I am not sure if this belongs in Great Debates or not.
My sense from my research is the most agree that Einstein was an empiricist but from what I know of him, he did not do experiments. His process was to solve problems mathematically which to me is a rational activity.
What am I missing?
I don’t know exactly what you mean by “rationalist.” But in science, the opposite of an empiricist is a theoretician.
And he was both, as basically all scientists were back in the day.
As I understand it, Einstein’s usual method was to take facts that other scientists had gathered by experiments and develop a theory that explained how the facts fit together. So he wasn’t conducting experiments himself but his work was grounded in experimental evidence.
The categorization of thinkers as empiricists or rationalists is usually a system applied (reteroactively, by historians of and teachers of philosophy) to philosophers of the early modern period (i.e., 17th to 18th centuries), rather than to more recent scientists, and even there it is a rough and ready and sometimes misleading category system of limited utility. Descartes, traditionally the leading figure of the rationalist “movement”, certainly paid much attention to empirical evidence, and it played an key role in his epistemology. (And I am fairly confident it was important to other rationalists such as Spinoza.) Descartes also did experiments, including dissections. Likewise, empiricists such as Locke, Berkeley and Hume relied extensively on reason in developing their theories.
In practice all scientists and all or very nearly all philosophers rely on both empirical evidence and rational argument. Sometimes in science, though, and particularly in modern physics, there is a division of labor between scientists whose main work is doing experiments and collecting empirical evidence (experimental physicists - although they do still need to use quite a lot of reason, which, of course, includes math), and those whose main or exclusive job is to provide a theoretical interpretation for that evidence (theoretical physicists, such as Einstein). This scientific division of labor really has little to do with the doctrinal and methodological differences (such a they were) between rationalist and empiricist philosophers. Einstein certainly relied on empirical evidence as well as on reason, he just didn’t do much in the way of collecting it himself.
(my emphasis)
And, of course, other people conducted experiments to test his ideas. He was in the thick of experimentation; just didn’t do lab or field work himself.
What you are missing is that you have confused logical deduction (which we now call rational thought) with rationalism, which uses logical deduction based on a priori concepts. Empiricism uses logical deduction based on observed truths. The greatest example of rationalism is Euclidean geometry. With euclidean geometry we can lay out a football field, but we cannot describe an atom (accurately) or even calculate the orbit of the planet Mercury.
Empiricism gives us the bulk of modern science, especially quantum mechanics and Cosmology.
Good examples of a priori truths would be the flat earth and the racial superiority of caucasians.
Einstein did not perform experiments because he was a theoretical physicist. I’m not sure how this made his activities more rational than those of experimental physicists.
Einstein gathered the evidence and created a theory. In the case of general relatively, he then made three predictions based on the theory. It turned out that one of them (the precession in the perihelion) had already been observed. The second, the bending of light around the sun, observable only at an eclipse, was soon verified. The third, gravitational red shift, was not observed for decades. The success of the whole GPS system provides overwhelming evidence, but of course Einstein could not have anticipated that.
Contrast that with string theory. Yes, by tweaking unknown parameters and using higher dimensions it can explain known facts, but no one has any idea what predictions it might make. And without predictions, it is not science. That’s just a way to say that no observation could falsify it.
These days many people use the term rational to mean logical. The terms *rationalist * and rationalism apply to a philosophical system that rejects any form of observation of the physical world as being a reliable basis for understanding reality, instead demanding that all understanding should derive from a priori concepts derived from “pure reason”. Most research groups in physics have both experimental and theoretical physicists.
The use of logical thinking does not make a person a rationalist. As a physicist, I would argue that the philosophical system of Rationalism is irrational. Goedel’s incompleteness proofs show that most a priori “truths” are self defined and not truly self evident. It is not truly self evident that the earth is flat, or that there is no god.
If that was what those term meant, they would be quite useless, because they would have no referents. Nobody in the history of thought has ever rejected “any form of observation of the physical world” or demanded that “all understanding should derive from a priori concepts derived from ‘pure reason’”. That is an absurdly caricatured straw-man position that nobody, certainly not the actual thinkers sometimes (retroactively, for pedagogical reasons) classed as rationalists, ever held.
I think it’s the other way around. Philosophical rationalists didn’t argue that truth could *only *be known through the use of pure reason along; merely that that was one valid way at which truth could sometimes be known. It was the empiricists who took the exclusivist position; that truth could only be known empirically.
But even if any empiricists ever explicitly and intentionally claimed that (which I rather doubt), it did not, and could not have, matched their practice. The works of empiricist philosophers (like those of all philosophers, and indeed, virtually all works of science) mainly consist of extended and elaborate chains of reasoning.
