A good way of unpacking the distinction: A-priorism is a normative (evaluative, epistemological) thesis, whereas rationalism is a descriptive (factual, psychological) one.
A-priorism says that we have warrant to believe some things without appealing to any evidence (more strictly: without appealing to any information beyond that which was required to understand the proposition in the first place).
Rationalism says that we arrive at some of our understanding of reality without an essential causal dependence upon prior experience. (E.g., we have some extremely primitive proto-understanding of ‘space’ or ‘causality’ or ‘quantity’ that precedes our experiential acquaintance with the instances of those categories.)
So an empiricist can assert a-priorism, if s/he thinks that in principle we could justify certain claims without any reference to experience, but also thinks that as a matter of fact our cognitive, epistemic, and conceptual grasp on everything, including our grasp on linguistic truths like ‘all bachelors are bachelors,’ stems entirely from sensory data. A-priorism doesn’t entail rationalism. A rationalist must make the further assertion that some kinds of understanding are not only justifiable without appeal to empirical data, but are also obtainable without a causal basis in past empirical encounters.
An empiricist might claim that our grasp of time, for example, developmentally arises via the sequence of external events imprinting itself upon the rudimentary sense-data-gathering faculties of the embryonic brain; whereas a rationalist would claim that we have some sort of grasp on time ‘built in’ by the evolved structure of our brain, requiring little if any ‘pre-structured’ sensory input to develop. Our experiential acquaintance with time is then mainly dependent on our innate makeup, rather than our innate makeup being mainly shaped by the temporality of our actual sense-data. (Notice that these are fuzzy distinctions; presumably actual brain development involves a dynamic interaction between innate and experiential information, so there is a continuous empiricism-to-rationalism scale, not a sharp division. A-priorism may be a sharper concept, if ‘justification’ is discrete.)
A good way of unpacking the distinction: A-priorism is a normative (evaluative, epistemological) thesis, whereas rationalism is a descriptive (factual, psychological) one.
A-priorism says that we have warrant to believe some things without appealing to any evidence (more strictly: without appealing to any information beyond that which was required to understand the proposition in the first place).
Rationalism says that we arrive at some of our understanding of reality without an essential causal dependence upon prior experience. (E.g., we have some extremely primitive proto-understanding of ‘space’ or ‘causality’ or ‘quantity’ that precedes our experiential acquaintance with the instances of those categories.)
So an empiricist can assert a-priorism, if s/he thinks that in principle we could justify certain claims without any reference to experience, but also thinks that as a matter of fact our cognitive, epistemic, and conceptual grasp on everything, including our grasp on linguistic truths like ‘all bachelors are bachelors,’ stems entirely from sensory data. A-priorism doesn’t entail rationalism. A rationalist must make the further assertion that some kinds of understanding are not only justifiable without appeal to empirical data, but are also obtainable without a causal basis in past empirical encounters.
An empiricist might claim that our grasp of time, for example, developmentally arises via the sequence of external events imprinting itself upon the rudimentary sense-data-gathering faculties of the embryonic brain; whereas a rationalist would claim that we have some sort of grasp on time ‘built in’ by the evolved structure of our brain, requiring little if any ‘pre-structured’ sensory input to develop. Our experiential acquaintance with time is then mainly dependent on our innate makeup, rather than our innate makeup being mainly shaped by the temporality of our actual sense-data. (Notice that these are fuzzy distinctions; presumably actual brain development involves a dynamic interaction between innate and experiential information, so there is a continuous empiricism-to-rationalism scale, not a sharp division. A-priorism may be a sharper concept, if ‘justification’ is discrete.)
That makes sense—thanks!