Epistemology is an effort to figure out what we can know (human knowledge), claim to know (its nature), and how to justify that claim. There are many views on how we should view reality. Rationalists insist that we come to know things through reason and our sense of reality is independent of experience. On the other hand, empiricists believe that we come to know reality through experience. This view rejects all "innate ideas" of reality and, stated by John Locke, all knowledge comes from experience. This experience is a generalization of the objects, thoughts, ideas, and feelings. Our minds are a Tabula Rasa (Blank slate) when we are born. On this slate experience writes all the details and principles of our knowledge. "All of our ideas must therefore be derived from experience, for none of them are innate", according to Locke.
Rationalists believe that human reason can provide answers to the most basic and philosophical questions. These answers are then all necessary truths and are found within our thinking processes. To the rationalist, experience only provides material and clues to help obtain an answer, but experience cannot teach us anything, "Truth is subject to the vicissitudes of experience". In addition they believe that observation and experimentation cannot give us philosophical truths.
Empiricists don't entirely reject all notions of reason, but only in specialized activities such as logic and calculation. Some of the more radical empiricists of this century believe that reason can tell us nothing about reality, only tell us about the structure of language. Since the majority of empiricism is based on learning through experience (an inductive argument), knowledge is highly probable and not certain. In addition, many empiricists believe that many of philosophy's big questions, does god exist, what is the meaning of life, and the nature of reality are unanswerable.
