Reason as a source of knowledge

Key distinctions: a priori, analytic, necessary#

FoundationAQA 7172 3.1 Epistemology — Reason as a source of knowledgeDfE GCE Philosophy subject content

The three distinctions

Fig. 1Epistemological, semantic and modal distinctions that need not line up, contra the empiricist alignment.

Three distinctions frame the whole rationalism/empiricism debate, and precision about them is what separates a strong answer from a muddled one. The first is epistemological, about how a proposition is KNOWN: a priori knowledge is knowledge whose justification does not depend on sense experience (it can be gained by reason and reflection — that 2 + 2 = 4, that all bachelors are unmarried), whereas a posteriori knowledge depends for its justification on experience (that water boils at 100 degrees at sea level, that Paris is in France). The test is the source of justification, not the source of the concepts involved.

The second distinction is semantic, about what MAKES a proposition true: an analytic proposition is true or false in virtue of the meanings of its terms alone ('a triangle has three sides', 'a vixen is a female fox'), so its denial is a contradiction; a synthetic proposition's truth depends on how the world is, not on meanings alone ('the cat is on the mat', 'grass is green'), so its denial is coherent. Kant introduced this distinction and used it to sharpen the debate: empiricists tend to claim that all a priori knowledge is of analytic truths, while rationalists claim there is synthetic a priori knowledge — substantive truths about reality knowable by reason alone.

The third distinction is metaphysical, about a proposition's MODAL status: a necessary truth is one that could not have been otherwise, true in all possible circumstances (that 7 is prime, that all triangles have three sides); a contingent truth happens to be true but could have been false (that there are eight planets, that I am sitting down). It is a substantive philosophical question how the three distinctions line up. The traditional empiricist view aligns them tightly — a priori = analytic = necessary, and a posteriori = synthetic = contingent — but Kant denied this by defending synthetic a priori knowledge, and Kripke later argued for the necessary a posteriori (that water is H2O) and the contingent a priori, showing the alignments are not automatic.

The pay-off is that the rationalism/empiricism dispute can now be stated crisply. Rationalism claims (i) that we have a priori knowledge of synthetic truths about the world (via rational intuition and deduction), and/or (ii) that some concepts or knowledge are innate. Empiricism claims (i) that all a priori knowledge is merely of analytic truths (relations of ideas), so reason alone reveals nothing substantive about reality, and (ii) that all concepts and all substantive knowledge derive ultimately from sense experience (the mind begins as a tabula rasa). The whole topic is the contest between these two packages, and every argument in it is best read as targeting one of these theses.

Worked example

Classifying propositions on all three axes

Classify '7 is prime' and 'the Earth has one moon' by the three distinctions.

'7 is prime' — justification
Known by reason, no experiment needed: a priori.
'7 is prime' — meaning and modality
True in virtue of mathematical meaning: analytic (on the standard view); could not be otherwise: necessary.
'Earth has one moon' — justification
Known by observation: a posteriori.
'Earth has one moon' — meaning and modality
Not true by meaning alone: synthetic; could have been different: contingent.

Result: '7 is prime' is a priori, analytic and necessary; 'the Earth has one moon' is a posteriori, synthetic and contingent — a clear pair, but the interesting cases (synthetic a priori) resist such neat alignment.

Typical mistakes

Conflating a priori with analytic, or a priori with innate; a priori is about justification, analytic about meaning, innate about origin in the mind.
Assuming a priori entails necessary and a posteriori entails contingent; Kant (synthetic a priori) and Kripke (necessary a posteriori) show the alignments are contestable.

Active revision

Explain the difference between the analytic/synthetic and a priori/a posteriori distinctions, with an example of each category. (5-mark AO1 response)

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: GCE AS and A level subject content for philosophy (Department for Education)

Innatism: Plato and Leibniz#

StandardAQA 7172 3.1 Epistemology — Reason as a source of knowledgeDfE GCE Philosophy subject content

The necessity-gap argument for innatism

Fig. 2Because experience is contingent and particular, it cannot be the source of necessary, universal knowledge.

