Rationalistic Empiricism

Reason and experience are not at odds.  It is impossible to have an experience that is not metaphysically and epistemologically governed by reason, after all.  The myth that the two are in opposition has promoted a perceived but nonexistent gap between rationalism and basic empiricism, though the gap is partly continued by the mistaken idea that all forms of empiricism hold that the senses ground all knowledge.  Experience is far broader than sensory information, and every fallacious belief about experience can be avoided if one only aligns with reason.

Sensory empiricism is self-refuting, for the senses alone can neither verify the epistemological nature nor be processed without the light of reason.  Either sensory empiricism is assumed to be true without sensory confirmation (which would be impossible as it is because logic and consciousness, both of which are required to understand sensory experiences, are nonphysical things not observed by the senses) or it is defended with fallacious reasoning.  Regardless of the arguments in its favor, it must be false.  Experience, however, is a prerequisite to all knowledge, but experience encompasses the inner thoughts of the mind and its grasp of the laws of logic as well as sensory perceptions.

Rationalistic empiricism is an aspect of thorough rationalism.  This stance acknowledges that reason is more fundamental than experience while also acknowledging that the very process of reasoning anything out or immediately grasping any logical axiom must be experienced in order to occur.  After all, a mind cannot grasp reason without conscious experience.  Rationalistic empiricism therefore does not pit either reason or mere experience against each other.  Rather, it is when people misunderstand or draw non sequitur conclusions from their experiences that they err.

This framework does not elevate experience above reason because experience is epistemologically worthless without a sound grasp of reason.  It is only because of the intellect--which is not the laws of logic themselves, but the means of comprehending them--that a person can even know that his or her own mind exists.  Without reason, it would be impossible to distinguish between the components of experience that cannot be illusions, like the fact that perceptions cannot exist without a mind and that at least one's perceptions of the external world are knowable, and those that may not be connected to the full reality behind them, such as memories of past events (there is no way to prove the events they recall actually happened).

The most thorough form of rationalism contains an empiricism that acknowledges the full scope of experience instead of ignoring experiences that do not involve the senses.  It is experiences pertaining to the intellect and general introspection that are absolutely certain (logic cannot be false and consciousness cannot be illusory), which makes them more fundamental than sensory information while also granting them the highest epistemological statuses by default.  The senses, in contrast, are useful only for establishing that some sort of material world exists, although only one of the senses can verify this [1], and that one is experiencing specific perceptions of stimuli.


[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/07/dreams-and-consciousness.html