At this point in time, this is how things have wound up:

Patricia has somewhat adventurously decided to stay in China, enticed by the conversations she had with Nell, which convinced her that she could aspire to more than being a mediocre photographer, (and of course to poor Nell’s disheartenment). She, on the other hand, had come to the end of her journey. No golden window of opportunity would open up in front of her in China, so the safest, most mature and most responsible thing to do would be to go home, mind her job.

But Nell had become a stalker.

She wilfully let the plane home blow in the wind and was now standing in the airport with no idea where Patricia was going — characteristically, neither did Patricia herself. Armed with the knowledge that Patricia was staying in Chengdu three more days, and of course a phone number, she stood and felt agony about the memory of sweet, delightful Patricia who seemingly had needed Nell to help facilitate something she probably easily could accomplish herself.

If she walked back into Patricia’s world, the latter would most likely find it peculiarly odd and perhaps make wrong conclusions. It was glaringly obvious that Patricia needed Nell much less than the other way around. Even to Patricia.

Last time Nell had tried to hold on to someone, it was a man in England, and she had bungled it up completely, showing all her emotions at once. The episode still shaped her thinking. Now it was a woman. Nell didn’t care, all she knew was that something so painful and rare had entered her life, that it was worth dying for. This time she wouldn’t let go.

Going back meant forgetting and returning to the numbing routines. Ruled out! The pain had to stay, like a guest who would develop into the master of the house.

After a while, she felt the path of least pain would be this: Stay abroad in China for a while, living as cheap as possible. At least she was in the same country as her. Write Patricia a letter, pretending to be in England. Keep talking about philosophy, keep the thing they had together alive for as long as possible. That was all.

A plan? No. But a last chance in life.

A modest start on a long siege

She sat in the airport with her laptop and browsed for cheap lodgings. A small hotel in the countryside. A place to start. A wretched life awaited.

Later that day, she stepped into a very small room, which however was much more personal and appealing than she had expected. Any table, cup or couch can turn out to have an odd luxuriousness to them that has nothing to do with their market price. This was such a room. The view was ordinary and yet dreamy. It was remote, but in a stretch of nature that was beguiling. The furniture was rural and artful. A cramped bathroom, and of course, a squat toilet. Life was not going to make it easy for her, and thus, she knew she was on the right track.

She went for a walk that lasted two hours. Made a phone call or two to stall the situation back home. When she had left for China, she was at that point in time pet-less and without any family of notice to deal with. The job was difficult to place correctly. But she looked around her and thought “I’m walking in a forest right now — I am in nature with a purpose. My own purpose for a change.”

When she got home, she planted her laptop on the table and started writing.

Subject: How are you?

Patricia, my joyous friend!

I’m sorry I couldn’t wait any longer before writing this letter. I started even before the plane had landed!

It will be interesting to see what you decide to study. I’m thinking that in any event, being able to discuss a little philosophy can’t hurt. Perhaps we can take up all the major subjects one by one and have a good old-fashioned email discussion?

You don’t have to answer at all! If you are too busy or don’t want to talk philosophy anymore, then I will obviously respect that.

Rationalism vs. Empiricism

Could I possibly persuade you to indulge in a more basic discussion? I was thinking about this article on Rationalism vs. Empiricis

Try reading it first, before you proceed.

I proceed now by way of imagining what you would have said. But it feels painful, since I frankly already miss your voice and your vivid ideas.

I’m sorry. Pulling myself together, first I want to point out that had we been sitting at Ding’s right now, I would have started with saying that the article initially states the discussion is an epistemological one at the core. I would perhaps say that it is about: What procedure can we follow to gain certain knowledge about the world.

At this point, you would most likely have directed the conversation into the question of the nature of the world that we inhabit. Why does rationality work? Can rationality hold sway over a fundamentally irrational world?

And it’s a very good question.

I would counter-answer [where I for the sake of argument take the empiricist standpoint] that it doesn’t matter if it works in a rational way. We can live without certainties, can’t we? A rationalist can argue: “But you do not live without certainties. You use rationalistic arguments in your reasoning. Should you not refrain from that, if you do not believe in them?”

Looking at the email, she felt that as always she needed to hear what Patricia would have said in her own voice.

Yes. Let us start there. What is the discussion really about?

For once, she noted a little stroke of luck. Patricia had texted her a vCard which also contained an email. It took another walk around the area before she mustered enough conviction that she had struck the right balance of not overdoing it but also be off to a good start.

In the meantime, she could prepare a note on the subject. Patricia loved her notes. The best she could hope for was to make Patricia miss something, just a little bit of the fun they had.

Points of conflict and confusion

In short, these are the ideas that are used to dissect the ongoing discussion:

Intuition — deduction: We “see” (intuit) that something is true by a reflex. Then we deduce new knowledge from that insight.
Innate knowledge: Some things (about the world) we know not from experience at all. We already have it.
Innate concepts: Some (abstract) concepts we are already equipped with, ready for use in thinking and experiencing.
Indispensability of reason: Reason is an ability necessary for acquiring new concepts or knowledge about the world.
Superiority of reason: Such knowledge gained by pure reason is more certain.
Warrant: They use the word warranted knowledge to focus the discussion on not the fact that someone is accidentally correct about something, but is correct due to some action or mental process which warrants a correct perception.

