文件名称：Knowledge and Mind
文件大小：325KB
文件格式：CHM
更新时间：2021-05-21 02:54:10
Knowledge, Mind
MIT 的经典！who lean more towards the latter are called RATIONALISTS. Extreme empiricists think that there can be no nonsensory knowledge because, to use one famous slogan, the mind is a "blank slate" (i.e., tabula rasa) at birth. So, whatever ideas end up in the mind must have been put there by experience. The rationalists, on the other hand, deny that the mind is vacant at birth: they are happy to allow that human minds contain "ideas" (i.e., beliefs, concepts, etc.) at birth. (In fact, rationalists typically downplay the importance of sense-based knowledge, stressing instead knowledge arrived at by "pure thought." Only the latter is, for them, genuine knowledge. The rest is mere "opinion".) Empiricists and rationalists, in addition to disputing what contents the mind has at birth, also typically disagree about the power of our innate cognitive capacities. A rough comparison: a factory has both machines, and materials that the machines work on. "Cognitive capacities" are the machines of the mind; while "ideas" are its materials. Empiricists are willing to admit that some capacities are there from the start, since without some innate capabilities, no learning would be possible. The ability to remember, for instance, or to associate one sensation with another, are innate mechanisms that even empiricists embrace. But they generally allow only these very minimal mechanisms. Rationalists, in contrast, believe that the human mind has very powerful and creative cognitive faculties at birth. It is innate ideas together with these dynamic reasoning abilities that, according to the rationalists, give human beings the kind of knowledge that cannot be obtained via sensation. (Such knowledge purportedly includes mathematical knowledge, moral knowledge, knowledge of God, and knowledge of language—none of which, say the rationalists, is adequately accounted for by empiricist theories of knowledge acquisition by sensation.) The debate between rationalists and empiricists, notice, is not about what we know. Instead, the issue is how we know what we do, as well as what the ultimate foundation of "real" knowledge is: experience or reason. In part I we will consider at length some epistemological questions. For the moment, we hope that we have given you some idea of what epistemology is all about.