Concept Mapping Thoughts

Up until now, I have thought that the main split in thinking about how to gain knowledge was between the rationalist and the empiricists. I was planning to map my idea of how epistemological concepts relate starting with this disctinction. I was going to trace empirical thinking down through structuralism and positivisim, right up to Skinnerian behavioralism; and then trace rationalism down through all of the "softer" sciences, like phenomenology, humanism, ethnomethodologies, even postmodernism. Somewhere in the middle I was going to bring in pragmatism--since it can really relate to either strand-- and then constructivism, though a bit closer to the rationalism side... stuff like that.

But now... I had some "shower thoughts" and I'm gonna shake it up.

I realized that rationalism and empiricism are truly not the big split in epistemological thinking. (Perhaps the article on romanticism got me thinking this way...) I realized that both are equally positivistic: both rationalism and empiricism are equally convinced that the world is indeed knowable; they just disagree about whether your path to those exisiting ideas is one of observation or one of reason. Still, they both come to positivist conclusions about the world. So I now think that the left side of my map will fall under the broader category of positivism and will encompass both rationalism and empiricism. The difference is that all the things I just claimed to be decedents of rationalism? I'm no longer so sure. I now think that the other side of the split--the thing that counters positivism is constructivism. So the main split, as I see it, is whether the world has these truths sitting out there waiting to be discovered, OR if the very notion of truth and knowledge is neither out there in an objective world nor simply made up by us, but is rather constructed in our attempts to find it. This is where Ben, I believe rightly, called Kant the quintessential constructivist.

So I now see the "softer" epistemologies, the humanism, the ethnographies, the critical theories-- I see them descending from constructivism, not rationalism. That's all I wanted to say. I welcome perpectives, arguments, whatevs. Hope this gives someone something to at least think about. -JL