Rather than asking “are you a rationalist or an empiricist?”, one should rather pose the question “what position do you take on each of these themes when it comes to … ?”.

So you can easily say that you are neither 𝐑 or an 𝐄 but rather have a 𝐑 view on everything pertaining to math and an 𝐄 view on physics and biology and a mix on social sciences.

Note that all these concepts can be expressed by different authors to various degrees. It is dangerous to think simplistic about 𝐑 versus 𝐄.

Nell leaned back. It’s funny, but it turns out that her ability to discuss philosophy was only an illusion. She could not raise above simple repetition. Patricia did something odd. Perhaps she provided the rising air that Nell just glided on. She hoped Patricia was right now arriving at the same but opposite conclusions, but she feared the worst.

She checked her email and knew she had arrived at a crossroads. If she wrote another email, she officially seemed desperate. Same with texting.

It was summer, and she decided to picnic it out in the nearby woods. She went, found a desolate spot and reclined. She closed her eyes and tried to dream up a conversation.

P: “So in essence, you can have many kinds of rationalisms and empiricisms?”

N: “It would seem so, yes. There is a world of difference between having the conviction that God is the manifestation of the rational ruleset of the universe, and thinking that in some areas, intuition—deduction seems to work and the knowledge it produces remains undisputed.”

It felt wrong imagining her. As if Nell was betraying the externally rooted very existence of Patricia. She would perhaps limit herself to only remember events that actually happened. God it was hard to exist without her. Much harder than she had feared. Nell felt alone.

Patricia was the secret behind all the philosophical drivel about the external world. Something so far from being in our head that it was almost painful. Our humble and sorry existence being miraculously illuminated by something not ourselves which presses on our frontiers. Only for a brief while after which the miracle is gone.

𝐑 vs 𝐄 can be seen as different approaches to the question of certainty in science. Is causality grounds for certainty? You can imagine an overarching debate such as this:

𝐄: Causality is just a mental habit, nothing more. Just because we have seen the sun rise every day until now doesn’t mean it will tomorrow.

That the sun will not rise to-morrow is no less intelligible a proposition, and implies no more contradiction, than the affirmation, that it will rise. We should in vain, therefore, attempt to demonstrate its falsehood. Were it demonstratively false, it would imply a contradiction, and could never be distinctly conceived by the mind.

Hume, Enquiry 4.2

𝐑: If science is to have any meaning at all, it is that we establish certainty about the laws of the world.

𝐄: Science can function easily without certainty. Claiming that the sun should not rise tomorrow is valid but highly unlikely given the prevalence of sunsets so far.

Empiricism

An empiricist may accept that ideas can form relations with other ideas and that the principle of intuition & deduction is useful for working with ideas mathematically and logically.

But on the whole, ideas come from experience, and are merely a shadow of experience left in the mind of us.

The full-fledged empiricist about our knowledge of the external world replies that, when it comes to the nature of the world beyond our own minds, experience is our sole source of information.

Rationalism

All of the principles mentioned earlier applies to rationalists to some degree.

Intuition—Deduction

Intuition is a key to this debate. Intuitions are the starting point. Surprisingly, the defence of such a concept seems weak. If it is formulated as a divinely correct principle, the defence can be ridiculous (God guarantees that our intuition is solid). If it is formulated as a lesser thing, it seems odd to ascribe it the degree of certainty we associate with the concept.

The inner perception version:

Just as it can visually seem or appear to one as if there’s a tree outside the window, it can intellectually seem or appear to one as if nothing can be both entirely red and entirely green.

Deduction is not mentioned in the article, but it must be assumed to play a central role as well. The archetype is of course the mathematical deduction once again.

The more she tried, the more she felt lonely. Life bestowed upon her few days of sanctuary from the mortal sin we all take over from our culture: Betraying our happiness.

She sighed and got on her feet and went home to her lodgings. She looked at her sorry little note and decided to email it as well. But it only made the coldness feel colder. No answer would of course come, since it was life itself that had struck her off its list.

She sat down and started writing another note.

Innate knowledge & concepts

Innate knowledge differs from innate concepts in that knowledge can take the form of a proposition (some X has some property P), which typically would require observing the object of the proposition. Concepts are more like abstractions of experiences or ideas. Perfect triangles, the colour “red”, God.

Plato has furnished us with the prototypical example of innate knowledge: Anamnesis. Through the interlocutor, we can be reminded of a worldly insight we already have.

We also lack some knowledge because, in our soul’s unification with the body, it has forgotten the knowledge and now needs to recollect it

Of course Plato’s version mandates a specific metaphysics: That of eternal forms.

