social science essay 社會科學dissertation賞析：啟蒙時代中經濟主義和理性主義的區別

 

啟蒙時代，這是一個文化運動的起源從17世紀到18世紀的知識分子，其特點是在科學，哲學，文化和政治的重大革命。這次成功的革命是引入新的概念的自然世界。其中的主要貢獻是建立在經驗主義和理性主義的哲學理論。經驗主義和理性主義的基本區別取決于獲取知識的人在路上。背后的經驗主義的基本原則是真正的世界知識，經驗和實驗的基礎上。相反，另一個主要的科學和哲學的角度是傳統理性主義。它指出，真正的對世界的認識來自純粹的思維，而不是感覺經驗（Hjorland，2005:130-135）。這篇文章將評估經驗主義和理性主義的重要性，以及，每種方法主要人物的想法，同時，解釋梳理經驗和理性的理論在實踐中的顯著改善。首先，前現代社會的基本特征，將簡要介紹，接著分析了經驗主義和理性主義的主要區別，然后將進一步討論每種方法的一些數字的想法。最后，文章將根據解釋社會的變化，在某些方面，通過啟蒙時期。The Age of Enlightenment, which was a cultural movement of intellectuals originated from 17th century to 18th century, was characterized by substantial revolutions in science, philosophy, culture and politics. This successful revolution is to introduce the new concept of the natural world. One of the main contributions was to establish the philosophical theory of empiricism and rationalism. The basic difference between empiricism and rationalism is on the way of people depending on to obtain knowledge. The fundamental principles behind empiricism are that true knowledge of the world was based on experience and experiment. Conversely, another main tradition of scientific and philosophical perspective is rationalism. It states that true knowledge of the world come from pure thinking instead of sense-experience (Hjorland, 2005:130-135). This essay will evaluate the importance of empiricism and rationalism, as well as, the ideas of the main figures in each approach, meanwhile, explain the significant improvement of combing empirical and rationalistic theory in practice. First, the basic characteristics of pre-modern society will be briefly described, followed by an analysis of the main differences between empiricism and rationalism, then the ideas of some figures in each approach will be discussed further. Finally, the essay will under explain the social change through Enlightenment period in certain aspects. 

 

In order to understand the crucial intellectual innovations in the Enlightenment age clearly, it is necessary to provide general information about European thoughts at pre-modern era. According to John Haase (2009:11-15), life was mainly defined in terms of religious faith in Western civilization during the pre-modern period. During this time, humans believed in the supernatural and the natural or social worlds were regarded as the consequence of God will, moreover, the unshakable role of religious institutions regarded the sources of knowledge as divine will, hence, any critical suspiciousness or inquiry into political authority a http://ukthesis.org/shx nd Catholic Church status were considered as heresy (Smith, 2003: 55). This can take the case of the persecution of Galileo. He expressed an opposite view with the Aristotelian scientific theory of the universe which was supported by the Catholic Church, and published his extraordinary observations that the earth rotates around the sun instead of immovable. The Catholic Church considered that Galileo's discoveries challenged the authority of religious status and was unacceptable (Ashley, 2002:74). The significant effect of Galileo affairs caused “even Descartes was reluctant to publish findings which were likely to stir up theological controversy (Smith, 2003:56)." 

 

The rise of empiricism and rationalism during the age of Enlightenment, both in the practice of science and understanding of knowledge, is the property of this period and dominate the philosophical theory in the study of human knowledge. There are three main points which distinguish rationalism from empiricism. The first one is the differing theories about the origin of ideas. Empiricists believed that all ideas can derive from experience including sense perceptions and emotions (Reamer,1992:257-260). Frederic Reamer noted that the principles of empiricism were based on the conception of a mechanistic universe. The universe, which regarded as an enormous machine, those operation principles, were able to be comprehended by human intelligence without seeking help to divine or superstitious explanations. On the other hand, rationalists emphasized that the role of intuitive reason was the essential route to truth rather than observation as the approaches to gain knowledge (Cross, 2008:18-22). The second difference is recognition of innate ideas. According to Michael Dickson (1995:123- 124), rationalism stated that humans could deduce the truth from innate ideas. The innate ideas exist within the human mind before we started thinking and were capable of directly accessing ideas by a priori reasoning; moreover, rationalists stated that some of the entities which the empiricists said were unobservable actually exist. The existence of unobservable entities can be understood by reason instead of sense. Conversely, empiricism denied the existence of unobservable entities, which rejects human beings having innate ideas in the subject area, ideas were built up from experience, and believe that only sense-experience can reveal the truth (Dickson, 1995:122). The third feature differentiating empiricism from rationalism is the methods of investigating problems. The work of Ferry (1992:85) noted that the method advocated by empiricists is inductive approach, which use collected data via careful observation and experiment to acquire knowledge. The key feature of the inductive method is that gain conclusions based on observable facts. In contrast, Ferry also stated (1992:86) that rationalist utilize deductive method to access to truths which are derived conclusions from first principles, indubitable axioms, and then systematic interpreting and mathematical analyzing reasons to deduce other truths. 