Innatism is the rationalist thesis that some knowledge and/or some concepts are innate — present in the mind prior to and independent of sense experience — rather than acquired from it. Plato gives the classic argument in the Meno through the doctrine of recollection (anamnesis). Socrates takes an uneducated slave boy who has never been taught geometry and, by questioning alone, leads him to work out how to double the area of a square. Since Socrates only asks questions and supplies no information, Plato argues, the boy must already have had the geometrical knowledge 'within' him; learning is really recollecting knowledge the soul possessed before birth. The knowledge is innate, merely drawn out by prompting.

The Platonic argument generalises into a pattern rationalists reuse: we possess knowledge (of mathematics, of the Forms, of moral and metaphysical truths) that is universal, necessary and certain in a way sense experience — always particular, contingent and fallible — could never supply; therefore its source cannot be experience, and it must be innate. Experience of imperfect drawn triangles could never teach the exact, necessary truths of geometry; so the concepts and truths of geometry must come from within. The strength of the argument is that it locates a real gap between the character of a priori knowledge (necessary, exact) and what perception could ever deliver (contingent, approximate).

Leibniz refines innatism against the obvious objection that children and 'savages' do not seem to possess sophisticated innate knowledge. He distinguishes explicit from implicit (dispositional) innateness: innate ideas and truths are not consciously present from birth but are latent potentials or tendencies that experience triggers and brings to consciousness. His image is the block of veined marble: the marble is not a blank slate but has veins that dispose it to be carved into one shape rather than another; likewise the mind has innate tendencies that dispose it to form certain concepts and assent to certain truths once experience prompts it. So the lack of universal conscious assent does not refute innatism, because innate knowledge is dispositional, not occurrent.

The empiricist replies that dispositional innatism risks being either false or empty. If it says we are born already knowing necessary truths implicitly, it is hard to distinguish from the empiricist claim that we are born with a capacity to LEARN them from experience — both predict that the truths emerge only after experience. Locke presses that 'a disposition to believe p when prompted' is not the same as 'innate knowledge that p'; on that loose criterion every truth we can ever come to know would count as innate. The innatist must therefore show that experience TRIGGERS rather than SUPPLIES the knowledge — that the content outstrips anything experience provides — which is exactly what the slave-boy case tries to show and what the empiricist denies, holding that Socrates' leading questions do supply the content.

Worked example

Evaluating dispositional innatism

Does Leibniz's dispositional innatism escape Locke's objection that there are no universally assented truths?

Locke's objection
If knowledge were innate it would be universally assented to, but children and the 'unlettered' do not assent to logical or mathematical axioms, so nothing is innate.
Leibniz's reply
Innate knowledge is dispositional (the veined marble): experience triggers it, so lack of conscious universal assent is expected, not a refutation.
The empiricist rejoinder
A disposition triggered by experience is indistinguishable from a capacity to learn from experience; both need experience, so innatism adds nothing.
The innatist's burden
To answer, the innatist must show the content exceeds what experience supplies (the necessity gap), not merely that experience is needed as a trigger.

Result: Dispositional innatism blunts Locke's assent objection but must still show experience triggers rather than supplies the content; whether it can is the crux, and it turns on the necessity-gap argument.

Typical mistakes

Treating the slave-boy case as proof that Socrates 'taught' the boy; the whole point is that Socrates only questions — though whether questioning supplies content is the disputed issue.
Presenting innatism as the claim that we consciously know everything from birth; Leibniz's dispositional version is the defensible target, and it must be engaged.

Active revision

'The slave-boy argument shows that some knowledge is innate.' Assess this claim. (25-mark essay)

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: GCE AS and A level subject content for philosophy (Department for Education)

Empiricism against innate knowledge: the tabula rasa#

StandardAQA 7172 3.1 Epistemology — Reason as a source of knowledgeDfE GCE Philosophy subject content

The empiricist theory of ideas

Fig. 3All ideas derive from experience — sensation and reflection — which the mind combines into complex ideas.

Locke opens his Essay Concerning Human Understanding with a sustained attack on innate knowledge, defending the empiricist picture of the mind as a tabula rasa — a blank slate or 'white paper, void of all characters' — on which experience writes. His first argument targets the innatist's usual evidence, universal assent: if certain principles (such as the law of non-contradiction, 'whatever is, is') were innate, they would be assented to by everyone, including children and 'idiots'; but children and the cognitively impaired do not have these principles before them, so they are not innate. Universal assent, even where it exists, is better explained by the fact that everyone can work the principles out from experience than by innateness.

