Chapter 4.   Part D  

  Rationalism appears to be a regular precursor to intolerance. Rationalism in one stealthy form or another – oh, those secret truths that only the members of the secret in-group know! – has too often been a dangerous and even pathological affliction of human minds. The whole design of democracy is intended to remedy, or at least attenuate, this flaw in human thinking. In a democracy, decisions for the whole community are arrived at by a process that combines the carefully sifted wisdom and experience of all, backed up by references to observable evidence and a process of deliberated, openly-discussed, cooperative decision-making. One of the main intentions of the democratic model is to neutralize secret in-groups. In the sub-culture of democracy called "Science", for example, no theory gets accepted until it has been tested against reality, and the tests have then been peer-reviewed.

  

    Of course, while some of my argument against Rationalism may not be familiar to all readers, its main conclusion is familiar to Philosophy students. It is David Hume's conclusion. The famous empiricist stated long ago that merely verbal arguments which do not begin from material evidence, and yet later claim to arrive at conclusions which may be applied in the material world, should be “consigned to the flames”. (5.) Cognitive dissonance theory only gives modern credence to Hume's famous conclusion.

   Rationalism cannot serve as a firm and reliable base for a full philosophical system; its method of progressing from idea to idea, without reference to physical evidence, is at least as likely to end in rationalization as it is in rationality. Or, to be exact, trying to find a beginning point for a complete, life-regulating system of ideas – a philosophy – is far too important to my well-being for me to risk myself, my kids, and my everything on a beginning point that so much historical evidence says is deeply flawed. In order to build a universal moral code, we are going to need to begin from a better base model of the human mind. 

 Rationalism's failures lead us to conclude that Rationalism's way of ignoring the material world, or trying to impose some pre-conceived, theoretical model onto it, doesn't work.

  But beginning from sensory impressions of the material world, which is Empiricism's method, doesn't work either. It can't adequately describe the thing that is doing the beginning. Besides, if we lived by pure Empiricism, i.e. if we just gathered experiences, we would be transfixed by what was happening around us. At best, we would become “collectors” of sense data, recording and storing bits of experience, but with no idea what to do with these memories or how to do it or why we would even bother. We would have no larger model or vision to work under, and therefore, no strategies for avoiding the same catastrophes that our ancestors fell into and had to learn, by pain, not to fall into.

  Even the most dedicated of empiricistic/scientific researchers need concepts and theories, that is, general systems for organizing their ideas, to enable the researchers to formulate hypotheses that they then can test in their scientific research. Otherwise, what would they do with a lab but stumble in and stare at the equipment?

    Meanwhile, in the practical affairs of real, daily life, a purely empiricist, naive, unsophisticated, innocent outlook – one with no theories or models to begin from – actually wouldn’t be that pleasant. Without concepts and models of reality learned from the mentors of our cultures to guide us, we would inevitably have to build some, in order to survive the hazards of the real world. Hunger, disease, and wolves lurk. In that scenario, we would have to recapitulate all of the painful mistakes of human history. 

    So. Where are we now in our larger argument? I have to have a comprehensive system that gives coherence to all of my ideas and so to the patterns of behavior that I design and implement by basing them on those ideas. But if both of the big models of human thinking and knowing that traditional Western Philosophy offers – namely, Rationalism and Empiricism – seem shaky and unreliable, then what model of human knowing can I begin from? The answer is complex and controversial enough to deserve a chapter of its own.   

Notes 

    5. Hume, David; "An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding"; cited in the wikipedia article "Metaphysics".     http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphysics#British_empiricism