Rationalism says mathematical knowledge comes from within, from pure thought; empiricism that it comes from without, from experience and observation. Rationalism led Kepler to look for divine design in the universe, and Descartes to reduce all mechanical phenomena to contact mechanics and all curves in geometry to instrumental generation. Empiricism led Newton to ignore the cause of gravity and dismiss the foundational importance of constructions in geometry.

Transcript

Here’s a fundamental problem in the philosophy of mathematics. You can sit in an isolated room, in an arm chair, and prove theorems about triangles, such as the angle sum of a triangle or the Pythagorean theorem. When you do this, you have the feeling that you have established these results with absolute certainty. You feel that they must be true because of how compelling the proof is. And you feel that you have established this by thought alone, by purely intellectual means.

Mathematics is unique in this respect. In other subjects, thinking is a powerful tool, but it is always supplemented by observation and experience. If you spent your whole life isolated in a locked room, you would not be able to say anything about the laws of astronomy or the anatomy of the digestive system, because without observation, with only pure thought, it is impossible to even get started in those field. But you could figure out everything about triangles. If one day you were released from your prison where you had been sitting for decades, you could go out and measure actual triangles and you would find that, indeed, their angle sum is always two right angles, the Pythagorean theorem always holds for right-angle triangles and so on. Just as you had predicted by pure thought.

This is a bit of a mystery. Because it shows that there are two sides of mathematics that are difficult to reconcile. On the one hand, the internal, mental conviction that mathematics establishes absolute truths purely by reasoning. On the other hand, the external, physical fact that mathematics works in the real world.

What is the bridge between these two worlds? It is as if there is a natural harmony between our minds and the outer world. What is the cause of that harmony?

These two poles can be called rationalism and empiricism. Rationalism takes mathematics to be fundamentally a matter of pure thought. This fits well with the sense we have when doing mathematics, when reading Euclid, that we are establishing absolute truths by sheer reasoning. But it doesn’t explain why mathematics works so well in the physical world.

We have encountered some rationalists already: Plato, Descartes. We saw how Descartes solved the problem. Mathematics is pure thought, and it works in the physical world because the Creator put mathematical ideas in our minds. As the Bible says, “God created man in his image.” That is to say, God created the world based on mathematical ideas, and then created humans and sort of pre-programmed their minds with the same kinds of ideas that he had used to create the world.

So no wonder there’s a harmony between the mental and the physical worlds: they both stem from the same source, the Creator, who used the same principles when designing both. Descartes said basically this quite explicitly, as we recall. Plato pretty much hints at the same idea. God is a mathematician. That is a central belief in Platonist thought as well. And it is a necessary thesis for the rationalists to explain why mathematics works so well.

We have already encountered some empiricist as well: Aristotle, Francis Bacon. They think knowledge ultimately comes from the world around us. From that point of view, it is no mystery that mathematics works on physical triangles. It stems from physical experience to begin with, so of course it conforms to physical experience.

The challenge for the empiricists is instead to explain the mental experience of doing mathematics; our feeling that it brings absolute truth by pure thought in a way that no other subject does. From the empiricist point of view, this feeling is a mistake, a delusion. We think we are doing pure thought, but actually mathematical thought is generalized experience. We think we can sit in a closed room, an arm chair, and figure things out about an outside world that we have never even seen. But it only feels that way.

We have seen and touched many lines and triangles and squares our entire life, since the year we were born. We have internalized this experience. It has become second nature to us. Basic truths of geometry, such as Euclid’s axioms, may feel like core intuitions that are much more pure and absolute and undoubtable than things we know from experience. But that feeling is a delusion, according to the empiricists. Our minds, our feelings have imperfect self-awareness. Just as we are not aware through introspection how our digestive system works, so we are not conscious of the psychological origins of our mathematical intuitions.

I think we can agree that rationalism and empiricism both face big challenges. The challenge for rationalism is to explain why mathematics applies to the physical world. Traditional rationalism had an answer that was very compelling at the time: the explanation in terms of God, the Creator. But nowadays we may want an atheistic answer. And then rationalism is back to square one, facing the original problem all over again, without any solution in sight.

Empiricism doesn’t have that problem, but it has other ones. If mathematics comes from experience, how can it seem so absolute and undoubtable? How can an exact science come from inexact sensory impressions? If mathematics is based on experience like everything else, why does it seem to be such a different kind of knowledge in so many respects? Those are challenges for the empiricist to answer.

It matters how you answer these questions. It shapes the kind of science that you do.

Consider for instance Kepler, the 17th-century astronomer. He was another rationalist. As Kepler says: “Nature loves [mathematical] relationships in everything. They are also loved by the intellect of man who is an image of the Creator.” That’s almost word for word how I described the rationalist position just moments ago.

Kepler felt that the world was designed with the intent that we should study the universe mathematically. As he says: “Whenever I consider in my thoughts the beautiful order [of the universe] then it is as though I had read a divine text, written onto the world itself saying: Man, stretch thy reason hither, so that thou mayest comprehend these things.”

In fact, scientific facts support this view, in Kepler’s opinion. For example, as he says, “Sun and moon have the same apparent sizes, so that the eclipses, one of the spectacles arranged by the Creator for instructing observing creatures in the orbital relations of the sun and the moon, can occur.”

That is indeed a striking fact: that the moon is exactly the right size to precisely block out the sun at the moment of a solar eclipse. From the point of view of modern science, this is a remarkable coincidence. It’s pure chance that the moon is exactly the right size.

You can understand why the explanation in terms of purpose was more compelling in Kepler’s time. Witnessing a solar eclipse is a spiritual experience. It all seems so perfect. Much too perfect to chalk it up to chance. It’s very disappointing that modern science offers nothing more than this non-explanation of such an emotionally compelling spectacle.

And not just modern science. Such views were around already in Kepler’s time. Atomism is a classical worldview that is indeed happy to attribute almost everything, eclipses included, to chance and randomness. According to Kepler’s teacher, Melanchthon, such views “wage war against human nature, which was clearly founded to understand divine things.”

So here we have again that double challenge to empiricism. If mathematics is just one type of knowledge among many that we pick up from experience, then, first of all, why does the universe show so many signs of being mathematically designed? Like the thing with the eclipses, but there are also countless other examples one could use to make this point. Empiricism has no answer to this. It thinks that’s all just a bunch of coincidences, and we are just fooling ourselves by looking for purpose and design that isn’t there.

And secondly, if empiricism is right, and mathematics is just experiential knowledge like everything else, then why does mathematical reasoning feel so uniquely compelling and convincing? As Melanchthon says, mathematics is as natural to a human being as “swimming to a fish or singing to a nightingale.” Just as animals are born with these instincts, so our minds are innately predisposed to do mathematics. Empiricism does not explain why that is the case, or why that seems to be the case.

So it’s understandable that Kepler was a convinced rationalist instead. And this conviction shaped his scientific work. Astronomers are “priests of the book of nature,” as Kepler said. So he was always looking for meaning and purpose and design.

For example, the telescope was a new invention in Kepler’s time, and it was a big moment when the moons of Jupiter were discovered. Kepler immediately looked for the purpose behind the existence of these moons. He concluded that Jupiter must be inhabited. Why else would it have moons? As Kepler says: “For whose sake, the question arises, if there are no people on Jupiter to behold this wonderfully varied display with their own eyes? We deduce with the highest degree of probability that Jupiter is inhabited.”

Another of Kepler’s attempts at uncovering divine design was his theory of planetary distances. According t...

Rationalism versus empiricism