Locke anticipates and rejects the dispositional reply. If the innatist retreats to 'these truths are innate but only implicitly, becoming explicit when reason is used', Locke objects that this makes innateness vacuous: any truth we are capable of coming to know 'when reason is used' would then count as innate, so the category would include every knowable proposition and lose all content. He also argues from transparency of the mind (a controversial premise): nothing can be 'in the mind' without the mind being aware of it, so there are no unconscious innate ideas waiting to be triggered. Whether this transparency assumption is defensible is itself debatable, and Leibniz explicitly denies it.

The positive empiricist thesis is that all the mind's materials come from experience, of two kinds: sensation (the input of the outer senses — colours, sounds, textures) and reflection (the mind's awareness of its own operations — perceiving, willing, doubting). From these two fountains flow all our simple ideas, which the mind can then combine, compare and abstract into complex ideas, but cannot manufacture from nothing. This is 'concept empiricism', developed in the next section: even our most abstract ideas (substance, cause, infinity) must be traceable to some experiential origin, or they are suspect.

The debate between Locke and Leibniz is, in effect, over the transparency of the mind and over what experience can supply. Leibniz's dispositional innatism concedes that experience is needed to activate innate knowledge but insists the content is not given by experience, whereas Locke insists that if experience is needed at all, and nothing is in the mind unawares, then experience is doing the supplying and the 'innate' label is idle. Modern discussions (Chomsky's argument from the poverty of the stimulus, that children acquire grammar too fast and on too little data to have learned it purely from experience) revive the innatist side with empirical evidence, showing the dispute is live and not merely historical. A strong answer weighs Locke's parsimony against the innatist's point that the necessity and universality of some knowledge seem to outrun what a blank slate plus experience could produce.

Worked example

Testing the no-universal-assent argument

Assess Locke's argument that the absence of universal assent shows there are no innate principles.

The argument
If a principle were innate, all minds (including children) would assent to it; not all do; so it is not innate.
Leibniz's reply
Innate knowledge is dispositional, so universal CONSCIOUS assent is not required; the argument assumes occurrent innateness, which the innatist rejects.
Locke's counter
Dispositional innateness is vacuous — any learnable truth would count as innate — and nothing is in the mind unperceived (transparency).
Weigh
If transparency fails (as Leibniz and Chomsky hold), Locke's argument loses its grip; if it holds, dispositional innatism does look idle.

Result: Locke's argument is decisive only given the transparency of the mind; since the strongest innatism denies transparency, the argument does not by itself refute dispositional innatism, and the debate shifts to the necessity gap and the poverty of the stimulus.

Typical mistakes

Attributing to Locke the view that the mind is passive; the tabula rasa still actively combines, compares and abstracts simple ideas into complex ones.
Ignoring the transparency premise; Locke's rejection of dispositional innatism relies on it, and it is precisely what the sophisticated innatist denies.

Active revision

Explain Locke's arguments against innate knowledge. (12-mark AO1 response)

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: GCE AS and A level subject content for philosophy (Department for Education)

Concept empiricism: the copy principle and Hume#

AdvancedAQA 7172 3.1 Epistemology — Reason as a source of knowledgeDfE GCE Philosophy subject content

Hume's copy principle

Fig. 4Simple ideas copy simple impressions; complex ideas recombine simple ideas; the missing shade is the conceded exception.

Hume gives concept empiricism its sharpest form. He divides the mind's contents into impressions (the lively, forceful perceptions of sensation and feeling — seeing red, feeling pain) and ideas (the fainter copies of impressions we have in thought and memory). His copy principle states that every simple idea is a copy of a corresponding simple impression: whatever we can think, we must ultimately have experienced, because ideas are just faded impressions. Complex ideas can be novel (a golden mountain, from the ideas of gold and mountain), but they are built entirely from simple ideas that were each copied from impressions. Nothing gets into the mind's stock of ideas except by way of the senses or inner feeling.

The copy principle is not merely a theory of concepts; Hume wields it as a critical WEAPON. If someone claims to have an idea — of substance, of the self, of necessary connection between cause and effect, of God — Hume's test is to ask: from what impression is this idea derived? If no impression can be found, the supposed idea is empty, a mere word without content, and the metaphysics built on it is 'sophistry and illusion'. This is how he attacks the rationalists' pretension to substantive a priori knowledge: their key concepts, he argues, cannot be traced to any impression, so they do not so much as express genuine ideas, let alone deliver knowledge of reality.

