Philosophical Doctrines: Empiricism, Pragmatism, and Rationalism

Philosophical Doctrines

Empiricism

Empiricism is often summarized in the formula: all knowledge comes from sensory experience. Since through experience we can only know particular events, contingent and relative, any generalization of such data as necessary laws of nature is illegitimate.

Critical to Chance

This associative relationship exists only between my perceptions and mental phenomena, and cannot say anything about how these things are connected outside of my mind, much less assert the existence of a real chance relationship between them. In short, the empiricist, while recognizing the demands of theoretical reason, notes that such demands are unrealistic illusions. On the other hand, empiricism leads to solipsism. Since the sensory organs that provide it are different in each subject, ultimately the knowledge gained from them is private and incommunicable.

Pragmatism

Our beliefs about reality are legitimated by their usefulness in practical life and for being a means to collective ends. The propositions of the sciences of nature are the only ones that can speak of a truth as correspondence with the facts of the world—the only verifiable ones and therefore the only ones with actual empirical significance.

Neopragmatism

The naive belief that a systematic correlation between propositions and facts can be realistically established to verify them, and an even more dubious assumption that those checks constitute ordinary scientific procedure. The notions of verification and falsification or refutation, if understood this way, are naive and problematic, and do not adequately describe the logic of scientific research.

Relativism

Relativist positions vary with the extent and character of the framework declared upon the truth of a cognitive assertion. This ranges from individual relativism, which has ultimately led to coincide with solipsism, to cultural relativism, which depends on the culture in which they operate as such—socially, historically, ethnically, or linguistically. In all cases, truth is only significant within each of these time-space and psycho-cultural frameworks.

Rationalism

In this context, the term rationalism does not mean the defense of reason compared to other faculties or the consideration of rational knowledge as superior to other forms of knowledge. Instead, it refers to the metaphysical claim about the rational nature of reality itself, something which could be described by the Hegelian formula: everything real is rational, and that is at the origin of the so-called principle of sufficient reason.