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Empiricism and Rationalism

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Aristotle was the philosopher to start empiricism.  Empiricism means that everything you experience in life causes you to create conclusions and gain knowledge about different parts of life.  When you’re looking out the window of your house or apartment ready for your walk to school or work, you see a large group of people walking down the street shivering and wearing many layers of clothing.  Through reasonable and logical thought, you can conclude that they are experiencing cold weather and you should follow their lead in wearing your winter coat.

Empiricism can be lost for certain people though.  When you were a kid, some parents would talk about how if you put a tooth under the pillow and fell asleep the tooth fairy would replace the tooth with change.  As children, we believed in the story because it was a reward for a natural part of life.  After learning the truth, you realize the foolish notions that were believed even though there was no evidence of a real tooth fairy.  Our experience was positive for blindly believing in the tooth fairy, so the evidence was not disputed in any way.

In this day and age, the internet has a ridiculous amount of information that can be processed in the shortest amount of time.  Through some artistic talent, any information on the internet can be polished to look real and legitimate.  Many people look at this information as true evidence without the citations or references to establish fact.  These people look at strings of information and draw their own conclusions on false information.  These conspiracy theorists are extremely passionate with their thought process and beliefs due to the supposed facts from the internet and the obvious related experiences.  This relates to illusory correlation in which people draw their own conclusion on random events even though there is no relation to it.  The people truly believe in the correlation between so many of the events because they don’t dispute the evidence before them and they believe in what they want to believe.  Empiricism is completely confused by the people with rationalism.  Rationalism is the thought process that puts reason as the primary source of information needed to attain knowledge.  Rationalizations are mainly used to justify a certain thought process without the use of empirical evidence.

 

Nature vs. Nurture

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Aristotle believed that human beings gain everything they know through personal experiences. He developed this idea of empiricism, which most people will refer to as the nurture side of the Nature vs. Nurture debate. Besides looking nearly identical to my mom, I also act a lot like her. We share the same interests, ranging from what type of movies we want to watch to our favorite types of food to our views about the world. I believe that I adapted these preferences because that’s what I grew up around the most. We almost have the same clothing style. We have the same sense of humor.  We are both very interested in health and nutrition. We both enjoy cooking. We have the same love for shopping. We have similar tastes in music too. There are so many learned behaviors that I now possess because of the time I have spent with my mom.

On the other side of the spectrum, Plato and Socrates gave us the idea that behaviors and thoughts are inborn. They described this as nativism, which was the nature side of the debate. I believe this also has a strong effect on people. I think the way I handle my emotions is incredibly similar to the way my mom handles situations. We very rarely get angry. If we do, we just end up crying because we get so stressed out. However, my sister and my dad are both incredibly short-tempered. They are definitely yellers when they get frustrated. The two of them have also had to deal with depression, while my mom and I have never had to go through that. I believe that the ways my sister and I handle our emotions were completely genetic.

Obviously, both nativism and empiricism come into play with developing a person’s behavior. It’s difficult to pinpoint which traits are learned and which traits are innate. People change their behaviors daily. We don’t change drastically, but we are all constantly trying to be the person we aspire to be. We observe the people around us, and we may begin to pick up their admirable traits as our own. We can never completely alter who we were born as though because, as we all know, some things just can’t change.