But being an empiricist or rationalist doesn’t mean you have to do without the other… it’s which one you consider to be the “reliable” source of knowledge.
bad example but if I remember that I my keys are on the table, yet discover they are actually on the night stand, I’ll assume I remembered wrong… not that they are actually on the table regardless of what my senses tell me.
The empiricist checks their reasoning, ontology, intuitions, rationality, memory, etc against the experiential evidence… if that’s what you “check” against then you are an empiricist.
For rationalists the “check” is the a-priori presuppositions… which is why it’s so hard to get anywhere without a benevolent god being presupposed.
A benevolent god would make the world such that you could know it and therefore you can trust your intuitions and senses etc… so long as you were rationally minded, of course.
Without that, checking in only tells you that you can’t really know anything… this could be a dream, you might be hallucinating, maybe there’s a demon messing with your head.
It’s a straight shot from there to epistemic nihilism and debilitating skepticism.