---
title: Reason and Rationalism
sort: 120
section-id: epistemology
description: Descartes, Leibniz, and Kant — the rationalist tradition, a priori knowledge, and the role of reason in epistemology.
language: en
---

# Reason and Rationalism

*Rationalism* is the view that reason — independent of or prior to sensory experience — is a significant source of knowledge. The paradigmatic rationalist claim is that some truths can be known *a priori*: known on the basis of reason alone, without appeal to experience. Mathematics and logic are the clearest cases. That 7 + 5 = 12, or that if all humans are mortal and Socrates is human then Socrates is mortal — these seem knowable by pure thought, without conducting experiments or making observations.

## The A Priori / A Posteriori Distinction

The distinction between *a priori* and *a posteriori* knowledge — between knowledge independent of experience and knowledge dependent on it — was systematised by Kant, though it has roots in earlier philosophy ^[Kant, I., *Critique of Pure Reason*, 1781/1787, B1-B6].

*A priori* knowledge is justified independently of experience. It includes logical truths, mathematical truths, and perhaps certain conceptual truths (a bachelor is unmarried). Crucially, a priori knowledge is typically characterised by *necessity* and *universality*: a priori propositions are true in all possible worlds and admit of no exceptions.

*A posteriori* (or *empirical*) knowledge is justified by experience. Contingent facts about the world — there are seven continents, water is H₂O, the temperature today is 22°C — are known a posteriori. Such propositions could have been otherwise, and we know them by observing the world.

Kant also introduced the analytic/synthetic distinction. An *analytic* judgment is one where the predicate is contained in the concept of the subject ("All bachelors are unmarried"). A *synthetic* judgment adds something beyond the subject concept ("The cat is on the mat"). Rationalists typically claim there is a priori synthetic knowledge — knowledge that is both independent of experience and genuinely informative about the world. Kant thought mathematics and the principles of pure science were synthetic a priori.

## Descartes and the Method of Doubt

René Descartes is the foundational figure of early modern rationalism. His *Meditations on First Philosophy* (1641) begins with systematic doubt: he resolves to suspend belief in anything he can doubt, to find, if anything survives, a foundation for knowledge that is absolutely certain ^[Descartes, R., *Meditations on First Philosophy*, AT VII:17-18].

The senses can deceive. Dreams can be indistinguishable from waking life. And most radically: could there be an evil demon, infinitely powerful and infinitely cunning, whose sole purpose is to deceive him? Under this hypothesis, even the truths of mathematics might be false.

From this radical doubt, Descartes extracts one certain truth: *cogito ergo sum* — "I think, therefore I am." ^[Descartes, R., *Discourse on the Method*, AT VI:32]. Even if a demon deceives me, the deceiving requires that I exist as a thinking thing. The *cogito* survives the most radical doubt.

From this single certainty, Descartes attempts to rebuild knowledge. He argues for the existence of a benevolent God who would not systematically deceive him, thereby reinstating trust in clear and distinct perception. The circularity of this reconstruction — using clear and distinct perception to prove God's existence, then using God's existence to validate clear and distinct perception — has been widely noted and is known as the *Cartesian circle* ^[Arnauld, A., *Fourth Objections*, in Descartes, *Meditations*, AT VII:214].

Despite these difficulties, Descartes' contribution is foundational: he established the *epistemological turn* — the idea that a systematic theory of knowledge is the prerequisite for metaphysics and science.

## Leibniz: Necessary Truths and Monads

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz distinguished *truths of reason* (necessary truths, knowable a priori, the opposite of which is impossible) from *truths of fact* (contingent truths, known a posteriori, the opposite of which is conceivable) ^[Leibniz, G.W., *Monadology*, §33-34, 1714].

For Leibniz, the basic furniture of reality consists of *monads* — immaterial, indivisible, mind-like substances. Each monad perceives (in a broad sense) every other monad, though with varying degrees of clarity. The apparent causal interaction between things is, in reality, a *pre-established harmony* installed by God: things do not genuinely cause each other but are programmed to correspond.

Leibniz's principle of *sufficient reason* — there must be a sufficient reason for everything being as it is rather than otherwise — is a cornerstone of his system and has remained influential in metaphysics and the philosophy of science.

## Kant's Copernican Revolution

Immanuel Kant transformed the rationalism/empiricism debate with his *Critique of Pure Reason* (1781). He accepted from the rationalists that there is genuine a priori knowledge and from the empiricists that all knowledge *begins* with experience. His synthesis: experience is possible only because the mind structures it using a priori *forms* (space and time) and *categories* (substance, causation, necessity, and others).

Kant called this the *Copernican revolution* in philosophy ^[Kant, I., *Critique of Pure Reason*, Bxvi]: just as Copernicus moved the sun to the centre, Kant moved the knowing subject. We do not passively receive an already-structured world; we actively structure the world we experience, using the forms of intuition and the categories of the understanding.

This generates *transcendental idealism*: objects as we know them (*phenomena*) are partly constituted by our cognitive apparatus. Things as they are in themselves (*noumena*) — beyond the conditions of our experience — are unknowable.

The great achievement of Kant's epistemology is explaining how synthetic a priori knowledge is possible: mathematical and scientific principles are synthetic a priori because they describe the structure that the mind imposes on experience, not features of mind-independent reality. The cost is that our knowledge is bounded by the limits of possible experience.

## The Analytic Critique

The logical empiricists of the early twentieth century (Carnap, Schlick, Ayer) challenged the very possibility of synthetic a priori knowledge ^[Ayer, A.J., *Language, Truth and Logic*, ch.4]. On their view, apparent a priori knowledge either reduces to analytic truths (true by definition) or is meaningless. Mathematics is analytic — true by virtue of the meanings of mathematical terms. There are no synthetic a priori truths.

Quine's "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" (1951) challenged even the analytic/synthetic distinction itself, arguing that no proposition is immune from revision in light of experience ^[Quine, W.V.O., "Two Dogmas of Empiricism", *Philosophical Review* 60, 1951]. This radical empiricism has been broadly influential but is not without critics ^[Grice, P. and Strawson, P., "In Defense of a Dogma", *Philosophical Review* 65, 1956].

The status of a priori knowledge remains one of epistemology's central contested questions.
