Given your definitions of ‘rationalism’ and ‘empiricism,’ an empiricist would need to assert that informative priors, if they exist, either are not “novel information about the world” or are novel information that we derive from experience. We aren’t perfect Bayesian reasoners, and you haven’t defined ‘information,’ so this doesn’t seem perfectly open-and-cut to me.
One approach an empiricist could take would be to deny that our primordial priors (i.e., our earliest expectations), in themselves, constitute information about the world; perhaps we can use them as a handy framework for genuinely informative research, but the framework itself is not knowledge,
Another approach would be to deny that we have expectations before possessing any sense-perception; perhaps neurological development relies extensively upon sensory input from our environments before anything as cognitively complex as ‘expectation’ or ‘belief’ enters the picture.
Given your definitions of ‘rationalism’ and ‘empiricism,’ an empiricist would need to assert that informative priors, if they exist, either are not “novel information about the world” or are novel information that we derive from experience. We aren’t perfect Bayesian reasoners, and you haven’t defined ‘information,’ so this doesn’t seem perfectly open-and-cut to me.
One approach an empiricist could take would be to deny that our primordial priors (i.e., our earliest expectations), in themselves, constitute information about the world; perhaps we can use them as a handy framework for genuinely informative research, but the framework itself is not knowledge,
Another approach would be to deny that we have expectations before possessing any sense-perception; perhaps neurological development relies extensively upon sensory input from our environments before anything as cognitively complex as ‘expectation’ or ‘belief’ enters the picture.
Or one could adopt a mixed strategy.