> On Nov 24, 2015, at 1:26 PM, Jon Awbrey <[email protected]> wrote: > > Yes, that's why I prefer to speak of “empirical” and “rational” > as referring to “aspects of reality” or “tendencies of mind”. > I gave that bit from Runes as a standard point of departure > only because it seemed to me that some folks here might be > thinking of rationalism in that vein. I'm not sure that > creating more labels is the way to go but I thought I'd > try using the phrase “philosophical rationalism” from > Peirce that Clark quoted as a way to distinguish the > more extreme position from the way the rationalistic > tendency has figured in scientific contexts in more > recent years. Here I am thinking of the way it > came up during the cognitive revolt, notably > Chomsky's review of Skinner, and maybe to > a lesser degree the later debate between > Chomsky and Piaget. > > Curiously enough, we can still speak of rationalism as involving > “an attempt to introduce mathematical methods into philosophy”, > but mathematicians have been shifting how they view their methods > since the middle of the 19th Century at least, as augured in part > by the Symbolist Movement, and Peirce contributed a few shifts of > his own to the prevailing sea change.
Clearly my knowledge of the early modernists is a bit fuzzy. However I am curious if perhaps one way to deal with this is the problem of induction. As I recall Leibniz saw that problem prior to Hume. Leibniz saw the problem of moving from knowledge of particular instances to general knowledge. I just don’t recall if Leibniz allowed induction to arrive at real knowledge. My inclination is to say he didn’t. With Peirce this is a huge difference since of course we can have knowledge by induction or abduction in addition to deduction yet the issue is continued inquiry rather than that move towards deductive reasoning. Invoking mathematical methods is interesting since arguably in practice mathematics was a bit looser than it should have been. (Thus the move in the early 20th century to shore up mathematics which didn’t go as well as intended) Of course if one is a strong mathematical platonist then insight can sometimes count as much as formal proof. So the question might well be which mathematical methods the Rationalists were bringing to philosophy. I suspect it was both formal reasoning but also a certain intuitive power. (Much like Socrates says the young boy knows math because of remembering)
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