Francis Bacon has articulated this distinction in stating that "empiricists are like ants; they collect and put to use; but rationalists are like spiders; they spin threads out of themselves". Empiricists and rationalists have a different point of view entirely. Empiricists claim that sense experiences are the only source of our knowledge or any knowledge that exists anywhere while the rationalists claim that innate ideas are the only source of knowledge and are constructs of how reason in some form or other provides that additional information about the world which can’t be perceived by the senses. Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz are while Locke, Berkeley and Hume are the British Empiricists. When we see something like: The sum of the angles of a triangle is 180 degrees. OR Parallel lines never meet. Etc we wonder how can we observe these things from sense experience as the above statements don’t give the genuine knowledge of the true world and are true always. So, how did we actually derive such statements. The answer given my empiricists is that all such …show more content…
For example, we know of things by using our sense perception. We know that the color of the chalkboard is black. There is no way to conclusively prove that the chalk board will stay green once we leave the room and stop perceiving it. There is no way to conclusively prove that the chalkboard even exists once we stop perceiving it. Or why does a baby need to learn to walk or talk, why does he or she not have this knowledge at birth? This question can be answered by an empiricist who claims that senses are the only source of knowledge, a rationalist may bring out the logic behind the theory and try to prove it in his own way. Being a rationalist and reasoning things out seems to be a better approach as we don’t blindly accept the theories laid out in front of us, but logic follows it. The empiricists believe in what they witness or perceive which might be