2. Epistemology
• How do we know what we know?
• Types of knowledge
– Acquaintance: I know Oxford well.
– Know how: I know how to ride a bike.
– Propositional: I know that elephants are
grey.
• Belief v. knowledge
– Knowledge has a justification or evidence
3. Reason and experience
• The terms ‘rationalist’ and ‘empiricist’ can
be applied to
– theories of knowledge
– theories of concept acquisition
– theories of justification
– historical schools of thought
• Why choose reason or experience?
– Most rationalists allow knowledge from
experience.
– All empiricists use reasoning to establish
conclusions.
4. Reason and experience
• Experience: just sense
experience? What
about religious
experience?
• Reason: just
reasoning? What
about intuition?
5. A clear distinction
• Rationalism: we can have substantive a
priori knowledge of how things stand
outside the mind.
• Empiricism: we cannot.
6. Substantive knowledge
• Substantive knowledge is knowledge of a
synthetic proposition. Trivial knowledge is
knowledge of an analytic proposition.
– An analytic proposition is true or false in virtue
of the meanings of the words.
– Not all analytic propositions are obvious: ‘In five
days time, it will have been a week since the day
which was tomorrow three days ago’ - true or
false?
7. A priori knowledge
• A priori: knowledge that does not
require (sense) experience to be
known to be true (v. a posteriori)
• It is not a claim that no experience was
necessary to arrive at the claim, but
that none is needed to prove it.
8. Two quick points
• Empiricists do not claim there is no a
priori knowledge; they deny there is
substantive a priori knowledge.
• Rationalists (except for Plato) do not
claim sense experience can never
provide knowledge.
