Criticisms of Rationalism

Necessary Truths: All a priori knowledge, can come from deductive arguments or by definition of the words. Examples: Contingent Truth: Is a truth that could have been otherwise. A posteriori. Examples:

There are 2 strands of rationalism: 1: Innate knowledge 2: The ability to reason in order to bring about knowledge. (Both of these are a priori)

Although Rationalist philosophers Descartes, Leibniz and Spinoza rely on primacy of reason in order to understand the universe, they are all heavily involved with experimental science.

Big Bang scientific experiment.

There is no way for us to know weather their knowledge came from innate rationalism or the ability to reason or weather it came from the sense perceptions.

Knowledge can’t JUST be based on rationalism if Galileo insists that experimental confirmation is necessary to prove theories.

However, Hacking believes that it is reason that enables us to secure knowledge from experiments.

Can we ever accurately predict the results of an experiment?