In Epistemology there are two schools of thought - rationalism and empiricism. Rationalists believe that knowledge can be gained through logic unaided by the senses. They believe that the knowledge gained with out the senses is more certain than that gained with the senses. Empiricists believe that all knowledge comes to us through the senses, and that you can never have knowledge more certain than what the senses allow. Many philosophers have fallen into these two groups. Descartes and Leibnitz were rationalists, Hume, Berkley, and Locke were Empiricists. My philosophy however can not classify me as a rationalist or an empiricist. Similar to Kant, I strike a balance between the two philosophies.
There are a number of reasons why I am not a rationalist. In rationalism, there is a belief in a priori knowledge. A priori knowledge is knowledge that can be had prior to an actual experience. The most common example is the idea that 2+2=4 is a priori. I disagree with the idea of a priori knowledge because I don't feel knowledge can be gained completely independent of the senses. Without the senses I don't believe it would be possible to gain an understanding of the number two. If you cannot see, feel, taste, smell or hear two things, how then would you ever be able to conceive of the number two? It does not appear to be possible. Once you knew of the number two you could then become aware that 2+2=4 without seeing two sets of two brought together, but that piece of knowledge would still be based, at the beginning, on the senses. No one is born with the idea of two. This relates to the empiricist belief in tabula rasa, or blank tablet, which is the belief that the mind comes into life blank and is "written" on by experience. I agree, for the most part, with tabula rasa because without the senses, without which we cannot have an experience, we cannot gain knowledge, save perhaps, Descartes' cogito ergo sum. Knowledge cannot be gained without the senses, and you cannot be born with knowledge. I do believe that you can be born with certain ideas or understandings, which are not knowledge per say, but I will discuss these later. Rationalism goes against the idea of tabula rasa by saying you can gain knowledge with the use of the senses. Since it also believes in a priori knowledge I am clearly not a rationalist.
I am, however, not an empiricist either. While all knowledge must, at it's base, be based on the senses, there is still much to be said for logic and deductive reasoning. If I have my senses for the first sixteen years of my life, then have them all taken away from me, I can still continue gaining knowledge. That is because, with certain information gained through the senses you can gain other knowledge. If you see two things, and then loose all of your senses for life, you can still come up with the idea of four. Another strike against me being an empiricist is that I don't consider knowledge completely of the senses to be the most certain. Once I understand two, I would be more certain that a four exists, than I would ever be about the existence of four particular objects. Yet empiricism states that any knowledge gained through the senses is the most certain knowledge that we can gain. Clearly, I cannot be an empiricist either.
I am neither an empiricist nor a rationalist. Similar to Kant, my philosophy is a combination of the two schools of thought. I am not a pure skeptic. If you doubt everything you are left with nothing. I believe that the senses are fallible, but so is human logic. A piece of deductive reasoning will many times seem flawless for hundreds of years until a new understanding of the world will prove it wrong. It is arrogant to suppose that just because it makes sense to humans it must be so. I believe there are many things we can never understand because of human limitations. This is similar to Kant's ideas about the categories of space and time in the human mind. I am not sure if I accept this exactly as is, but the idea that our understanding is limited by our means of understanding is something I hold to be true. With this knowledge, (that we can never truly interpret the world as is) it makes sense to do the second best thing and take the interpretations we do receive, distorted though they may be, and use them as knowledge. We cannot ever get past our own impediments, so rejecting knowledge gained through our impediments is rejecting knowledge all together. The rationalist would argue that this "second hand" knowledge gained through the senses should be disregarded, while an empiricist might claim that the "second-hand" knowledge is the only thing we can use for explanation. I reject both. And while a rationalist argues for knowledge we are born with and an empircist argues for being born with no knowledge at all I fall between the two again. I agree with empiricism in so far that statements of fact, such as, 2+2=4, must be learned, not "remembered", but I think we are born with some ideas. Justice, in the sense of something being fair, is an idea that we all have. Even a four year old understands the concept to some degree, if someone else is getting more of what they want than they themselves are, they proclaim it as not fair. I don't think such an idea can be taught. It is innate.
Rationalism and empiricism both have points that I believe to be true and those that I reject. Neither one is complete without the other, they both are too extreme. Like Kant, I have adopted a philosophy that attempts to resolve, or combine these two schools of thought. When it comes to Epistemology, I do not fall under the preperscribed categories. I sit in the middle, with my own, somewhat different set of beliefs.