Having described the main features of these two intellectual perspectives above, for the reminder of the essay, the focus will shift to discussing the ideas of some main figures of empiricism and rationalism. It regarded Francis Bacon (1561-1626) as the founding father of the empiricist strain because of his remarkable ideas for the methods that people constructed knowledge in Western societies. Bacon shaped the emergence of the scientific perspectives during the period of the Western societies still largely dominated by religious thinking (Porter, 2001:15-17). The reasons made his ideas acclaimed because had compatible relationship with religious viewpoints. According to Smith(2010:47-49), in the writings of Advancement of Learning(1605) and Novum Organon(1602), Francis Bacon first developed the ideas that obtaining knowledge and searching for truth should be based on objective observations and experiments of natural phenomena. Additionally, Bacon argued that there were four categories of false knowledge, or called "idols", which were the mainstream of thinking patterns of people on his day, and stated that scientific methods were the only route to truth (Ferry, 1992:82-83). It can be distinguished as idols of the Tribe--misunderstanding due to human nature, idols of the Cave--misunderstanding based on individual drawbacks, idols of the Marketplace--misunderstanding because of language and words and idols of the Theatre--misunderstanding due to false learning of philosophy (Ferry, 1992:84). Bacon's doctrine of the idols not only represents a stage in the history of false and irrational theories but also is a crucial theoretical element during the rise of modern empiricism. What is more, another famous accomplishment of Bacon is that he utilized inductive method to obtain truth and useful knowledge. According to Henry (2004:17), Bacon advocated that the purpose of performing experiment is to discover facts, rather than to prove what people wanted it to prove. Therefore, Bacon described in detail that the process of the inductive method involves "careful observation of nature, systematic accumulation of data," creating new laws from the knowledge of particular findings and testing these laws by constant experiment (Ferry, 1992: 84). #p#分頁標題#e#

 

Since Francis Bacon set up the scientific perspective of empiricism in the 17th century, other philosophers followed his footsteps to study the human mind and behavior in more details. One of the philosophers continued the study was John Locke (1632-1704). He concentrated on the work of Francis Bacon in order to examine and investigate empiricism more extensive. In his famous writing of Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), he refuted the viewpoints that humans have innate concepts, instead, he claimed that human were born with complete ignorance, all knowledge was founded on and derived from experience, which he called it as sensation (Kramnick, 1995:186). Moreover, another basis of Locke's argument is the notions and perception. Locke believed that human not only have notions in mind, as traditionally thought, but also receive notions through optesthesia, audition, scent, gustation and tactus which means ideas interconnected with sensation (Kramnick,1995:186-187). On the whole, the contribution of Francis Bacon and his scientific method emphasized the crucial role of observation and experiment, while the meaning of John Locke's work had discovered the origins of knowledge. Their thoughts of empiricism have promoted the modern theory of social operation and understanding of the human mind. 

 

In contrast, if said the founder of the empiricist strain of the Enlightenment is Francis Bacon, then the founder of the rationalist strain is Rene Descartes (1590-1650). The work of Hjorland (2004:134-135) stated, Descartes believed that knowledge of eternal truths including epistemological and metaphysical science can be achieved through reason, which is regarded as the guarantor of progress. For example, in Descartes' wax argument, he proved that our senses can be deceived, and the best way of understanding something is through pure thinking. This can be interpreted that we can obtain the idea of what the true nature of an object is by critically evaluating the information we have seen. Meanwhile, in studying the work of Ferry (1992:86-87), Descartes asserted that sense experience can be doubtable because it can create illusion, as a result, a rational pursuit of truth should never accept anything as true. Breaking down each object into elements as many as possible until intuition can grab, and then the clear truths about reality will be discovered by purely deductive process. The famous phrase "I think, therefore I am" was the result of Descartes exercise of radical doubt because he never doubted that he does existed. Furthermore, after the step of suspecting human existence, Descartes then advanced his theory on deducing the existence of God. He claimed that there exist a perfect being and human are imperfect being so that our intellectual capacity to understand the nature world is coming from this perfect being. Descartes' argument about the existence of God can briefly describe as God is a perfect existence than humans and therefore he must actually existent, if God not exist, he would not be perfect (Ashley, 2002:76). As a matter of fact, Rene Descartes play a profound role in rousing scientific perspective during Enlightenment, but his " God exist " ideas bring about a lot of controversies. #p#分頁標題#e#

 

Once the foundations of the idea of rationalism were laid down by Rene Descartes, the ideas of Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) are another noteworthy basis for enlightenment thought. According to Ferry (1992:88), one of the significant Spinoza's opinion were that he opposed the dualism, which Descartes separated the mind and body as two independent entity, because there was no response of how to connect these two entities together. Spinoza believed that the human mind and body, in other words, human thought and sensation is a single identity instead of divided. Moreover, Spinoza denied the existence of a transcendent supreme being in contrast to Descartes theory of “God exist " (Ferry, 1992:89); he identified God with nature and contented that all substances are determined by Nature to exist and cause effects. Thus, based on the understanding of Spinoza's system, it can be interpreted that God is likely to be the natural world and impersonal. This theory was regarded as strong promotion to developing atheism and naturalism, meanwhile, Spinoza himself was considered as one of the rationalistic forerunner to laying the foundations of the 18th century Enlightenment. 