Hume himself raises the famous counterexample of the missing shade of blue. Suppose a person has seen all shades of blue except one particular shade, arranged in a graduated series with a gap where that shade should be. Hume grants that such a person could, on being shown the series, form the idea of the missing shade from imagination alone, without ever having had the corresponding impression. This is a simple idea not copied from an impression — a direct violation of the copy principle. Strikingly, Hume concedes the case but declares it 'so particular and singular' that it is not worth altering his general maxim for. This candour is philosophically important: it shows the copy principle is an empirical generalisation with at least one admitted exception.

Evaluation weighs the copy principle's power against its exceptions and its self-application. On the one hand it offers a compelling account of concept-formation and a bracing method for exposing empty metaphysics; it explains why we can imagine centaurs (recombination) but cannot form a genuine idea of a 'round square' or of Locke's unknowable substratum. On the other hand, the missing shade of blue shows a simple idea can be generated without an impression, and critics argue that concepts like causation, negation, identity or the logical connectives are hard to trace to any single impression, suggesting the mind contributes structure that experience does not supply — which is the rationalist's foothold. Moreover, the copy principle itself is not obviously derived from an impression, raising a question about its own status. A judicious verdict is that concept empiricism is largely right about the ORIGIN of most ideas, but that the exceptions and the apparently a priori structural concepts leave room for a residual rationalism about the mind's formal contribution, which Kant would develop into the synthetic a priori.

Worked example

Applying Hume's test to an idea

Use the copy principle to assess whether we have a genuine idea of 'necessary connection' between cause and effect.

State the test
Ask: from what impression is the idea of necessary connection derived?
Look for the impression
In observing one billiard ball striking another we see contiguity and succession, but no impression of a NECESSARY tie compelling the second to move.
Hume's diagnosis
The 'idea' of necessary connection derives not from the objects but from the mind's habit of expecting the usual effect — an impression of REFLECTION, not of the world.
The upshot
So our idea of causal necessity is real but projected by the mind; it is not read off a mind-independent necessity in nature.

Result: The copy principle relocates the idea of necessary connection to an inner impression of habit, illustrating its power as a critical tool — while also showing the mind contributes structure (expectation) that pure sensation does not supply.

Typical mistakes

Saying the copy principle forbids all novel ideas; it allows novel COMPLEX ideas built by recombining simple ideas — only simple ideas must copy impressions.
Overlooking that Hume concedes the missing shade of blue; the sophisticated point is that he keeps the principle despite the exception, which invites evaluation of its status.

Active revision

'Hume's copy principle shows that all concepts derive from experience.' Discuss. (25-mark essay)

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: GCE AS and A level subject content for philosophy (Department for Education)

The intuition and deduction thesis#

AdvancedAQA 7172 3.1 Epistemology — Reason as a source of knowledgeDfE GCE Philosophy subject content

Rationalism vs empiricism on a priori knowledge

Fig. 5Both use reason for a priori truths; they disagree over whether any synthetic (world-involving) truth is knowable a priori.

The intuition and deduction thesis is the rationalist claim that we can gain a priori knowledge of synthetic truths about reality through rational intuition and deduction from it. Rational intuition is the immediate, non-sensory grasp of the truth of a proposition by the 'natural light' of reason — the way one just SEES that 1 + 1 = 2, or that if A is taller than B and B than C then A is taller than C. Deduction is the derivation of further truths from intuited premises by valid inference, each step itself intuitively certain. Descartes is the paradigm: in the Meditations he seeks a foundation of intuitively certain truths and reconstructs knowledge by deduction from them, taking as his criterion of truth that whatever he perceives 'clearly and distinctly' is true.

Descartes' cogito is the model intuition: 'I think, therefore I am' is grasped as certain the moment it is entertained, not inferred from observation but seen by the intellect. From this and from his (clearly and distinctly perceived) idea of God he claims to deduce, a priori, substantive conclusions — that God exists, that God is no deceiver, and hence that clear and distinct ideas are generally reliable, which licenses the reconstruction of knowledge of the external world. Whatever one thinks of the details, the STRUCTURE is the rationalist programme: begin from what reason intuits with certainty, deduce the rest, and thereby reach synthetic truths about God, the self and the world without relying on the senses.

