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[Full title: Language Faculty (1): Rationalism Versus Empiricism]

Whether what human know and do, of course including language, is the product of experience or innateness? This is a continuous dispute throughout many centuries until the twentieth century between two contrasted positions: empiricism (experiential) and rationalism (innate).

Empiricism, in philosophy, affirms that the source of all knowledge, including language, is based on experience, and denies the possibility of spontaneous ideas or a priori thought. Among famous empiricists, the English philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) was known as the first to give this school systematic expression, although his compatriot, the philosopher Francis Bacon (1561-1626) had anticipated some of its characteristic conclusions. John Locke traced all ideas to experience and argued against innate ideas. He attacked all the doctrine of innateness. He believed that man begins in the world as a blank slate, a tabula rasa, on which experience writes down. Human鈥檚 mind, for him, is a dark closet which requires to be furnished from without. In general, for empiricists, there is no linguistic structures are innate, and that language is learned entirely through experience (Panda 1996).

The philosophy opposed to empiricism is rationalism, represented by such thinkers as Plato, Ren茅 Descartes, and so on. In contrast to empiricism which emphasizes the role of experience especially sense perception, rationalism, in philosophy, is a system of thought that emphasizes the role of reason in obtaining knowledge; that is, the doctrine here states that reason is the sole, or at least the primary source of knowledge. This means rationalists assert that the mind is capable of recognizing reality by means of the reason, a faculty that exists independent of experience. Rationalism has appeared in some form in nearly every stage of Western philosophy, but it is primarily identified with the tradition stemming from the seventeenth century French philosopher and scientist Ren茅 Descartes. Descartes believed that geometry represented the ideal for all sciences and philosophy. He held that by means of reason alone, certain universal, self-evident truths could be discovered, from which the remaining content of philosophy and the sciences could be deductively derived. He assumed that these self-evident truths were innate, not derived from sense experience. This type of rationalism was developed by other European philosophers, such as the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza and the German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Epistemological rationalism has been applied to many other fields of philosophical inquiry such as philosophy of religion, ethics and so on. In linguistics, rationalism is the claim that the structure of language is specified biologically as part of the genetic endowment of human; that is, innateness and that the function of experience is not to teach, but to trigger the capacity for language.

Immanuel Kant, the German philosopher, attempted a compromise between empiricism and rationalism, restricting knowledge to the domain of experience, and thus agreeing with the empiricists, but attributing to the mind a function in incorporating sensations into the structure of experience. This structure could be known as a priori without resorting to empirical methods, and in this respect Kant agreed with the rationalists. Steinberg (1982) also showed that both empiricism and rationalism are really forms of mentalism, in which all mentalists agree on the existence of mind and that humans have knowledge and ideas in the mind. But they do not agree on how those ideas got there; the empiricist position is that ideas are derived entirely through experience while the rationalist position is that some ideas are already in the mind at birth. Rationalist may disagree about which processes activate innate ideas and as to what kinds of ideas are innate in the mind (Kess 1992).