*Originally published pre-2020 and republished as part of our archive project. Get E-International Relations delivered to your inbox, free of charge. As you sign up, consider becoming a paid subscriber, or make a donation, to support our work

Recent intellectual history has made considerable strides in acknowledging certain forms of institutionalized discrimination as well as the unjustifiable privilege of certain cultures over others. Our epistemology, however, has in general continued as if its schools—predominantly empiricism and rationalism—are preoccupied with the nature of knowledge per se, rather than the nature of knowledge as conceptualized within a specific society or cultural tradition.

Consequently, epistemology has been slow to see its own limitations as well as in acquiring a kind of basic understanding of our shared cognitive architecture.  The outcome of improved understanding in this regard would go far beyond academia. It would serve as a more profitable and equitable foundation for international relations. Two crucial features of this new edifice will be humility and an appreciation for underestimated commonality.

The classical positions of both the empiricist and the rationalist schools remain well-entrenched. Empiricism continues to praise sensory experience and the data gathered from such experience. The purists of the rationalist school, for their part, emphasize the role of reason in all knowledge acquisition, as they remind us of the frequent fallibility of our sensory apparatus. This dichotomy has served as the subject matter for long-standing philosophical controversies. Happily, there are now tools to bridge this conceptual chasm. Neuro-Rational Physicalism (NRP) provides a basis for understanding how sensory experience, emotionality, and rational inference are much more intimately related than has previously been appreciated. The relevance of these epistemological debates is not only scholarly but also political. A better understanding of the foundation of knowledge is critical to affirming the role of our limitations and consequently in demonstrating that all “truths” must be respected.

The Best Aspects of Two Traditions

Neuro-Rational Physicalism and empiricism share the view that sensory data is a source of knowledge. Using contemporary neuroscientific research, however, NRP argues for a much more pervasive role for inference. This is because individual perceptions are colored by the sensory apparatus through which they are perceived, and this apparatus, in turn, is significantly formed by unique spatio-temporal and cultural influences.

NRP also diverges from those rationalists who claim that there is........

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