The thesis needs the synthetic a priori to be substantive. If reason alone could only deliver analytic truths (relations of ideas), rationalism would collapse into the empiricist concession that a priori knowledge is trivial — true by meaning, telling us nothing about reality. So the rationalist must claim that at least some a priori intuitions are synthetic: that reason can grasp truths that are both necessary and about how the world must be. Descartes' 'God exists', Leibniz's principle of sufficient reason, and (for Kant) the truths of arithmetic and geometry and the principle that every event has a cause, are candidates. The empiricist denies there are any such truths: for Hume, every a priori certainty is a mere relation of ideas, and every substantive claim about reality is a posteriori and only probable.

Evaluation confronts three worries. First, the reliability of rational intuition: intuitions have historically conflicted (Euclidean vs non-Euclidean geometry; rival 'self-evident' metaphysical principles), so the 'natural light' seems fallible, and clear and distinct perception looks less than self-guaranteeing — the Cartesian circle (that Descartes uses clear and distinct ideas to prove God, then God to validate clear and distinct ideas) is the classic charge of circularity. Second, the empiricist alternative explains the appearance of a priori insight as really analytic (Hume, and the logical positivists) or as grounded in the mind's own forms rather than in reality (Kant's compromise: synthetic a priori knowledge is possible, but only of the world as it appears, structured by our concepts, not of things in themselves). Third, developments in logic and mathematics (the reduction of arithmetic towards logic; the empirical revisability urged by Quine's attack on the analytic/synthetic distinction) put pressure on the very categories the thesis uses. A balanced judgement grants that we do seem to have genuine a priori knowledge (of logic and mathematics at least) that reason, not the senses, delivers — a real point for rationalism — while doubting that intuition can reach the grand metaphysical conclusions (God, substance) the classical rationalists claimed, which is the empiricist's enduring insight.

Worked example

Model 25-mark plan: can reason alone give knowledge of the world?

Plan an essay assessing whether reason alone can give substantive knowledge of reality.

Thesis
Reason alone gives genuine a priori knowledge of logic and mathematics, but the classical rationalists overreached in claiming intuition of God and substance; the truth lies near Kant.
AO1
Explain intuition and deduction (Descartes' cogito), the need for synthetic a priori knowledge, and the empiricist denial (Hume).
For rationalism
We do seem to know necessary mathematical/logical truths a priori, which sense experience could not establish (the necessity gap).
Against
Intuitions conflict and are fallible; the Cartesian circle undermines Descartes' deductions; Hume traces apparent a priori insight to relations of ideas.
Judgement
Adopt Kant's compromise: synthetic a priori knowledge is possible but only of the world as structured by our concepts, not of things in themselves — vindicating reason's reach while limiting it.

Result: A defensible judgement: reason delivers real a priori knowledge (mathematics, logic), so pure empiricism is too austere, but intuition cannot secure the grand metaphysical conclusions, so classical rationalism overreaches — Kant's limited synthetic a priori is the strongest position.

Typical mistakes

Equating the intuition and deduction thesis with innatism; they are distinct rationalist theses (one about a priori justification via reason, the other about the origin of ideas), though often held together.
Claiming reason can only reach analytic truths as if this were agreed; that all a priori knowledge is analytic is the empiricist THESIS, which Kant and the rationalists deny.

Active revision

'Reason alone can give us knowledge of the world.' Is this claim true? Defend your answer. (25-mark essay)

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: GCE AS and A level subject content for philosophy (Department for Education)

Rationalism or empiricism?#

AdvancedAQA 7172 3.1 Epistemology — Reason as a source of knowledgeDfE GCE Philosophy subject content

Two questions, two answers

Fig. 6The concept question and the knowledge question can be answered differently, giving Kant's hybrid two-source view.

The overall contest can be settled only by separating two questions the labels run together: the question of CONCEPTS (are any concepts innate, or do all derive from experience?) and the question of KNOWLEDGE (is there synthetic a priori knowledge of reality, or is all substantive knowledge a posteriori?). One can be an empiricist about concepts and a rationalist about some knowledge, or vice versa, so a good judgement addresses each strand rather than crowning one 'ism' wholesale. Kant's famous slogan — that concepts without intuitions are empty, and intuitions without concepts are blind — expresses exactly this two-source view: experience supplies the content, but the mind supplies the a priori form.

