it's all about language

Empiricism vs rationalism is a whole big thing in philosophy, it’s gone on for years and much has been written about it and you can google it and find pages and pages and different outlooks. And like most philosophy at first you are thinking, wow this is keen and a little later you are thinking zzzzzzzzzzzz.

It’s not much like nature vs nurture, except in the sense that you like you say clearly both sides are involved. You need to have both the inborn genetic stuff and the environmental opportunity to be able to um, write a folk song, likewise you need to use both the information from your senses and from the logic machine in your brain to write that same song.

Math, technically you could devise everything about it sitting in a dark room and never leaving it. Of course you would have to be really really smart and live a really really long time. You could never do physics that way. Without getting into your laboratory with all those whizbang instruments you could never figure out the charge and the mass of an electron. There is no logical reason why an electron has the mass or charge that it does, it just does. It could have had a different charge and a different mass, but then our whole universe would have been different and we wouldn’t have been around to measure it, and some folks think that’s the reason why it has what it has, but that looks like circular reasoning to me.

Another odd thing, every electron has exactly the same weight and the same charge. How do they know this? They surely haven’t measured every electron in the universe. What if they spotted an electron with twice the mass and half the charge of the horde somewhere on the edges of Alpha Centauri? Like finding that one white raven. There’s some information for a new science skeptic like yourself.

I think language is the key to empiricism vs rationalism and nurture vs nature. It was long thought that language was something that you had to be taught, and indeed we do good and bad grammar at school. But this is all written language. We wandered around the hills for thousands of years without one, and even today we have plenty of illiterate people, but we don’t have anybody, excluding severely retarded, that can’t speak.

It’s generally accepted now that spoken language is something inborn. People isolated from other people develop their own language. But they have to have other people to talk to. If they don’t have anybody to talk to by the age of around four you will never be able to speak well. I think you can be taught to use it, the way we can sort of teach chimps sign language, but you never can use it fluently.

Isaac Newton who invented calculus, about the same time as Leibniz, famously said that he got that far because he was standing on the shoulders of giants, and that is how we got to the whizbang world we live in today, because we could write down what we have discovered and pass it on to people who would come later.

Much, I suppose, as the writings of the Beaglesonian Institute will enlighten folks to come.