Three Principles of Rationalism

Three Principles of Rationalism

It is just over fifty years since the publication of Quine’s ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’ (1951). That paper expresses a broad vision of the system of relations between meaning, experience, and the rational formation of belief. The deepest challenges the paper poses come not from the detailed argument of its first four sections – formidable though that is – but from the visionary material in its ...

Biological Rationalism

I argue that contemporary philosophy of language in the analytic tradition rests on two fundamentally wrong assumptions: empiricism and externalism. After I show why these two assumptions are incorrect, I turn my attention to biological rationalism. Biological rationalism—a research program inspired by the work of Noam Chomsky—is committed to nativism and internalism. I believe biological ratio...

The Heyday of Rationalism

Against Rationalism

Rationality and the issues associated with it have always occupied a central place within the Western philosophical tradition. Moreover, as the humanities and social sciences have found themselves under assault from post-modernists and deconstructionists, the role of rationality has also become a pressing problem well beyond the borders of philosophy. In this paper I am going to take issue with...

Empirical Evidence for Rationalism

[PENULTIMATE DRAFT] Joel Pust University of Delaware