On concepts, the balance favours a broadly empiricist view with a rationalist residue. Hume's copy principle plausibly explains the origin of most of our ideas, and the demand to trace an idea to experience is a powerful discipline against empty metaphysics. But the missing shade of blue, the apparently a priori structural concepts (identity, negation, causation, the logical connectives), and Chomsky's poverty-of-the-stimulus argument for an innate language faculty, all suggest the mind contributes formal structure that pure sensation does not deliver. The honest verdict is that experience supplies the raw materials while the mind supplies some innate organising structure — not the rich innate KNOWLEDGE Plato claimed, but more than a blank slate.

On knowledge, the balance is finely poised and depends on whether there is synthetic a priori knowledge. That we know necessary truths of mathematics and logic a priori is hard to deny, and hard for strict empiricism to explain if all a priori knowledge is merely analytic; this is the rationalist's strongest card. Yet the classical rationalists' further claim — that intuition and deduction reach substantive metaphysical truths about God, substance and the soul — is undermined by the fallibility and conflict of intuitions and by the Cartesian circle. Kant's compromise (synthetic a priori knowledge is real but confined to the structure our minds impose on possible experience) captures both the strength of the rationalist point and the force of the empiricist limitation, which is why it remains the default resting place of the debate.

For an A-Level judgement, then, the defensible conclusion is neither pure rationalism nor pure empiricism but a principled hybrid, and the essay's task is to say WHERE the line falls and WHY. A candidate might conclude: all our ideas ultimately answer to experience (empiricism about concepts, softened by innate structure), but not all our knowledge is a posteriori (rationalism about the a priori, softened to Kant's synthetic a priori of appearances). What must be avoided is the lazy 'both have a point' with no line drawn; the AO2 marks come from adjudicating each strand against a stated criterion — explanatory power for concepts, the reality of mathematical knowledge for the a priori — and defending the placement of the boundary.

The topic threads through the whole specification. The empiricist premise that all ideas derive from experience is the engine of the verification principle in 'religious language' (a statement is meaningful only if analytic or empirically verifiable) and of the meta-ethical debate about whether moral concepts are natural or non-natural. Descartes' intuition-and-deduction method is the very method under attack in 'the limits of knowledge', and his clear-and-distinct-ideas criterion reappears there. And the rationalism/empiricism split resurfaces in the philosophy of mind, where the knowledge argument (Mary learns something new on leaving her black-and-white room) turns on whether all knowledge of the world can be gained propositionally/a priori or whether experience supplies something irreducible.

Worked example

Adjudicating the two strands

Explain how a candidate can reach a hybrid judgement on the rationalism/empiricism debate.

Split the question
Distinguish the origin of CONCEPTS from the possibility of a priori KNOWLEDGE of reality.
Settle concepts
Favour empiricism (copy principle) but grant innate structure (missing shade, logical concepts, Chomsky).
Settle knowledge
Grant a priori knowledge of mathematics/logic (rationalist card), but deny intuition reaches metaphysics (fallibility, Cartesian circle).
Locate the line
Adopt Kant: experience supplies content, the mind supplies a priori form, so synthetic a priori knowledge is of appearances only.

Result: A defensible hybrid: empiricism about the origin of ideas (with innate structure) plus a limited rationalism about a priori knowledge (Kant's synthetic a priori), with the boundary drawn and defended rather than left as a truce.

Typical mistakes

Treating rationalism and empiricism as all-or-nothing; the strongest position is a hybrid, and the marks lie in specifying it.
Concluding 'both have a point' without drawing a line; AO2 rewards adjudicating each strand against a criterion, not a truce.

Active revision

'All knowledge comes from experience.' Discuss. (25-mark essay)

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: GCE AS and A level subject content for philosophy (Department for Education)

Key points

Classifying propositions on all three axes

Key points

Evaluating dispositional innatism

Key points

Testing the no-universal-assent argument

Key points

Applying Hume's test to an idea

Key points

Model 25-mark plan: can reason alone give knowledge of the world?

Key points

Adjudicating the two strands

Sources

Reason as a source of knowledge

Key points

Classifying propositions on all three axes

Key points

Evaluating dispositional innatism

Key points

Testing the no-universal-assent argument

Key points

Applying Hume's test to an idea

Key points

Model 25-mark plan: can reason alone give knowledge of the world?

Key points

Adjudicating the two strands

Sources