Empiricism And Epistemology

We acquire and use knowledge every day and yet we rarely stop and think about the process through which we acquire knowledge. Epistemology is an area of philosophy that deals with the questions and theories concerning knowledge (Lawhead). There are multiple theories in epistemology with the main ones being rationalism, empiricism, and constructivism. Each theory seeks to answer the important epistemological questions in their own way with some being more convincing than others. I believe constructivism provides the strongest theory of knowledge by combining elements of both rationalism and empiricism in a manner that fixes some of the flaws in each theory. Before I get into constructivism, it is important to go over empiricism as I feel it

To the empiricists, our mind is a blank slate when entering the world and only through experience are marks left on it. Empiricists are content with believing in conclusions that are probable rather than absolutely certain (Lawhead). Our sense experiences may not provide complete certainty as rationalists would like, but it is all we have to go on. Empiricists are against the speculation that rationalists tend to make. Empiricists believe every idea, concept, or term must be tested by tracing it back to an original experience from which it was derived (Lawhead). Empiricists also differ from rationalists by claiming that we have no innate ideas. While some ideas may seem universal, the empiricists would say these are expressions of the relations of our ideas or the generalizations from experience (Lawhead). For example,

Constructivism is the claim that knowledge is neither already in the mind nor passively received from experience but that the mind constructs knowledge out of the materials of experience (Lawhead). Kant first started his epistemology with the belief that we do have knowledge. He found it undeniable that arithmetic, geometry, and physics provide us information about our world. He also believed these disciplines involved universal principles that no future discoveries would ever change. The problem Kant found here is that no collection of particular experiences could ever provide an absolutely necessary basis for such universal claims about all possible experience (Lawhead). This is where Kant decides to combine elements of rationalism and empiricism by claiming that both reason and experience play a role in constructing knowledge. Kant still needed to find a way to explain how we could have synthetic a priori knowledge. This is knowledge that is acquired through reason, independently of experience, that is universal and necessary and provides information about the world (Lawhead). Kant was eventually inspired by Copernicus’ theory that the Earth revolved around the Sun instead of the other way around. Kant decided to switch the center of focus from “knowledge conforms to its objects” to “objects conform to our knowledge” (Lawhead). This means that the only way