The fact is that the difference between empiricists and rationalists, inasmuch as it is a useful distinction at all, is one of degree rather than kind. Some thinkers have focused more on the importance of reason as the basis for our understanding of reality, and some have focused more on the importance of experience, but no-one (apart, I suppose, from pure solipsists, if there have ever been any such) ever thought we could, or even should, get by on reason alone, and no empiricist (who had thought at all carefully about the issues) ever thought the converse.
The other thing to bear in mind is that these are not labels that thinkers normally ever put on themselves. They are labels applied retroactively (and often rather carelessly) by teachers, historians, and later philosophers, for pedagogical, rhetorical, and often polemical purposes.
As for Einstein, yes (like other theoretical physicists) he put a good deal more of his intellectual effort into his reasoning than into the collection (even at second hand) of empirical data, and, thereby, it makes some sense to classify him as a rationalist. However, it is not at all useful to do so. The rationalist/empiricist distinction arguably has some degree of utility for a neophyte attempting to grasp the broad trends within 17th and 18th century philosophy; it really is not appropriate or helpful at all for anyone who is trying to understand the development of science during the 20th century.
Oh, sure. But, as I understand it, it was always reasoning applied to empirical data. The empiricists denied that you could discern truth from pure reason. For the empiricists, knowledge had to be founded on empirical observation, even though you could (and should) apply reason to make inferences and deductions from what you observed. Conversely the rationalists weren’t opposed to making empirical observations, but they regarded reason as capable of being, at least in some instance, the foundation of knowledge.
Absolutely agree. You might as well ask whether David Cameron is a Royalist or a Roundhead.
According to [url=http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/einstein-philscience/]this article from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
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The paper goes into a fair bit of detail, and might be a good way to try to asses Einstein’s scientific philosophy. I thought he was a logical positivist, but as it turns out, LP was heavily influenced by Einstein’s physics but the great man never called himself that as far as I can find. In fact, he said,
However, Einstein’s definition of Positivism doesn’t quite match up with what most positivists say, which is not that anything else isn’t real, but rather, that we just can’t know it.
In any case, his philosophy was far more nuanced than a simple dichotomy like rationalism vs empiricism. I think that a very good argument could be made that Aristotle is a rationalist. While he did make a lot of observations, he believed that all knowledge could be derived from basic principle. This was consistent with Greek thinkers in general, who tended towards the abstract and considered fiddling with objects a bit beneath them, something a mere engineer would do. Even Archemides, who was a great engineer – as we’d call him today – considered practical applications more of a necessary nuisance than a calling.
I wonder what category folks would put Newton in. Clearly, he was heavily influenced by empiricism, and his laws of motion derive from data, made sensible by a few simple axioms and math that he invented for the purpose (“fluxions” which we now call calculus). Yet I feel he’d have been far happier to have discovered a rational cause for gravity. He had to tell people to be content with knowing that’s how things worked, even if we didn’t know why they worked that way. We’re still pretty much in that same boat today, regarding gravity!
I agree with those above who say the terms are too broadly diametric to describe modern scientists.
Einstein was most certainly not a Logical Positivist, as he well understood.
You could say that with as much, or more, justice, about any of the philosophers who actually do get labeled as rationalist or empiricist in introductory philosophy textbooks (which are about the only place those terms ever get used unironically by actual intellectual historians).
I think you don’t know what you are talking about. If one were to insist on taking this crude, vapid, and misleading classification system (which obscures as much or more than it illuminates even when confined to the purpose for which it was invented, i.e., giving broad-brush overviews of the thinkers of the early-modern period) and applying it to the to the classical Greeks, then Aristotle was by far the most empiricist-like of all the classical philosophers.
Best by far not to force him into any of these Procrustean and inappropriate categories at all. Certainly it is nonsense to say that he was influenced by empiricism. Empiricism was influenced by, indeed, based upon, him! Locke, who is considered the founder of the empiricist movement, is quite explicit that he sees himself as a follower of, and intellectual “underlabourer” to, “the incomparable Mr Newton” (whose major scientific work was complete before Locke set pen to paper). Hume, and most of the lesser empiricists, and even Berkeley to a considerable extent, would have agreed. Newton (or, at least, their fantasy model of Newton) was a hero, a model, and an inspiration to them.
That said, it is a huge distortion to say that Newton derived his laws of motion (and gravity) from “data”. They are primarily an axiomatic system, derived from first principles (principles mostly lifted from Descartes, although, apart from the first law, which is a straightforward steal, Newton adapted and corrected Descartes’ laws of motion very extensively to arrive at his own, much neater, tighter and more quantitative system). Newton certainly saw it as important that his laws, or, rather, their implications for such things as the form of planetary orbits, should be tested, after the fact, by being compared with the observable realities, and he seems to have been ready to throw the theory out should it have failed such tests, but the laws themselves did not primarily derive from empirical “data”.