information about the world. Empiricists present complementary lines of thought. First, they develop accounts of how experience provides the information that rationalists cite, insofar as we have it in the first place

yep it sure did and is very enlightning james - thnx for that, i will se how it goes but it sounds very true to me.

I should probably add here also that I stated that rationalism and empiricism have two different domains.

In truth this isn't my stance.

I'm not sure if rationalism has any true meaning at all. Empiricism clearly had meaning with respect to the empirical world. In fact, I hold that without experience there would be no way of deducing the empirical world. I hold to this notion based on the following:

If the empirical world could be deduced using pure thought without any experience at all, that would imply that there is only one way to construct an empirical world, and that world is the world we live in. I'm personally not sold on that idea. I believe the universe in which we live truly is based on various random parameters and there may be many physical universe possible that are not the same as this one.

Of course, I have no 'empirical' way of proving this. But the mere fact that I can rationalize it with pure thought should be enough to convince a rationalist that there's a fly in the soup.

I consider myself to be both a rationalistic thinker as well as an empiricalistic thinker. I can dive into either thought pool. But I can also see where rationalistic thinking cannot come to a concrete conclusion about anything without standing upon some empirical evidence. And even much of the so-called 'pure' mathematics is truly based on empirical evidence. It a fallacy to believe otherwise.

So I guess my ultimate conclusion is that empirical thought has value in the domain of the physical. However, rational thought has no value at all. Not even in the ream of the spiritual. And the reason being that ultimately, without a solid empirical premise of some sort to stand on, rational thought can basically begin with whatever it so chooses, and thus go anywhere. It can't be used to reach any genuine conclusions about anything. Truly.

The true nature of the spiritual world cannot be know. A better way to think of this is really quite simple.

"With God all things are possible". If you don't like the word "God" try replacing it with the word "spirit".

Well, if all things are possible what's to figure out? Anything goes!

So the very idea of figuring things out using pure thought alone, is to merely suggest that pure thought is ultimately limited in what it can do!

This universe is the results of random seeds. That doesn't imply that it's pure happenstance. Not in the least. It a random toss of organized dice so-to-speak. Nothing happenstance about it. Yet it is still random. And because it is random it can never be figured out using pure thought. It must be figured out relative to the random seeds that gave it birth. for this reason, this particular universe can only be understood via empirical reasoning, and can never be rationalized using pure thought alone.

I hope this post made sense because it took a long time to type in.

Thanks Sam. I just realized that last post was riddled with minor typos. Hopefully that won't distract from its core message.

Those who know don't speak...

Those who speak...

ANOTHER bloody label....

I'm off to find a cyclone to blow all these other ones off people have stuck on me...

Number two seems to imply that there is no intuition, no innate knowledge, no sixth sense (unaware that we have a sixth sense probably) no knowledge or information besides that which we observe and gather and collect via our senses during our short and single lifetime.

I think this is where people often make a mistake.

They think that empiricism is restricted to only that which can be measured on a detector.

I personally feel that this is an incorrect view.

In fact, one of the reasons that people feel this way is because many people who tend to rely on empirical views do indeed tend to say things like, "Well if it can't be measured by science then it can't be known".

That's a foolish statement for anyone to make because science is far from knowing everything that is empirically knowable.

For all we know intuition may very well be empirically knowable.

We just don't know yet.

We simply don't have a complete handle on what is and isn't empirically knowable yet.

But outside of that, I would hope a scientist would consider the other method too and not confine himself inside of that box.

I'm playing with Calligraphy pens.

I'm practicing so I can write my book of shadows.