One could develop a suspicion that these authors mostly need the ideas of innate knowledge/concepts to defend their favourite religious foundation. Indeed, Descartes’ ideas on God as a logical necessity doesn’t exactly sell his theories today.

She emailed it and capitulated completely to her heartache. Then she went to bed.

At 3 AM her phone rang and woke her up. She panicked and immediately took a violent grip on herself. For sure it was Patricia.

N: “Hello… Patricia dear?”

P: “NELL! God I miss you! It has only been a day! Are you already back home? I couldn’t figure out how long your flight would take, so I had to wait until evening back home which is late night here. I’ve been staying up for so long I’m almost dizzy. But you kept emailing me and I felt awful about everything! My decision, my idiocy, my arrogance and self deceit. I tried discussing philosophy with my my friends’ roommate over VooV, but she obliterated me completely. I was back to being stupid among clever people.”

Nell was struggling just to sit upright at this hour. Patricia’s torrent of words stunned her.

N: “God Patricia am I glad to hear your voice. I am.. I am just jet lagged that’s all. My head is still on China-time. I was sleeping.”

Outside her window it was all black. She drank a bit of water and cleared up.

N: “Did you like my emails?”

P: “I always like anything you say to me. Are you angry with me for making this stupid decision?”

N: “No. No, not at all”. She sighed loudly.

P: “But I have hurt you, haven’t I?”

Not a word could she voice.

Patricia understood.

N: “Please Patricia — I don’t want to talk about anything painful now. I feel like I have been given a few extra moments in the sun. Please talk about rationalism and empiricism with me, won’t you?”

P: “God I want to! Okay, so you asked me what I think this discussion is really about.

I think that some of it has become obsolete. Yes. That’s what I think. Plato was just a strange man. He talks about a completely different world that can be visited for real. But Descartes, as you say, is really trying to put his preference for God and order into everything. No idea why. Perhaps they are all so much in love with mathematical certainty that they try to ground their desire in something indisputable.”

Across the telephone line Patricia heard Nell exhale into what became a sound of delight.

P: “See, you do that to me! I can think clearly when you are around. You are my magic.”

N: “I’m not worth much without you either, to be honest. I couldn’t even write my notes properly.

Let us follow this trail. We are rationalists, 𝐑, at odds with the empiricist’, 𝐄, thought that most likely we simple can’t know that the sun will rise tomorrow. Not with certainty. We want that certainty.”

P: “We know that both 𝐑 and 𝐄 have no qualms about Euclidian proofs. Only 𝐑 thinks that Euclid’s claims says something substantial about the external world, whereas 𝐄 thinks that they exactly do not. That’s the empiricist point: Everything inside the head stays inside the head. It shows nothing about the stuff outside in the real world. We can have ideas about the external world, but those principles — even causality — remains as ideas inside our heads.”

N: “And here you could perhaps discern between different kinds of rationalism. Descartes wanted the lawfulness to be built into the world itself. God was the proprietor that made sure that it was so.”

P: “Leibniz seems like a much more interesting fellow.”

N: “Yes he does! His analogy with the tabula rasa which is made of marble and thus its veins dictate the content or shapes it really predates Kant’s arguments.”

P: “But Hume and Locke already counters those arguments long ago didn’t they? By stating that ideas and concepts are shaped by experience. I mean, you abstract the connections between sense experience. In a way, isn’t that just neurology?”

N: “As in: The brain connects the dots from the lower sensory layers and constructs models that organises the experiences? Perhaps. But rationalists can easily claim to be on the side of neurology too. Leibniz’s marble slate and Kant’s transcendental categories and Chomsky’s universal language abilities all say that our learning ability is not completely arbitrary.”

Nell pulled her legs up in bed and reclined a bit, fighting the weariness.

P: “Were you sleeping? Did I disturb you?”

N: “NO! No, .. Sorry for shouting. No, not at all.”

P: “Nell… I promise, promise, promise that I will call you whenever I can and we have enough thoughts to talk about, okay? Let me try to stand on my own intellectual two feet just a little, but please, I beg you, don’t read too much into it. I want our conversations so badly.”

N: “I would love to see you get a degree someday. But I can’t lie anymore. I need you, the way you are as you are right now, and the way we work together. I fear you will be old, educated and lifeless some day, and I will simply return to botany and canned food late at night. I can’t explain it. Sorry for all my stupid emotions. You should be with younger people, not a relic like me.”

Undecipherable noises in the other end of the line.

N: “Are you crying? I didn’t make you cry, did I?”

The sobbing sound was quite distinct now.

P: “It’s just the first time in my life I have meant anything to anybody!”, and she gave way to tears.

So Nell started crying too. What she wouldn’t have given to be able to embrace Patricia right now. All she had was words. Precious words.

N: “Patricia… "

Then she fell asleep of exhaustion.

She couldn’t be sure, but perhaps she whispered “I love you” in her half-awake, half-delirious state.

•P•A•R•A•D•O•X•

The Neverending Debate