Which is more reliable as foundation of knowledge: reason or sense experience?

Question

Which is more reliable as foundation of knowledge: reason or sense experience?

Answer 1

Reason is the cognitive faculty that makes sense of sense experience. Reason includes epistemology which is not learned but is hard wired. This does not make it infallible. It is only a faculty, like that of taste, which also is hard-wired; you don't have to learn it, but you must learn what each item of food tastes "like".

In the same way, your epistemological faculty must learn how each form of syllogism works. There are only 256 forms. This indicates that the number and the form itself are laws of the nature of the human mind.

Sense experience is nothing without reason. Reason without sense experience is nothing.

But the Rationalists are wrong to think that we only need a limited amount of sense experience before Reason becomes the be-all and end-all of knowledge.

And Empiricists are wrong to think that Reason is limited in its ability to makes sense of sense experience.

Each is a requirement for human survival. Try existing (as a fully formed adult) if your senses all quit working. You won't know one thing beyond what you knew already, and the longer you live the less you wil know because you can have no idea of what is happening to you, who is feeding you or how, whether it is daylight or nighttime, whether you have pooped your pants or if someone is bidding you goodbye forever.

Try existing if your Reason quits working. As a totally insane person, you might as well have lost your senses.

And in a manner of speaking, you have.

Answer 2

neither alone. they both have problems. if i really had to pick one, i go with simple senses even though reason is probably better.

Answer 3

Lets assume for a moment that it is simply one or the other.

Tell me how would you make sense of all the information that bombards your senses without cognitive reasoning of the right hemisphere of your brain?

Answer 4

sense experience definately man