 

Although rationalism and empiricism have quite different features, there are not conflicts with each other that each realm is likely to associating with a particular subject area. For instance, rationalism can be relative to a particular area of mathematics while empiricism may be connected to some of physical sciences. The theory of synthesizing the empiricism and rationalism can be found at the work of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). He aimed to combine the inadequacies between empirical and rationalistic approaches since each approach had strengths and weaknesses (Caygill.1995 Cited in Smith, 2003:132). According to the work of Mark Smith (2003:133), Kant argued that the idea of empiricism is empty because it considers the mind as a blank slate before receiving physical sensations; on the other hand, the theory of rationalism tends to "neglect the role of observational evidence as a way of testing the validity of theoretical statements." It can be interpreted that experience is merely subjective without applying it to reason, while using reason without consideration of functions of experience is likely to cause theoretical illusions. One of the significant contributions of Immanuel Kant in scientific perspective are that a human can only understand the world by compromised the strengths of each approach: human can not comprehend our experiences without reason as well as can not apply our capacity for critical thinking without observation (Bordum,2002:4-21). The influence of Kant's thoughts were profound in Western civilizations that he bridged the controversies between early empiricism and rationalism, and made human imagination more clearly at the centre of social scientific inquiry. 

 

The emergence of modern sciences in Enlightenment brings about momentous transformation in the system of knowledge and provides opportunities to suspect even authoritative belief. The major transformation in society can be focused on religious, intellectual, economic and political. The study of Mark Smith (2003:57-58) indicated that, in terms of religious belief, the role of Catholicism was not as unshakable as the pre-modern period because the emergence of Protestantism which emphasized the human beings as the core of faith. The second transformation in intellectual, for the first time, offered the idea that reasons can be comprehended through the inner working of all objects and placed human beings to reshape the society. In the case of transformation in the economy, the former relationship between the noble lord and bonded slave was replaced by the emerging relations between landlords and tenant farmers, which can be described as capitalist economy. Also, the individual status in society was decided by their role in capital market instead of traditional family background. The further innovation is the politics while treats the French Revolution from 1789 to 1799 as the first step toward political liberalization. Since the modern nation-state show up, the political power transferred from monarchy to legislation and raised competition between parties and “Oligarchic parliamentary system." Meanwhile, traditionally cruel punishments were displaced by relatively democratic law. All in all, these historic progresses have a crucial impact on providing fundamental conditions for the development of modern industrial era. #p#分頁標題#e#

 

To conclude, the development of empiricism and rationalism has considerable impact on evoking the understanding of the relationship between truth knowledge and the role of humans in society. Some key figures summarized the three major characteristic of empiricism and rationalism: how the knowledge came from; whether it exist innate ideas in human mind; and what is the way of investigating problems. Furthermore, based on the accomplishment of empiricists and rationalists, Immanuel Kant synthesized the controversies of the two approach and utilized it in particular subjects. The new ideas setting up during the Age of Enlightenment not only pay an fundamental role for further philosophic development, but also result in social transformations in respects of religious, intellectual, economic and political.

 

Reference: 參考文獻

Ashley, M. (2002). The Golden Century: Europe 1598-1715. London: Phoenlx Press

 

Bordum, A. (2002). The Categorical Imperative Analyzing Immanuel Kant's Grounding for A Metaphysics of Morals, MPP Woking paper NO.4

 

Cross, S. (2008). Sociological theory and analysis. London: University of London

 

Dickson, M. (1995). An empirical reply to empiricism: protective measurement opens the door for quantum realism, Philosophy of Science, 62, 122-140

 

Ferry, M. (1992). An Intellectual History of Modern Europe. Boston: Houghton Mills

 

Haase, J. M. (2009). Postmodernity: Impact and Implications. KwaZulu-Natal: University of Zululand

 

Henry, J. (2004). Science and the Coming of the Enlightenment. In Fitzpatrick, M, et. al. (eds), The Enlightenment World. London:Routledge

 

Hjorland, B. (2005). Empiricism, rationalism and positivism in library and information science, Journal of Documentation, 61(1), 130-155

 

Kramnick, I. (1995). The Portable Enlightenment Reader. Harmondsworth: Penguin

 

Poeter, R. (2001). The Enlightenment. Basingstoke: Palgrave

 

Reamer, F. G. (1992). The Place of Empiricism in Social Work, Journal of Social Work Education, 28(3), 257-260

 

Smith, M. J. (2003). Social Science in Question, London: Sage.